Career
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
Career
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
Strategy
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
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
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
Strategy
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
Decision Making
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
Strategy
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,
Goal Setting
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
Mental Models
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.
Mental Models
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