Shaw

"As if there were some force arranging things in the dark, Mr. Morris Chang’s third uncle, with foresight, first chose a year at Harvard for him, rather than immediately entering the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which most directly matched his specialty. In his year at Harvard, he immersed himself almost in all directions in Western civilization: from Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Austen, and Shaw, to Churchill’s World War II memoirs and the speeches of successive U.S. presidents; at the same time he subscribed to major American newspapers and periodicals, listened to music, watched theater, visited museums, attended ball games and dances, and made American friends."

"In that one year at Harvard, the amount and breadth of my reading were something I never again matched later. I read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Shaw; Churchill’s memoirs of World War II; famous speeches by modern American presidents; American history; Wells’s world history; several English books about China; and I also ventured into a few classical giants such as Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and even Marx’s Capital. Besides these major works, I subscribed to two newspapers, The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor published in Boston, as well as Time magazine."

"Shaw thought the most important decision any new firm can make is the type of people it will hire. He hired computer scientists and mathematicians because quantitative analysis was the firm’s power alley, but it wasn’t this focus which mattered most. What mattered was the intellectual firepower of his people."