Quality is Intimacy
A name for the pattern we keep rediscovering and how it reshapes investing
About a year ago, I read The Timeless Way of Building hoping to learn something new or deeper about systems thinking. Instead, I ran into page after page on the “quality without a name.” It felt esoteric—almost like a religious text, or a fantasy novel involving magic. My initial read was: this “quality” is basically what happens when architecture is aesthetically right because it fits the way the surrounding community lives. That didn’t grab me, because it felt obvious. How else would you design architecture if not to serve the inhabitants?
I was already familiar with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, particularly Pirsig’s idea that the most important motorcycle you’re working on is yourself. But the connection between Robert Pirsig and Christopher Alexander wasn’t immediately clear to me.
Recently, I read The Way of Excellence, and it landed as a clear evolution of Pirsig’s teaching. The author, Brad Stulberg, frames quality as a lot like intimacy—and that’s when it clicked. “Quality,” across architecture, motorcycle maintenance, and nearly any human endeavor, really does seem to share a common root.
Alexander’s view is that a building is beautiful when it matches the living patterns of the community it serves—the building must be intimate with the world it inhabits. Pirsig and Stulberg argue something parallel at the personal level: to achieve excellence in your life’s work, you have to be close to your values. Even in engineering, control theory tells us that a good regulator of a system must contain a good model of that system. The pattern is the same: you thrive when you’re close to what you’re working on (your values, a building’s inhabitants, your motorcycle), and you wither when you’re disconnected from that source of truth.
Turning back to investing, you can see the same dynamic in the corporate world. We’ve watched powerful corporations rise and fall, and the failures often rhyme with “disconnection” while the successes look like “intimacy.” When companies stay close to customers, suppliers, employees, and shareholders, they tend to compound well over the long term. When they become disconnected from too many stakeholders, they turn into a house built on sand. When a company overuses debt to maximize near-term performance, it disconnects from future obligations. When it raises prices without offering more value, it disconnects from customers. When management enriches itself by screwing over owners, it disconnects from shareholders. A lot of what we call low-quality behavior is, at root, just different flavors of disconnect.
We’ve also seen what high-quality behavior looks like. I’d put Berkshire Hathaway close to the ideal: closely aligned with shareholders (e.g., plain-language communication and a long-held bias toward long-term compounding over short-term optics), closely aligned with the businesses it acquires (generally preserving operating autonomy rather than suffocating them with HQ “synergies”), closely aligned with customers (a reputation for straightforward business practices rather than opportunistic price-gouging), and closely aligned with its future (notably cautious about interest-bearing debt, preserving resilience and optionality).
My thinking on “quality businesses” used to anchor on metrics like return on invested capital (ROIC) and free cash flow return on invested capital (FCFROIC), because over the long run they’re among the best quantitative signals for how “good” the underlying business is.
The recurring problem is that this lens can inadvertently reward zero-growth (or even slowly dying) businesses that look great in steady state. There’s no real drive to improve or expand; and sometimes that’s low-quality behavior. Does it really make sense to ignore customers’ need for a better product just to preserve your precious ROIC? Through the “quality is intimacy” lens, that’s low quality precisely because it’s a form of disconnect.
Once I started thinking about quality this way, I could evaluate a much broader set of companies without over-relying on the numbers—like younger businesses investing heavily in brand (low or negative ROIC), or fast growers with heavy CapEx (low or negative FCFROIC).
I’ll leave you with this: Stulberg argues that modern, mainstream views of excellence over-emphasize quantitative metrics (EPS, revenue growth, EBITDA margin). Taken to an extreme, the proxies hijack the real thing. If we’re looking for truly wonderful businesses, perhaps we should spend far more time on the qualitative reality—history, customer relationships, and how management behaves in good times and bad—because those are closer to the real quality than ratios derived from financial statements.