Decision Making - Self-improvement, productivity, career, leadership

Self-improvement, productivity, career, leadership

Decision Making

A collection of 6 posts

Saying Yes to the Right Things: A Framework for Opportunity Triage

Decision Making

Saying Yes to the Right Things: A Framework for Opportunity Triage

Most career advice, at the senior level, focuses on saying no. The research-supported importance of declining, the specific phrases that work, the discipline of protecting your time. This is all correct, and it's the lower-hanging fruit. Once you've learned to say no cleanly, a more interesting

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

Decision Journals: The Boring Habit That Makes Smart People Measurably Better

Decision Making

Decision Journals: The Boring Habit That Makes Smart People Measurably Better

Michael Mauboussin, the strategist now at Morgan Stanley, has written about decision journals in multiple papers and talks over the last fifteen years. The research he cites, mostly from Philip Tetlock's work on forecasting and from studies of expert judgment, converges on a pattern that almost nobody in

The Eisenhower Matrix Is Too Simple — How to Build a Real Prioritisation System

The Eisenhower Matrix Is Too Simple — How to Build a Real Prioritisation System

Dwight Eisenhower never drew the matrix that now bears his name. In a 1954 speech, he quoted an unnamed university president who distinguished between urgent and important problems, noting that "the urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of

How to Build a Personal Decision-Making Framework That Holds Under Pressure

Decision Making

How to Build a Personal Decision-Making Framework That Holds Under Pressure

In 2019 I watched a senior executive I respected make a bad decision in about eleven minutes. It was a hiring decision — a Head of Sales for a 40-person software company. The candidate was charismatic, well-connected, coming off a strong run at a larger competitor. The interview was warm, the

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