Good morning to all new and old readers! Here is your Wednesday edition of Faster Than Normal, exploring one short story about a person, a company, a high-performance tool, a trend I’m watching closely, and curated media to help you build businesses, wealth, and the most important asset of all: yourself.
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Today’s edition:
> Stories: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw & Sephora
> High-performance: Albert Gray, the common denominator of success
> Insights: Schools kill creativity
> Tactical: Thorough year-end review
> 1 Question: Authentic traits
Cheers,
Alex
P.S. Send me feedback on how we can improve. I respond to every email.
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Stories of Excellence
Person: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is an Indian entrepreneur who founded Biocon, now a leading biopharmaceutical company. She started in 1978 with just $500 and a rented garage. Early on, she faced gender bias and skepticism. "I was told, 'You're a woman, you're not a qualified engineer, and this is a high-risk business,'" she recalls. But Mazumdar-Shaw persevered. She pivoted from enzymes to biopharmaceuticals in the 1990s, a move that propelled Biocon's growth. The company went public in 2004, with shares oversubscribed 33 times. Today, Biocon is valued at over $4 billion. Mazumdar-Shaw remains active in philanthropy and advocacy. "I want to be remembered for making a difference in global healthcare," she says.
Key Lessons from Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw:
On resilience: "I believe that entrepreneurship is about being able to face failure, manage failure and succeed after failing."
On leadership: "I think, in terms of corporate philosophy, I've always believed that you've got to treat people in a very, very egalitarian manner in the sense I like to treat people on a one-to-one basis."
Company: Sephora
Sephora was founded in 1970 by Dominique Mandonnaud in Limoges, France. Mandonnaud, a perfume retailer, revolutionized beauty retail by creating an open-sell environment where customers could touch and try products. In 1997, Sephora was acquired by LVMH for $262 million. The company expanded to the US in 1998, opening its first store in New York City. Under the leadership of CEO Christopher de Lapuente since 2011, Sephora has grown to over 2,700 stores in 35 countries. In 2020, Sephora reported global revenues of €5.2 billion. The company has pioneered omnichannel retail, launching its website in 1999 and mobile app in 2010.
Key Lessons from Sephora:
On retail experience: Sephora flipped the script on traditional beauty shopping. They ditched the stuffy department store counters and let customers play. "We created a candy store for beauty," says Mandonnaud. This hands-on approach wasn't just fun - it boosted sales.
On omnichannel synergy: Sephora doesn't treat online and offline as separate entities. They're seamlessly integrated. Buy online, pick up in-store. Try in-store, buy online. "We don't think in channels. We think in customer journeys," says Mary Beth Laughton, former EVP of Omni Retail.
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High-performance tool
⎯
Albert Gray, The Common Denominator Of Success
"Recently I was talking with a young man who long ago discovered the common denominator of success without identifying his discovery. He had a definite purpose in life and it was definitely a sentimental or emotional purpose.
He wanted his children to go through college without having to work their way through as he had done. And he wanted his wife, and mother of his children, to enjoy the luxuries and comforts and even necessities, which had been denied his own mother. And he was willing to form the habit of doing things he didn‘t like to do in order to accomplish this purpose.
Not to discourage him, but rather to have him encourage me, I said to him, “Aren’t you going a little too far with this thing? There’s no logical reason why your children shouldn’t be willing and able to work their way through college just as their father did. Of course they’ll miss many of the things that you missed in your college life and they’ll probably have heartaches and disappointments. But if they’re any good, they’ll come through in the end just as you did. And there’s no logical reason why you should slave in order that your wife can enjoy comforts and luxuries that your mother never had.”
He looked at me with a rather pitying look and said, “But Mr. Gray, there’s no inspiration in logic. There’s no courage in logic. There’s not even happiness in logic. There’s only satisfaction. The only place logic has in my life is in the realization that the more I am willing to do for my family, the more I shall be able to do for myself.”
—Albert Gray, Author
Insights
Ken Robinson, "Schools Kill Creativity":
"Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there.
And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, another form of life. But they’re rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There’s something curious about professors in my experience — not all of them, but typically, they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. Don’t they? It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.
Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.
Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician; don’t do art, you won’t be an artist. Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly-talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way."
Tactical reads
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> When conducting a thorough year-end review
The Ultimate Annual Review (Read it here)
> When accessing free business templates and processes
Free Templates and SOPs — Taylor Pearson (Read it here)
1 question
What do you love about yourself that has nothing to do with your money or success?
That’s all for today, folks. As always, please give me your feedback. Which section is your favourite? What do you want to see more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know.
Have a wonderful rest of week, all.
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