Organizations succeed to the extent that all of their members pursue a common goal.

Everything in this book goes back to that idea. It goes back to the idea of keeping the main thing, the main thing,

and how this is a very simple and powerful idea that's excessively hard to practice

over a long time because it goes against human nature. It's in our nature to drift and

complicate things and the founder of Fastenol, Bob Kirlin, built his entire company building

thesis around that idea. Keep everybody in your organization pursuing a common goal. And then Bob

uses this book to defend his ideas but it's laughable

that his ideas even need to be defended. His numbers speak for themselves.

How the hell does a company selling a commodity product? He says in the book he had

no advantage on products. Yet that same company was able to compound all the way to a 38 billion dollar market cap and is one of the best performing stocks

over the last quarter century.

I'm friends with the co-founder and CEO of Ramp Eric and I was texting him about this book

and this incredible company while I was reading and

researching this episode because Eric is keeping everyone in his company pursuing a

common goal that would make history's greatest founders proud.

Ramp is building the world's best tool that gives you everything you need to control your spend,

watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations on a single platform.

So this is what I texted to Eric. It describes why this

obsession with cost control that fastenol has turned into a massive advantage that

fuels other things. So it says anyone who claims that expense management

and frugality is not a competitive advantage should

pull up a long-term chart of fastenol stock price and see how a company that sells nuts and

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