Every business pays something to win a new customer. The quiet question is how long that customer stays and what they bring while they are there. A tiffin service and a famous warehouse club show how to see it.

Every household keeps an umbrella for the day it rains. A business keeps spare cash for the same reason. But the best businesses use that cash for something more interesting than staying dry. Here is a simple way to see what spare cash is really for.

A famous sweet shop makes every sweet in one small kitchen with one big oven. On an ordinary day that looks efficient. On the day a pipe bursts, it looks very different. Here is a simple way to ask what happens to a business when its one important place stops working.

A farmer who plants a mango tree asks three quiet questions before anything else: are the roots healthy, is it putting out new branches, and will it still be giving fruit twenty years from now? One of India’s best-known long-term investors asks the very same three questions of a business — and you can too.