Strategy - Self-improvement, productivity, career, leadership

Self-improvement, productivity, career, leadership

Strategy

A collection of 11 posts

Stress-Testing Your Career: A Red-Team Exercise for the Next Five Years

Stress-Testing Your Career: A Red-Team Exercise for the Next Five Years

Most ambitious professionals spend significant time stress-testing their investment portfolios and almost no time stress-testing their careers. This is odd. A portfolio represents a financial bet; a career represents most of your economic upside and a large fraction of your identity. The failure modes of a career — becoming obsolete, being

How to Think About Career Risk in Your 30s Without Reading More LinkedIn Posts

How to Think About Career Risk in Your 30s Without Reading More LinkedIn Posts

Most LinkedIn content about career decisions in your 30s is, fundamentally, optimisation porn. Perfect trajectories. Hockey-stick comp growth. The right number of company moves. The optimal time to go for an MBA versus an MSc. The correct calibration of risk for someone with your precise background. The advice is given

Why Most Strategic Plans Collapse at First Contact With Reality

Why Most Strategic Plans Collapse at First Contact With Reality

Mike Tyson is widely quoted for the line "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." The context was a 1987 pre-fight interview; he was talking about boxing. The line has since been borrowed by Silicon Valley to justify a lot of different things — agility,

Writing as a Thinking Tool: Why Amazon's 6-Page Memos Beat PowerPoint Every Time

Writing as a Thinking Tool: Why Amazon's 6-Page Memos Beat PowerPoint Every Time

Jeff Bezos, in a 2004 internal memo, banned PowerPoint presentations at Amazon senior-leadership meetings. Instead, any proposal had to be submitted as a six-page, narratively structured memo. Meetings began with 20-30 minutes of silent reading of the memo, after which discussion started. The policy was controversial at the time and

Leadership Styles Are Fake — Context Is Real

Leadership Styles Are Fake — Context Is Real

The personality-quiz version of leadership — visionary, servant, transformational, authentic, situational — is a forty-year exercise in giving old ideas new labels. Every few years, a consulting firm releases a new taxonomy with four or five leadership styles, markets it aggressively, and then watches it settle onto the pile with the previous

The Two-Hour Strategy Meeting: Why Most Companies Waste the Most Important Session of the Year

The Two-Hour Strategy Meeting: Why Most Companies Waste the Most Important Session of the Year

Most companies have a strategy offsite. They happen once or twice a year, they last two to three days, they're held in conference centres or rented houses, and they produce slide decks that almost nobody refers to three weeks later. The offsite industry is worth hundreds of millions

How to Think in Bets: The Annie Duke Framework That Beats Most MBA Strategy Classes

Decision Making

How to Think in Bets: The Annie Duke Framework That Beats Most MBA Strategy Classes

Annie Duke played professional poker for 18 years, winning more than $4 million in tournament earnings, before retiring to write and consult. Her book Thinking in Bets (2018) condenses what she learned about decision-making under uncertainty in a domain where you're forced, every hand, to distinguish between the

Pareto in Practice: Finding Your Actual 80/20 Without Fooling Yourself

Pareto in Practice: Finding Your Actual 80/20 Without Fooling Yourself

Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, observed in 1896 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. He extended the observation to wealth distribution and then to peas in his garden (20% of the pods produced 80% of the peas). Over the century that followed,

Why SMART Goals Are a Trap for Ambitious People

Why SMART Goals Are a Trap for Ambitious People

George Doran coined SMART goals in a 1981 management-review article. The idea, reasonable at the time, was that vague managerial objectives produced vague outcomes, and that forcing people to write goals that were Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound would pull performance upward. For ordinary corporate work — hitting a quarterly

Second-Order Thinking: The Mental Model That Separates Good Decisions from Smart-Looking Ones

Second-Order Thinking: The Mental Model That Separates Good Decisions from Smart-Looking Ones

A PE firm I know well once passed on an acquisition because the numbers were too good. The target company was a European distributor of industrial components with 18% EBITDA margins in a sector where the average was 9%, a five-year growth rate of 22%, and a clean balance sheet.

First Principles Thinking: How to Solve Problems Instead of Copying Solutions

First Principles Thinking: How to Solve Problems Instead of Copying Solutions

In 2008, SpaceX had lost three rockets in a row. Elon Musk was down to the last reserves of his eBay payout, Tesla was burning cash, and the consensus view in aerospace was that launch costs were fixed — $65 million minimum, maybe $100 million, and that was just the physics