May19 0

Munger Mondays in May: If You Don’t Know Just Say So!

Posted by Jesse Kliza in Business, Leadership, Management

In April of 1996 Charles Munger spoke to a group of students at Stanford University Law School. This talk was later published in Outstanding Investor Digest twice (December 29, 1997 and March 13, 1998). During the question and answer section of this discussion, one student asked Munger the following question (remember, this was in 1996):

“You discussed Coke’s mistake. Do you have any thoughts about where Apple went wrong” – Student

Munger’s answer was one that far too few people are willing to give:

“That’s not a field in which I’m capable of giving you any special insight” – Charles Munger

He didn’t have any insight into where Apple went wrong…so he said so. Why can’t more people simply admit that they don’t know something, rather than give a confident answer when they have no real knowledge related to the question or topic of discussion?

One word: Pride.

Pride gets in the way. Too many people are afraid to admit that they don’t know something, even when it’s something they really can’t be expected to know.

I learned this lesson the hard way my first two years of college. I would NEVER go and ask professors for help. If I didn’t understand something, I would try and tough it out by myself. I would work all alone at trying to solve problems and grasp concepts that were completely new to me. I would avoid answering questions in class and stubbornly do poorly test after test. I just couldn’t humble myself to go and ask for help. I beat myself up, wondering why I didn’t just get it. Why were other students enjoying class and acing the tests?

Then I noticed over time that the students that were really excelling were the ones that were with the professor during his/her office hours. They were with the TA during their office hours. They were willing to admit they didn’t know it all. They didn’t “just get it”. They worked at it, and asked for help when they got stumped.

Pride is a terrible thing. Humbleness is something we can all use more of. I’ve noticed that I’m realizing it’s value more and more lately.

Now of course, Munger didn’t JUST say he didn’t have an answer to the student’s question. He took the opportunity to beautifully illustrate the importance of admitting when one doesn’t know something:

“There’s another type of person I compare to an example from biology: When a bee finds nectar, it comes back and does a little dance that tells the rest of the hive, as a matter of genetic programming, which direction to go and how far. So about forty or fifty years ago, some clever scientist stuck the nectar straight up. Well the nectar’s never straight up in the ordinary life of a bee. The nectar’s out. So the bee finds the nectar ad returns to the hive. But it doesn’t have the genetic programming to do a dance that says straight up. So what does it do?

Well, if it were Jack Welch, it would just sit there. But what it actually does is to dance this incoherent dance that gums things up. And a lot of people are like that bee. They attempt to answer a question like that. And that is a huge mistake. Nobody expects you to know everything about everything.

I try to get rig of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge. To me, they’re like the bee dancing it’s incoherent dance. They’re just screwing up the hive.” – Charles Munger