Tag: Kirk Thompson

1. Beware overcrowded spaces - have an intense desire to offer specialized and unique services that allow you to do what others wouldn't or couldn't
2. Differentiation, better customer service, a refusal to stand still, natural expansion with homegrown talent
3. Boring things - even if excellent - quickly become invisible
4. JB Hunt's founder was impatient, wanted to maintain frantic growth at all costs, an idea man, was all over, didn't want to let go
5. You learn a whole lot more from the struggles in the valley than you do on the mountaintop
6. Never feed problems while starving opportunities
7. Decision theory makes it clear that for a given set of costs and benefits, selecting alternatives with lower down-side risk, other things being equal, increases the expected payoff
8. We've never been concerned about cannibalizing one part of a company to offer a better solution to the customer. If there's a better solution for the customer, we need to offer it. most companies won't do that. We are not in business to support our trucking company. We are in business to support our customers with the best answer possible in that market 
9. Must constantly adapt and iterate so that you never become stale and optimized for an environment that no longer exists. How you perceive a business segment can affect how you change the curve of the product life cycle
10. The customer is most certainly not always right. They are always to be respected, listened to, and served, but only when a return is generated
11. 3 criteria needed to develop core competencies: provides potential access to a wide variety of markets; that it makes a significant contribution to the perceive customer benefits of the end product; and that it is difficult to imitate by competitors
12. Incentives
    1. Selling JBHT rather than just one segment results in more satisfied and loyal customers. Our bonus structure rewards leaders based on the company's overall performance. When the company performs well as a whole, everyone reaps the rewards. Ironically, one of the things the original DCS leaders rebelled against was that bonus structure. There are legitimate arguments to do it other ways, but we find our approach fosters a one-for-all-and-all-for-one mentality. We incentivize the company's success, not just the success of any one part of it. Sharing the wealth with those who helped create it has worked for JBHT for nearly 40 year. 
    2. We measure the quality of a team's results against its peer groups, not against other JBHT units, so we put the emphasis on being "best in class" not "best within JBHT." We've found this helps eliminate the popularity contests, lead to better decisions, and allows us to celebrate contributions that otherwise might get overlooked 
    3. Growth is key, growth is oxygen
13. Culture
    1. A good message is clear, actionable, consistent. Give the what/why, not the how
    2. What's unique is that variables like time, growth and the influx of new people haven't caused an erosion of our culture. Instead, they have added to it and strengthened it. We've been open to change, while staying true to our core; flexible enough to stretch with new ideas, but solid enough to maintain our identity. I credit this to the dynamic interplay between our culture and our leadership and management.
       1. Antifragile
14. Intermodal - more than one mode of transportation to reach the final destination (ship to train to truck...)
    1. Trucks first complemented and then competed with the railways
    2. "partner with the enemy" became the right choice for railways and trucks as it gave the customer more options, increased efficiencies, grew the pie (win/win/win)
    3. Developing Intermodal opened up new business lines that are now multi-billion dollar segments
15. Hiring
    1. Grassroots and top-down - go to local colleges and universities to recruit good students and home grow them. From the top-down, Hr goes to the company's leaders and asks them for the names of 2-3 people they have in mind as their successor. Having a good understanding of the existing talent pool also allows us to know when we need to look outside the company, as was the case when we shifted our approach toward technology and engineering. Growing organically is really healthy and really great for your culture, but you do have to inject outside thinking strategically and purosefully from time to time. 

What I got out of it

1. A great look inside the culture of a compounder who has grown steadily for decades now