Very very interesting perspectives. However, let be play the devil’s advocate and be the sceptic that probably comes naturally to me.
All this framework etc is nice to have and good to slot businesses. The challenge is if you take them too seriously. They need to be starting points and not endpoints of analysis.
The reason I say this is if you think of any framework / any model and any parameter you can always find examples of companies doing well and ones which will do poorly.
As I drilled myself in my head when I started maturing as an investor - “The market is a complex adaptive system.” It is too large, too dynamic, too complex to be correctly modelled. Else, it would have been modelled by now. Think about this. We are able to get cars drive themselves, we can get unmanned vehicles to the moon, but we are not able to figure out which company will do well and which will fail.
If a company with all its resources like SoftBank can fail visibly and miserably in judging WeWork and other such companies, why have the ego and hubris to think we are able to do a better job, especially when in hindsight we have not been able to do it with any great skill? Most of the VP picks did well because the team here were able to understand and catch the tailwind of the specific industry and/or the specific company. Tons of examples, Shilpa, Mayur, Ajanta, Manjushree etc. Can we refine the existing frameworks? An emphatic YES. Should we take them too seriously? To me, clearly no.
One of the best frameworks I have come across is the QGLP model. Yet, even with applying such a robust model, the founder of the model makes the mistake of buying Manpasand. Raamdeo Agarwal is a much better investor than I ever will be. And he armed with a great model can still get blindsided by what happens in reality.
The use of a framework, to me, is more for a negative screening tool AND a deep-dive tool. I follow the QGLP model, and it helps me dig deeper into questions related to individual aspects of the model.
Any model needs to be high-level enough so that is useful for customising and facilitating deep dives. Individual companies will have their own dynamics. Sometime as @desaidhwanil mentions, industry-specific dynamics will be of paramount importance. However, history is replete with examples of companies following similar strategies but ending up with completely different results. Can anyone explain why Infosys did so brilliantly and say a Mastek underperformed in the last 30 years? They both started within 1 year of each other and see where they are today. Easy answer, looking back today, is management quality was superior. But was it apparent then? I can sight literally hundreds of such cases across industries. We look at the “stories” and create a narrative fallacy for ourselves.
So, to conclude, my brief point is, use a framework to dig deeper. Keep that framework a live one. That is, keep updating it when you get new learnings. Keep it flexible. Read and understand the history of companies and industries as much as possible to get a “context” of history. And finally, two more things – i) don’t take yourself too seriously and ii) keep some leeway to make mistakes and adjust for it.
Apologies if I sounded a bit negative … that was the intent 