Corporate Intellectualism is a bizarre imitation of Academic Intellectualism, embracing badly constructed abstractions and peddling platitudes which confer a vague sense of insight and understanding but do nothing to improve the quality of judgments.

Popular business education overemphasises Thought Leadership, the addition of structure to problems and facilitating effective analysis. It's pretty high up the Maslow's hierarchy, and rarely what is most needed. There are many more basic yet more important activities involved in running a business:

• fostering a culture of accountability, with explicit commitments and commensurate payoffs
• defining job responsibilities more robustly
• formulating clear policy about day-to-day actions
• encouraging goal ownership and intrinsic quality control
• being aware of the nature of engagement and motivation

All those are difficult to get right, more explicit, addressable, and more directly connected to success.

My written voice is a separate part of my consciousness. It slumbers for months at a stretch, roused by emotional outbursts every few months. Others are driven to drink, I am driven to write.

I have the impulse to write about the follies of others, how clear things are to me and how hopelessly muddled it is to them. It isn't a pretty impulse, and writing was easier when I was younger and less concerned with appearances. That voice IS genuine - underneath I am every bit as arrogant and unmeasured as what I sound like when I speak with my loudest voice.

With age, I have lost space. The known world shrank and shrank as the unknown beyond proved its limitless depths again and again. I know so little, so little is certain. The simple logic games and puzzles still delight me, but appear to me as nostalgic toys and not the bludgeoning weapons I once thought they were. Words matter only if people care. Words persist only if they are supported by clarity of thought. Without the company of minds for which clarity is a virtue, these two goals tug in different directions.

The resulting strain makes for much confusion. I am no sophist, I will not corrupt my logic just so you will listen. I am no hermit, I have not the independence of mind to hide away for decades nursing a novel proof. Such is my human condition.

Reduced activity, low fees and tax efficiency are reasons given for why passive investing is low-cost for the investor. This logic is wrong. Those are reasons why passive investing is low-cost for the fund management company. The reason those cost-savings get passed to the investor is because the product is standardised by virtue of tracking a standard, named index like the S&P 500, and multiple companies compete to provide the same product.

Without competition, there's no reason for an ETF to be low-cost. Companies offering unique ETFs have no directly, easily comparable competition, and you should not expect them to be as efficient as SPY, IVV and VOO are.