Several stories about one of the hardest maxims to put to practice in business. | Continue reading
David Maister's Managing the Professional Service Firm reveals some very fundamental principles about the business of consulting. | Continue reading
What do we actually know about burnout? What does the research say? Is burnout prevention possible? All the research, in one free, constantly updated book. | Continue reading
Learning from history is often problematic — history is context and path dependent, and it doesn't repeat itself. But what if there is a better way to read history, one that sidesteps these problems? | Continue reading
Believability is a heuristic for practical advice. Here's one surprising way that it can fail. | Continue reading
Cedric Chin talks to Lia DiBello about cognitive agility, the cognitive science of the strategic rehearsal, and, most importantly: the mental model of business expertise. | Continue reading
Bootstrapped operators who take their hiring seriously all eventually end up designing a system with the same fundamental approach. Here's how you can do it too. | Continue reading
Good news: we have a neat, universal milestone on the journey to mastery. What that looks like, and how to use it. | Continue reading
Mentor relationships can be absolutely wonderful over the arc of a career. This is a simple way to think about finding and keeping good mentors. | Continue reading
Why the Internet has driven writing to sound ever more insightful, how writers accomplish this, and what to do about it. | Continue reading
What Cognitive Flexibility Theory tells us about the acceleration of expertise in ill-structured domains. | Continue reading
There's a saying commonly attributed to Charlie Munger that goes 'Take a Simple Idea and Take It Seriously'. Work out all the implications. Seek out all the case studies. Here's a story of two investors who did exactly that. | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I helped Amplitude head of product education John Cutler extract tacit expertise around diagnosing and improving product organisations. Here's how that went. | Continue reading
Believability is a criterion for evaluating practical advice, originally articulated by Ray Dalio in his 2017 book Principles. These are some notes from practice. | Continue reading
M. Mitchell Waldrop's book on the Santa Fe Institute is a gateway drug to a powerful if subtle idea. Here's why it matters. | Continue reading
Why org design is about more than just studying and then picking the right organisational structures. | Continue reading
Building effective organisations is a remarkably useful, if rare, skill. This is what it looks like, what it consists of, and how to tell if someone has it. | Continue reading
We take a look at how you might turn extracted, tacit expertise into a training program for yourself or others. | Continue reading
Cedric Chin talks to David MacIver about ways programmers harm themselves in their careers, mistakes non-technical people make when dealing with programmers, and what it was like pushing the boundaries of property testing. | Continue reading
Make sure you're playing the real game, not some more complicated game you've made up for yourself. | Continue reading
An in-depth look at John Boyd and the OODA loop, the strategic thinker most concerned about fast adaptation under uncertainty. | Continue reading
Accelerated Expertise is the best book we have on creating accelerated training programs today. | Continue reading
Your two biggest barriers to achieving your goals: lying to yourself and blind-spots. The cure? Being 'radically open-minded'. | Continue reading
Preview of a members-only post: how one Naturalistic Decision Making researcher successfully extracted a tacit mental model of business, and what that looks like in practice. | Continue reading
Why we need to be careful when using frameworks from the field of judgment and decision making. | Continue reading
Product validation frameworks often describe processes without talking about taste. Here's why this is almost always a bad idea. | Continue reading
What games are the best at simulating the lived experience of running a business? And what is that experience like, anyway? | Continue reading
Why focusing on the most important thing often means letting other things blow up. | Continue reading
What Amazon's Working Backwards process tells us about product development methodologies at large. | Continue reading
Why thinking long term can lead to a competitive advantage, and what that looks like in business and in careers. | Continue reading
Results from the BIN paper, or why reducing noise in your decision making is far easier than fighting your cognitive biases. | Continue reading
A thinking trap for those of us who are analytical. | Continue reading
One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice. | Continue reading
Why ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ isn't as great a thinking tool as you might think. | Continue reading
Psychological heuristics (or mental shortcuts) tend to get a bad rep today. But heuristics are what makes expertise possible. Here's why heuristics aren't as bad as we make them out to be. | Continue reading
Is it really worth it to generate well-calibrated probabilistic predictions? Or would you do better if you assume that all prediction is too difficult, and act as if this were the case? | Continue reading
When you're taking action in the face of uncertainty, you have to make peace with the idea that you're never going to know if you're doing the right thing. This pandemic is one way of remembering what that's going to feel like. | Continue reading
What tacit knowledge is, and why it is the most interesting topic in the study of expertise today. | Continue reading
When you're faced with uncertainty, the best thing you can do is analyse your inputs, synthesise a new model, and then destroy it to start over again. | Continue reading
Notes from putting three variations of productivity momentum to practice. | Continue reading
Why cash flow is the right lens to use as we watch the current pandemic recession unfolding in real time. Written with the employee in mind. | Continue reading
You can't pursue expertise if you're scared of starting. Why it's better to get numb first before you focus on getting good. | Continue reading
Why it's sometimes limiting to optimise for mission, especially if you're at the start of your career. | Continue reading
Everything that's helped me read a book a week, even with a full-time job. | Continue reading
I find it a little difficult to believe that expertise is 'merely' pattern-matching. And yet it seems to have resulted in the some of my best learning outcomes over the past year. A look at my scepticism, in the context of several ideas we've covered in this blog. | Continue reading
The Chinese Businessmen Paradox: what is it that makes uneducated, superstitious Chinese businessmen successful? | Continue reading
What do metagames have to do with the acquisition of expertise? | Continue reading
Ram Charan's 2001 book on business principles is probably the best concise introduction to how a business works. | Continue reading