What Danny Meyer did to achieve repeatable success in the cut-throat, low margin, highly competitive restaurant business.
I like the timeline at the end of this post! I find timelines like this help me better (1) wrap my head around and (2) remember cases and historical events generally. I use flashcards in order to remember them.
I’ve been using an LLM prompt to generate these for Commoncog cases, biographies, and beyond. Here it is in case interesting to anyone:
Take a deep breath and work on this problem step-by-step.
I will send you some text.
Please dissect the text and create a timeline of events in the text using the following format.
Choose the ten to fifteen most important events. Make sure the events present a nuanced perspective of the story. And surround the three most important events with {}'s. (This means I will remember said event as a flashcard.)
Among other things, make sure to include:
- If the timeline is of a person:
- Where/when the person was born, and, if it is known, what their parents did, how successful they were, and what their socioeconomic status was. This can be 30 words if needed.
- Where/when they graduated college.
- If the timeline is of a business:
- How the business raised capital to start.
By most important events, I mean events that may meet some of the following criteria:
- The event was a key reason the story is known.
- The event is a crucial detail in the story.
- The event sums up the story or gives key context that ties together events.
Each event should be 10-20 words.
If you are creating a timeline of a specific person’s life, add their age in parenthesis at various points. Include the age at the end of the timeline.
- <year 1>: <event 1> (0 years old)
- <year 2>: {<event 2>} (10)
- <year 3>: <event 3> (20)
- <year 4>: <event 4> (23)
- <year 5>: {<event 5>} (30)
- : (n)
Here is an example timeline it generated for the John Malone case:
- 1941: John Malone is born in Connecticut. His early interest in engineering leads him to refurbish and sell used radios. (0 years old)
- 1963: Malone begins his career at AT&T’s Bell Labs, analyzing monopoly market strategies, but his suggestions are ignored. (22)
- 1968: Disillusioned with AT&T, Malone joins McKinsey, working with tech companies and first noticing the potential of the cable industry. (27)
- 1972: Malone becomes CEO of Jerrold Electronics and restructures the company by cutting costs and increasing cash flow. (31)
- 1973: {Malone accepts the CEO position at Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), taking on its $132 million debt burden.} (32)
- 1977: A consortium of insurance companies refinances TCI’s debt, lowering interest rates, stabilizing the company’s financial situation. (36)
- 1979: Malone and TCI founder Bob Magness gain control of TCI, setting the stage for aggressive acquisitions. (38)
- 1980s: {TCI embarks on a massive acquisition spree, closing 482 deals between 1973 and 1989, fueled by Malone’s cash-flow-focused strategy.} (40s)
- 1984: Malone uses TCI’s leverage to negotiate lower programming fees from MTV, marking his aggressive approach to content providers. (43)
- 1985: Malone helps prevent CNN’s collapse by securing a lower carriage fee for TCI, further cementing his power in the industry. (44)
- 1993: Malone negotiates to sell TCI to Bell Atlantic for $34 billion, but the deal falls through after re-regulation hits the cable industry. (52)
- 1996: TCI loses subscribers for the first time, and Malone intervenes with drastic cuts and renegotiations, stabilizing cash flow again. (55)
- Late 1990s: Malone experiments with spin-offs and tracking stocks to increase transparency and shareholder value. (55-58)
- 1998: {AT&T acquires TCI for $48 billion, marking one of the largest media mergers and ending Malone’s tenure as CEO.} (57)
- End of 1998: TCI shareholders experience a compound annual return of 30.3%, significantly outperforming the industry. (57)
Brilliant, thank you for the prompt! I’m going to try this during case production!