The Garden

A collection of everything I'm thinking about, reading, and writing.

Accelerate existing customer behavior

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Lifecycle marketing efforts work best when you work to accelerate existing customer behavior rather than attempting to stimulate new behavior altogether.

Advertising must be consistent

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Just like good management (see Good management requires consistency), good advertising requires consistency over a long time horizon to build mental availability.

Advertising must be memorable

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
For a long time, marketers have been trying to capture what makes good advertising. Unfortunately, it is tough to capture.

AI allows hyper-personalization

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The true power of generative AI is not in the mass production of broadcast content, but in the ability to hyper-personalize individual assets and pieces of content on a 1:1 or near-1:1 basis.

Alexander Technique allows you to expand the space between stimulus and response

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There’s a famous quote that’s typically attributed to Victor Frankl, although it’s not actually his:

Align teams before empowering them

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
If you empower individuals that are not aligned, everyone will push in a different direction and a lot of energy will be wasted as a result. You need to align individuals and teams on what you want to achieve and where you want to get before you can empower them. If you can’t align them, don’t empower them.

An operating cadence needs shared vision

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There’s no point in building an operating cadence in the absence of shared vision. Operating cadences allow you to move faster and with more confidence, but you need to know where you want to go in the first place. That’s why you should Align teams before empowering them.

The anticipation of danger causes stress

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Humans have developed the ability to anticipate danger months, years, or decades out. This causes stress, even though there is no immediate danger.

Appeal to emotion and reason for changing things

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#cahnge-management

Arrive early to new arenas

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Early-arriver arbitrage is a real thing. When you identify the next arena that’s being built and arrive there early, you can reap exponential benefits with comparatively little wrok.

Attribution is not incrementality

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Attribution is where results are coming from.

Authenticity is a learned skill

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#leadership

Avoid open-ended next steps in sales

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In a sales conversation, you should avoid open-ended next steps like the plague. This is when the call ends with the client saying they’ll get back to you without specifying when exactly they’ll get back to you.

Be wary of flawless ideas

🌳 Evergreen • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When an idea is blatantly wrong or flawed, it’s easy to dismiss.

Being right is dictated by facts, not opinions

🌳 Evergreen • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Having people who agree with you does not make you right.

Best practices are a floor, not a ceiling

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Best practices are a floor, not a ceiling. You should ensure you understand them and their rationale (because Understand the rules before breaking them), but you should also feel free to carefully and deliberately break them if you think they’re not a good fit for your context.

Blogs are suboptimal for learning

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Brand growth comes from light buyers

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Intuitively, it seems like the 80/20 rule would hold true for a brand’s revenue distribution, where the top 20% of your customers account for 80% of your revenue.

Brand management aims to turn brands into landmarks

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The ultimate goal of any brand management strategy should be to turn your brand into a reference for its category.

Brand marketing is performance marketing

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Many marketers consider brand marketing and performance marketing as two completely separate concepts. In their mind, brand marketing is a very long-term strategy that is not directly tied to a financial impact, while performance marketing is a very short-term strategy that is directly tied to a financial impact.

Brand purpose should be generative

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
We’ve established that Brands should stand for purpose, not search for it.

Brands need to activate their purpose

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Purpose is not irrelevant for brands, but it can’t just be lip service.

Brands serve two purposes

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
!customer-based-brand-equity.jpg

Brands should stand for purpose, not search for it

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
If you need to search for your purpose, it means it’s artificial. Purpose is the byproduct of your values and work, not something you impose on your brand.

Bright spots catalyze change

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When creating change, look for bright spots in your organization and use those as an example to replicate the behavior in other areas of the org: what teams are performing well? What’s making them effective? Point to those examples in the organization and use them as catalysts for change—after all, effective change requires collaboration.

Build a referral program after people start referring

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#referrals #acquisition

Build experimentation guidelines

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Experimentation guidelines allow you to quickly and safely tackle challenges and capitalize on opportunities, and get closer to your shared vision.

Build your loyalty program with tiers not balances

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Change requires an activation energy

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In chemistry, “activation energy” is the minimum energy that must be available for a chemical reaction to initiate. Until that amount of energy is provided to the reactants, nothing happens.

Chaotic systems are not random

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There’s a difference between random systems and chaotic systems:

Codebases are for humans

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Codebases should be built for humans, not machines, because they’re inhabited by humans.

Collaboration is not compromise

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Collaboration is not about compromise: if you compromise and end up with a sub-par solution, everyone suffers as a result.

Commerce is the most democratic form of art

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Everyone is involved in commerce in some way, shape, or form.

Common enemies unite individuals

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Communities of practice are loosely knit

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
A product team has clearly defined deliverables, joint accountability, and an evenly distributed workload—it’s a tightly-knit organizational unit. Communities of practice, on the other hand, are loosely-knit organizational units:

Communities of practice combat cross-functional silos

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#communities-of-practice #org-design

Communities of practice exhibit a two-way feedback loop

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There’s a two-way feedback loop between communities of practice and the “host” organization:

Communities of practice form organically

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Because communities-of-practice-are-loosely-knit, they cannot be created by external forces such as management pressure. If they are important to the organization, they can only be supported and nurtured in the following ways:

Compliance is not commitment

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The fact that people comply with your vision and work to make it happen doesn’t mean they are committed to the vision. There are multiple levels of commitment and compliance, and people will generally fall somewhere on this spectrum:

Composable commerce is a spectrum

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Most literature about composable-commerce talks about composable as if it were a boolean choice: you either go composable or you don’t. The MACH Alliance has exasperated this problem by having a very strict definition of “composable.” This works well in their favor, but it does the entire industry a disservice.

Composable commerce may be a choice

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When composable-commerce is a choice, it should clearly and directly inform your business strategy. That means asking (and continuously re-asking) yourself three questions:

Composable commerce may be a necessity

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
For very large brands, composable can sometimes be a necessity.

Composable commerce

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There are only two good reasons for an e-commerce brand to go composable today:

Consulting involves tension

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In consulting, the two parties are on fundamentally different journeys. This makes the highs higher and the lows lower.

Consulting is conversation

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Good consulting is less like real work and more like a long conversation.

Consulting is the gift of perspective

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The value of the consultant (especially when playing an expert or collaborative role) is that he’s external to the organization, so he can see, say, and do things that others wouldn’t be able to.

Consulting maximizes diversity

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Entrepreneurship is intrinsic diversity (i.e., you get to wear lots of different hats). Consulting is extrinsic diversity (i.e., you get to work on a lot of different businesses). Being a consultant-entrepreneur means living your professional life on hyperdrive.

Conversion is fleeting, maturation is stable

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There are two ways for people to change: conversion and maturation.

Correlation is not causation

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
TBD.

Create a fanbase around your brand

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
A powerful community-building strategy is to create a fanbase around your brand. Fans are not there to create something new, but to re-interpret what your brand does.

Cross-functionality creates silos

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
As you get more cross-functional (Cross-functionality is a spectrum), your cross-functional teams will naturally start acting as silos. This creates several disadvantages:

Cross-functionality is a spectrum

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When people say you should be cross-functional, they usually mean you should build cross-functional teams, i.e. a team that can handle the entirety of their stack (BE, FE, DevOps, etc.).

Cross-functionality promotes shared vision

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#tbd

Cross-functionality removes dependencies

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
As you move down the cross-functionality spectrum, you remove more and more dependencies, which is a good thing because it allows you to move faster without getting blocked.

Cultural brands are bidirectional

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While regular brands exclusively work by imprinting themselves onto the culture (see Advertising may work by cultural imprinting), cultural brands establish a bidirectional relationship with culture: they are simultaneously building and influenced by the culture.

Cultural brands promote remixing

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Not only are cultural brands bidirectional, but the best cultural brands also give their audience the tools and the freedom freedom to remix the brand’s narrative and visual language to create new artifacts.

Cultural fragmentation causes market fragmentation

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Cultural fragmentation (which is typically caused by information abundance) leads to market fragmentation in an inverse U-shaped relationship:

Curation creates brand depth

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
It is not always feasible for a brand to launch new products to expand their IP.

Customer loyalty is behavioral

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Marketers like to think of loyalty as a deep, emotional connection that’s formed between a consumer and a brand. However, the data doesn’t seem to support this theory: according to research done by Byron Sharp, 72% of Coke drinkers also drink Pepsi, and 89% of brand users don’t think their brand differs from competitors.

Data must be activated

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
It’s useless to collect data if you aren’t doing anything meaningful with it.

Decentralized identity could save advertising

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
An anonymous, decentralized identity system could be a major step forward for the advertising industry and make up for the signal loss due to recent privacy changes.

Defensiveness inhibits learning

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#decision-making #learning

Define a meeting OS

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
As much as people will try to tell you otherwise, meetings can’t be eliminated: they are essential tools for collaboration. What you should do is create a meeting OS that will minimize the time you spend in meetings and maximize the value you get from them (Structure sets you free).

Define decision making

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Part of having an operating cadence (Design an operating cadence) is defining your decision-making processes. Do you expect consensus before moving forward, or are you looking to create a “disagree and commit” culture?

Define your unit of immutability

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Defining your unit of immutability means understanding what is the smallest unit of work definition that will not change once the work has started. A few examples:

Design an operating cadence

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Organizations that are both fast and stable outperform competitors who only exhibit one of these traits, because Structure sets you free.

Discussion is not dialogue

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Dialogue is about exploring a problem from all possible perspectives. During dialogue, everyone suspends their own beliefs, and there’s a shared search for the truth.

Don’t play life on hard mode

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Life is already hard enough without us trying to make it even harder.

Dreams matter because of their function

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
If you have a dream/vision, you shouldn’t focus so much on the content of that dream (i.e., what you desire) but rather on the function of that dream, i.e. the kind of behavior that the dream causes you to enact in your daily life. That’s the real power of derams.

DTC has long been about arbitrage

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
DTC’s underlying strategy, for a long time, has been to identify the most interesting arbitrage opportunity and capitalize on it before it’s exhausted.

Economies of scale are not exclusive

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While access to economies of scale does create efficiencies, it is not a competitive advantage per se. If economies of scale are accessible at 10% of market share, that creates room for ten firms with the same economies of scale, which reduces your ability to use economies of scale as a competitive advantage.

Effective change requires collaboration

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When introducing some kind of change, whether it be technical, cultural, or of some other form, you will need to collaborate with others to be effective. This is because of two reasons.

Efficiency must be defensible

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
If you invest in a business improvement attainable by everyone else, you have not created a competitive advantage. At most, you have ensured you don’t fall behind and unlocked the capacity to deploy to work on more meaningful innovations.

Eliminate bias in decision-making

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Because the quality of your information shapes the quality of your decisions, eliminating bias naturally leads to better decisions.

Eliminate the cost of mistake

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
If you’re in a situation where you cannot afford to make a mistake and can’t seem to pick the right option, the best approach is to eliminate the cost of making a mistake. It’s much safer than trying to guess what’s right.

Emotions aren’t always correct

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Sometimes, your emotions may lead you astray.

Empathize with difficult people

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
As counterintuitive as it may seem, the best way to deal with difficult people is to get in their shoes and understand where they’re coming from. This may seem like doing them a favor and excusing poor behavior, but in reality, it helps us be less reactive and more effective, because we’re counteracting the stress hormones that naturally fill our bodies in tense situations.

Engineers should own the product

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Every sales channel has its purpose

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
You shouldn’t approach all sales channels in the same way. Instead, you should focus on the incremental value that each channel can bring to your brand (e.g., Wholesale is for breadth, DTC is for depth).

Excessive cultural fragmentation causes social isolation

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Cultural fragmentation (which is typically caused by information abundance) is in an inverse U-shaped relationship with social cohesion:

Explicit knowledge is easy to capture

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Explicit knowledge is characterized by the fact that it can be easily captured in some form: a book, a course, a seminar, or any other medium. It is the most basic form of knowledge, and the one we usually think about when imagining expertise.

Explore three solutions for a problems

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
If you’re only exploring two solutions for a given problem, you’re probably falling prey to dichotomous thinking. Force yourself to explore at least one additional solution.

Focus on aspirations and afflictions

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When selling to a customer, you should uncover:

Focus on controllable input metrics

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Instead of focusing on your output, which is not controllable, you should determine which input metrics will influence the desired output metric and focus on those instead.

Focus on directional lift rather than ROAS

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While certain channels need you to measure ROAS for optimization, you shouldn’t discount a channel issue because it can’t be measured directly. Instead, marketers should become a bit more comfortable with not having all the answers and focus on directional lift over time.

Focus on second-order positivity

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
A lot of great outcomes are the result of actions that are first-order negative, second-order positive. Thinking about second-order consequences is the equivalent of Systems Thinking.

Focus on the process, not the outcome

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When you’re working in an environment with a long feedback loop, focusing on the outcome can be extremely detrimental to morale, because Long feedback loops create frustration.

Focus on what’s not changing

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Rather than focusing on what will change and trying to build a strategy around that, focus on what will NOT change in the foreseeable future. The typical example here is Jeff Bezos betting on the fact that Amazon’s consumers would always care about low prices and fast delivery.

Focusing on monetary value impoverishes cultural work

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When we look at cultural objects through the lens of their monetary value, we impoverish them. This is because:

Foresight is creation, not prediction

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While it may seem counterintuitive, predicting the future is one of the most effective ways to create the future. When you predict X, assuming you have the right reach or that this operation is repeated enough times, you are effectively bending the future in the direction of X.

Freedom is only valuable when forgone

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The only thing that makes freedom valuable is that we can give it up for something we believe in. Freedom is essentially useless if you don’t use it for something you care about but rather continuously keep all of your options open.

Fusion alters our reality

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In Acceptance Commitment Therapy, there’s a concept called “fusion,” which happens when our perception of reality fuses with reality. This can make us think that the way we perceive things is the way that things are, as opposed to just being our own malleable perception.

Good cooking requires time

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Good management requires consistency

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Just like Advertising must be consistent, one of the critical factors to being a good manager is consistency in your behaviors.

Good operators instrument

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Good operators must always instrument the organization they are running, otherwise they don’t know whether the organization is going in the right direction.

Good strategies are simple

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Good strategies are simple and quick to explain. If it takes too long to explain them or if people cannot understand them, then they’re probably not good strategies (yet).

Good strategy is simple

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Because Strategy requires focus, you can spot good strategies because they are simple to explain. Effective strategic thinking doesn’t like corporate fluff and pompous words—a good strategy often seems almost obvious.

Good writing is personal, observational, and playful

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The best pieces of writing have three traits in common. They are:

Great consulting begets authenticity

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In the best consulting relationships, both you and the client have the freedom to be yourselves. Because the consultant operates from outside the organization and have less “skin in the game,” they don’t need to hide their real thoughts or feelings behind a curtain of politics or politeness, and neither does the client.

Great consulting requires client collaboration

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Good consultants work on problems in isolation and then come back to the client with the solution.

Groups always have structure

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There’s no such thing as a structureless group: even groups without a formal structure will still have a structure. Very often, such groups will not have the optimal structure: in the absence of structure, dynamics of power come into play and the strongest/smartest tend to dominate over the others.

Hard work is overrated

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In our culture, hard work has traditionally been equated to success, but that is simply not true. Effort doesn’t matter: how you direct your energies does. Either you direct your effort well, or you might as well not put in the effort in the first place.

Hire coachable people

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
One of the most important traits to evaluate in people is their coachability: are they willing to get coached by someone else, or will they resist?

Hire for attitude, not for skills

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Hiring is a network effect

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The people you hire define the people you hire next. This means that the more people you hire, the harder it becomes to shape your organization’s culture.

Hiring is an approximation of the job

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Ideas need to be grappled with

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
To truly understand something, you can’t just read about it. You must grapple with it: practice it, write notes, write a blog post, etc. When you do this, your mind starts to solidify the idea and form connections from that idea to adjacent ideas and concepts.

If being a fast follower is easy, innovation is less appealing

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Improve the operating cadence

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#tbd

In the future, commerce will be everywhere

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Shopify and other “e-commerce site builders” are becoming obsolete in their current form.

Increasing agency reduces stress

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Stress is often caused by a perceived lack of control.

Influencer partnerships should be long term

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Long-term influencer partnerships help the influencer’s audience become accustomed to your brand, which increases their trust in you. In contrast, one-off partnerships are seen as more transactional and less authentic.

Information abundance causes cultural fragmentation

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
As information becomes more abundant and more easily accessible, culture becomes more and more fragmented.

Information quality is decision quality

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There is a concept called “bounded rationality,” which means people act in a fairly rational way when making decisions and account for all the information they have.

Innovation needs a platform

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Innovation is not created in a vacuum. Multiple factors (a “platform”) are required for it to become successful and widespread. Until that platform exists, any innovations introduced to an ecosystem are bound to fail.

Kindness begets kindness

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
If you ask someone for a small favor and they agree, it’s more likely that the person will then agree to a slightly larger favor, and so on and so forth.

Learning is a four-phase process

🌳 Evergreen • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Learning a new domain typically happens in four phases:

Learning is the work

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The most effective organizations are learning organizations. Learning —about both the products we produce and the way we produce them—is continuous. Learning is not just a normal work activity, it is the work.

Life is seasonal

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Light buyers favor large brands

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In any category, light buyers (i.e., those who only buy the category occasionally) favor large brands over small ones. This is known as the “Natural Monopoly Law” (i.e., larger brands monopolize light buyers) in How Brands Grow.

Lofty visions require personal mastery

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
If your vision is complicated or seemingly unachievable, you need to cultivate personal mastery at all levels of your organization. If you don’t, people will eventually become discouraged becuase they won’t be able to close the gap between reality and the vision.

Long feedback loops create frustration

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Focus on the process, not the outcome

Look for collab partners that are aligned with you

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#partnerships #collabs #culture

Loyalty programs don’t drive direct growth

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Brands typically launch a loyalty program with the idea that it will either get their heavy buyers to spend more or that it will convert their light buyers into heavy buyers.

Make people feel good about themselves to make them like you

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
We often believe that we need to come across as smart or fascinating if we want people to like us. This is not really true: for the most part, people like those who make them feel good about themselves. In other words, making the other person feel smart and fascinating may be the quickest way to win them over.

Managers operate on two horizons

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#management

Market penetration trumps market segmentation

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Traditional marketing literature teaches marketers to pick a specific market segment and then position their brand and focus their marketing initiatives to appeal exclusively to that segment. The idea is that consumers identify strongly with the brands they buy, so they will naturally gravitate towards brands that “resonate” more deeply with them. This is called the market segmentation approach to marketing.

Market share is a self-reinforcing feedback loop

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
If you’re a consumer brand selling wholesale, gaining or losing market share can cause you to enter into a positive or negative self-reinforcing feedback loop:

Marketing must build availability

🌳 Evergreen • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The modern consumer is bombarded with brands they can choose from. As a result, consumers filter out most of the brands they see because the human mind simply cannot process all the information it’s exposed to, and it has to take shortcuts.

Marketing must build mental availability

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In addition to physical availability, marketing must also build mental availability. By this, we mean that it must reinforce the mental structures in the consumer’s brain that allow the consumer to:

Marketing must build physical availability

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Brand growth comes from light buyers, and light buyers are not motivated enough to shop in specific channels: they will just buy their products wherever they want to buy it.

Marketplaces are usually 80-20

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In most marketplaces, a few sellers drive most of the outcomes.

Marketplaces require dedicated teams

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Marketplaces are usually 80-20. You don’t start selling in one if you’re not equipped to deal with the additional complexity.

Media and commerce are blending

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The line of demarcation between media and commerce is fading more and more.

Mediums create new agency

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Tools simply make existing workflows more efficient, while mediums create new agency.

Membership is a type of synergy

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Synergies help unrelated assets succeed

Memory is for context

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Memory gives you a web of facts/references that you can use to put new information into context. It allows you to answer questions with deduction, without having to look up key facts.

Merchandising is turning into a real business

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Merchandising used to be an afterthought, just ugly band t-shirts with logos and concert dates printed on the back.

Metaverse generates a lot of first-party data

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In metaverse experiences, you get a ton of first-party data through the actions that users take in the experience. You don’t need third-party cookies to track it, which makes the metaverse a solid mitigation strategy to the death of cookies.

Metaverse is for behemoths and natives

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
To be successful in the metaverse, you either need to be a giant company with a huge following, e.g., Nike/Puma, with the gravitational pull to attract a new type of consumer into the metaverse, or you need to be metaverse-native (e.g., KIKI), and lean heavily into the quirks of Web3.

Misaligned product demand is detrimental

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
For an early-stage startup, it’s flattering to encounter demand outside of your established ICP. However, this demand will inevitably cause you to lose focus.

Money is like oxygen

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Making money for a company is like breathing oxygen for a person: it’s not the end game, it’s just a means to keep afloat and be able to achieve your vision.

Most ideas can only be post-rationalized

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Ideas can be categorized into one of two buckets:

Multi-brand retailers create moats through CX

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

MVP is not half-assed

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

NFTs create transparency into the value of cultural artifacts

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Traditionally, the monetary value of a cultural artifact (e.g., a painting) would only be known when that artifact was involved in a transaction—usually a sale. Even then, the value of the transaction would not always be publicly disclosed and would only be known to the buyer and the seller (or a select few).

Non-fiction must revolve around a shiny dime

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
All good non-fiction pieces are centered around a shiny dime, i.e., the core thesis, idea, or takeaway you want to explore. It’s the kernel that you cannot take away from the piece without killing it.

Optimism requires diversification

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Being optimistic for no reason is a recipe for disaster, because optimism is always at odds with human stupidity.

Optionality can hinder risk-taking

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While it’s true that Optimism requires diversification, you need to be careful not to diversify and protect yourself so much that you forget to take risks.

Org design is about structure, incentives, and culture

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Organization design comprises three factors: structure, incentives and culture.

Organizational design is iterative

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Org design is not a mysterious skill: it’s just a matter of iteration.

People change places, not the other way around

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Most people say that they travel to get enriched, but the reality is that travel is something that we mostly do out of a need to be entertained. In the real world, it is far more likely that tourists end up changing the places they visit than getting changed by them.

People problems are often situation problems

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
What seems a people problem is very often a situation problem.

Perfectionism delays convergence

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There are two phases to any project:

Personalization may be harmful

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In the retail/e-commerce industry, there’s much discussion about the power of personalization as applied to different contexts: advertising, purchase experience, customer service, etc.

Physical design is hard to change

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While the physical design is one of the most important factors in determining a system’s behavior, it also can no be changed easily after the system has been created. This makes it one of the least appealing levers in adjusting system behavior.

Point to the new tower

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When you’re scaling your organization, you will ask people to reinvent themselves and take on new sets of responsibilities continuously. This can be very unsettling for some people because no one likes to give away their toys.

Points are better than money for loyalty programs

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
If you reward your loyalty program members with money immediately (e.g., in the form of a cashback or a balance that they can accumulate over time), you will have very little flexibility in shaping the reward structure down the line.

Popularity is the new rarity

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In the past, rare objects were objects that were not widely circulated.

Post-rationalization can lead to survivorship bias

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While it’s true that Most ideas can only be post-rationalized, we must always remember that The map is not the territory. If we forget it, it can lead to

Prestige is not wealth

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In an ideal world, prestige and wealth would go hand in hand: the more prestigious someone is, the more wealth they should be able to accumulate.

Prioritize strengths over weaknesses

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The same idea as Don’t play life on hard mode applies to business strategy:

Product development attempts to systematize success

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
People often think of Lean Startup as the only possible methodology for product development, but that’s just because it’s the most popular one.

Product management is about the customer

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The purpose of a product team is to solve problems in ways our customers love, yet work for our business.

Product strategy has four steps

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Product strategy derives from focus (see Strategy deals with present challenges) on your product’s vision and current objectives.

Productivity is goal plus strategy

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
For a team to be truly productive, they cannot simply be given a goal. They also need to be given a strategy for how to achieve the goal. A leader’s job is to create the conditions for success—otherwise any effort will seem wasted.

Psychological safety is a compromise

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
It’s interesting to note that psychological safety is NOT a natural thing: our instinct is to always try to protect ourselves by not speaking up.

Psychological safety is a team factor

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Research has shown that all organizations have pockets of high and low psychological safety. This is because psychological safety mostly happens at the team level rather than at the organization level.

Pursue your personal Venn diagram

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Your source of power in life is the intersection of two things you’re great at—assuming that intersection is valuable to someone. This is your personal Venn diagram.

Queerness is about eschewing normality

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The fundamental belief behind queerness is NOT that one should feel comfortable being strange because that would imply there is an idea of “normality” in the first place.

Re-evaluate your strengths

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In order to continue progressing in your career, you should constantly be asking yourself whether the traits that got you here are still the right ones to get you there.

Reason from first principles

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#tbd

Regulation can create opportunity

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Most times, regulatory changes are just a burden for organizations. In some rare situations, however, a smart organization can “ride” a regulatory wave to seize a new opportunity in the market, effectively turning what would otherwise be a burden into a competitive advantage.

Reinforcing feedback loops can be self-enhancing or self-destructive

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Through reinforcing feedback loops, a system effectively causes its own behavior, ending up in a virtuous or vicious cycle depending on whether the behavior is desirable or not. Over time, this can lead to exponential improvements or collapse.

Relax is not idleness

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Often, we “relax” by doing nothing and succumbing to brain rot, e.g., by watching TV shows or playing video games for hours on end just to numb the mind.

Renewable resources are flow limited

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
You can extract a renewable resource indefinitely, but only at a slower pace than its replenishment rate. If you extract it at a faster pace, then you may drive the resource below a critical threshold, which would make it, for all practical purposes, nonrenewable.

Resale is not enough

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Many fast-fashion brands are launching resale programs in an effort to appear more sustainable, but in reality, the evidence shows that these programs will not do much to make brands more sustainable. In fact, resale programs only reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of a fast-fashion brand by 0.7%.

Retention doesn’t grow brands

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Despite all the talk about brands needing to invest in customer retention, it’s important to know that brands cannot survive on retention alone: most brands only retain 20-30% of their customer base.

Risk protects from competition

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There are four types of product risk, and each poses a different existential threat to a startup.

Sales channels must be integrated

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While it’s true that every sales channel has its purpose, you shouldn’t think about channels in isolation. Instead, you should be constantly thinking about how to integrate them so that they support, and not cannibalize, each other.

Selection bias skews decisions in retail

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7259940888389316608/

Serendipity requires randomness

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
You cannot stumble into something novel by sticking to your routine. Serendipity requires doing things you’ve never done before, meeting random people, reading random books, etc. This is how you find new things, make connections between different fields, create theories, etc.

Shared vision is built through hiring

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Because Shared vision is descriptive, not prescriptive, it follows that if you have a personal vision and want to build shared vision, one of the best things you can do is select your people carefully.

Shared vision is built through inquiry

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While Shared vision is built through hiring, building a shared vision also means constantly inquiring into the personal visions of all of your team members and finding ways to harmonize them.

Shared vision is descriptive, not prescriptive

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Building shared vision in an organization is important because An operating cadence needs shared vision and Shared vision promotes systems thinking.

Shared vision promotes systems thinking

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When enrolled in or committed to a shared vision that spans 10, 20, or 50 years, you are much more likely to develop and practice systems thinking because people will want to make things work in the long run.

Small orgs give you breadth, large orgs give you scale

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In a small org, you can do a little bit of everything and you influence all areas of the company (high internal impact), but the results of your work on the outside world are very small (low external impact).

Social commerce puts people over brands

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When we buy through social media, we often emphasize the person over the brand: we don’t want to buy a particular brand, but rather a particular person’s look or lifestyle.

Social media is leading to product-centric commerce

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The nature of social media means that marketing organizations are moving from brand-centric commerce to product-centric commerce, i.e., when you buy something without really caring about the brand that is producing it.

Social support reduces stress

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
A social support network reduces stress, even though the stressors may remain the same. This is similar to how Increasing agency reduces stress even though you may not actually exercise your agency to alter your stressors.

Software should be tested in production

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Split teams after the seams emerge

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
A lot of leaders attempt to split teams pre-emptively, with a top-down approach. This might sometimes work, but it’s the path of highest resistance, because you need to Align teams before empowering them.

Stores have a double nature

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Stories are not facts

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
be-wary-of-flawless-ideas

Strategy deals with present challenges

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Strategy is a concrete set of coherent and realistic actions for dealing with one or more pressing challenges. It forces you to focus on a few objectives that will lead to several favorable outcomes for you or your organization.

Strategy requires focus

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While Strategy deals with present challenges, not all present challenges must be tackled simultaneously. Deciding which hills to die on and which to ignore is a key part of strategic thinking.

Strategy requires original insights

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Strategy requires someone with a deep understanding of the subject matter to have an original insight.

Stress isn’t the same for everyone

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
If you expose two people to the same stressor, they will react differently. The stress tolerance is a combination of genetics, competency, context, and personal history.

Structure makes willpower unnecessary

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Because Structure sets you free, you don’t need to worry that Willpower is fallible.

Structure sets you free

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In an organization “structure” is any piece of process around how people work (e.g., operating principles, policies, document templates, recurring meetings, etc.).

Synergies help unrelated assets succeed

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
If you hold a bunch of unrelated assets, building synergies can help tie them together and increase their performance. An example would be Prime for all of Amazon’s services, or Apple One for Apple services.

Systems happen all at once

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While systems can be written about, the written word is an inefficient medium for describing systems. Words come one after the other—systems happen all at once.

Systems must be inspected

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Rather than listening to people’s theories about how systems work, it’s always better to inspect them and see what really happens. It helps expose several wrong theories about what’s happening.

Systems of engagement consume data

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While Systems of record hold data, systems of engagement take the data from systems fo record and transform it in ways that are useful for the business.

Systems of record hold data

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Systems of record, like ERPs, are built to store data in the most efficient possible way.

Tacit knowledge is hard to capture

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While explicit knowledge can be captured, tacit knowledge cannot be captured—or at least, not in a very practical way.

Taking yourself seriously impedes learning

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Because it ties your self worth to not making mistakes, and mistakes are necessary for knowledge-management.

Teach how to decide

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When empowering team members, share your mental models for decision-making rather than simply making decisions on behalf of someone else on the team.

The consumer creator line is fading

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Creators and consumers have the ability to co-create and amplify a brand through their daily actions, and the lines between them are fading.

The good life is an individual affair

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Only you know what a “good life” means. Don’t let others define it for you.

The internet favors discounting

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The problem with selling to the consumer on the Internet is that it favors price comparison and, as a result, discounting. The moment one brand starts offering a product for a slightly lower price than the competition, it triggers a discounting spiral that makes everyone worse off.

The map is not the territory

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The real world is much more complex than the mental models we create of it: maps are a necessary simplification so that we can reduce a chaotic system to a number of reproducible, rigid rules, so that the system itself is easier to work with.

The new luxury is about taste, not wealth

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Luxury used to be having money to buy things. It was the accumulation of wealth.

The organization is the work

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When they’re part of an organization, most people consider their primary and immediate responsibilities to be the work. For example, a mediocre software engineer will limit themselves to writing the code they are required to write. These people are enrolled, but not committed (remember that Compliance is not commitment).

The wellness industry promotes unfairness

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
In Tiny Stupid Habits, Rosie Spinks argues that the wellness industry is inherently unfair because it proposes individualized solutions for structural problems: breathing more cannot be the answer to the ever-increasing anxiety that we all feel due to economic and social pressures and inequalities.

There are five levels of meeting maturity

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
From: https://pupius.com/resources/meeting-maturity-levels

There are four types of product risk

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
A startup typically faces four types of product risk:

There are three definitions of intelligence

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While evolution can be considered a compile-time type of adaptation, intelligence is a run-time type of adaptation: an intelligent organism can adapt to its environment during the course of its life—it doesn’t need to wait for gene selection.

There are three types of consulting

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There are three types of possible relationships between the consultant and its client:

There are three types of failure

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There are three types of failure archetypes:

There are three types of non-fiction works

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
There are three types of non-fiction works:

Things that don’t scale keep you grounded

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM

To win, redefine success

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
When designing a new initiative, define what success looks like and don’t assume it’s the same as for everyone else.

Turn transient notes into evergreen notes

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Transient notes are valuable scratchpads for supporting working memory, but knowledge should accrete (see Note-Writing Practices Provide Weak Feedback, Designing a Better Thinking-Writing Medium). Transient notes should be an input for evergreen notes, which you refine and cultivate over time (Ideas need to be grappled with).

Turn your brand into social capital

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Turning your brand into a source of social capital is a quick way to boost organic growth. You can do this by effectively activating your brand’s purpose (see Brands need to activate their purpose) so that buying from you becomes a statement about one’s own values rather than a mere transaction.

Understand the rules before breaking them

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
You cannot change a system you do not understand. Before you break the rules, you need to go through the process of learning why they exist.

Unknown habits impede learning

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Known habits are a good thing insofar as their ability to create a structure, because Structure sets you free. An operating cadence, for example, is a known habit (see Design an operating cadence).

Use stores as fulfillment nodes

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#stores

Use the TERA quotient for building trust

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#management #leadership

Use your loyalty program to get insights

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
One good use of loyalty programs is to collect insights and data, e.g., through surveys, focus groups, etc.

Vertical integration requires stable demand

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
While Vertical integration comes with regulatory benefits, you also want to make sure that you don’t do it too early: opening your own factory when your demand is still variable, and you do not see stable, continuous growth is a very dangerous move.

We get what we reward for

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
We always get what we reward for, which means we can shape reality by rewarding the right behaviors, and by being conscious about what we reward for.

Wealth has diminishing marginal utility

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
It then follows that wealth redistribution maximizes collective utility.

Web3 experiences lack composability

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Web2 products are more composable than web3, thanks to the presence of underlying standards. Web3 products are still very much isolated because every product is a walled garden.

Weirdness is the seed of humor

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Being funny requires not suppressing our weird thoughts. If we find something weird, everyone else will likely find it weird; that’s the seed of humor.

Wholesale boosts brand awareness

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Wholesale is not just about generating direct revenue.

Wholesale is for breadth, DTC is for depth

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Every sales channel has its purpose. In the case of the wholesale/DTC conundrum (no matter whether we’re talking about physical or digital DTC), most brands should think about is as a breadth vs. depth distinction:

Wisdom is knowing what’s worth wanting

🌿 Budding • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Getting what you want is a sign of intelligence.

Work the policy, not the exception

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
The correct way to build policies while also maintaining flexibility is NOT to grant exceptions, but rather to collect requests to an exception and then only change the policy once you’ve built up enough critical mass.

Work toward proximate objectives

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Rather than setting overly ambitious goals, which can be demotivating if it takes too long to reach them, set proximate objectives instead. Proximate objectives are relatively easy to attain, and they give you momentum and context that you can use for your next battle.

Writing is thinking across time

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#tbd

Writing shouldn’t start with a blank page

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
People struggle to write because they sit down in front of a blank page and try to come up with a brand-new thought on the spot. This is a recipe for frustration.

You can only coach the person in front of you

🌱 Seedling • Watered 7 days ago April 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
#coaching

Ecommerce Italia 2025

🇮🇹 Italian • Published 11 days ago April 9, 2025 at 12:00 AM

An interview I gave at Casaleggio Associati’s “Ecommerce Italia 2025” conference about the intersection of AI and commerce.

La Strega Di Portobello cover

La Strega Di Portobello

By Paulo Coelho • Watered 13 days ago April 6, 2025 at 4:56 AM
Il Conte Di Montecristo cover

Il Conte Di Montecristo

By Alexandre Dumas and Gaia Panfili • Watered 3 months ago January 23, 2025 at 4:56 AM
Madame Bovary cover

Madame Bovary

By Gustave Flaubert • Watered 3 months ago January 11, 2025 at 4:56 AM
Managing the Professional Service Firm cover

Managing the Professional Service Firm

By David H. Maister • Watered 3 months ago January 9, 2025 at 4:56 AM
The New Strategic Brand Management cover

The New Strategic Brand Management

By Jean-Noël Kapferer • Watered 4 months ago December 23, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Alchemy cover

Alchemy

By Rory Sutherland • Watered 4 months ago December 14, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them cover

Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them

By John Ortberg • Watered 4 months ago December 14, 2024 at 4:56 AM

Elevating Customer Journeys in Digital Commerce

🇬🇧 English • Published 4 months ago December 11, 2024 at 12:00 AM

An interview with James Hodges from Simply Commerce about how brands can elevate their CX through thoughtful data activation.

Get Together cover

Get Together

By Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh, and Kai Elmer Sotto • Watered 5 months ago November 25, 2024 at 4:56 AM
The Art of Gathering cover

The Art of Gathering

By Priya Parker • Watered 5 months ago November 23, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Love All the People cover

Love All the People

By Bill Hicks • Watered 5 months ago November 10, 2024 at 4:56 AM
How to Take Smart Notes cover

How to Take Smart Notes

By Sönke Ahrens • Watered 5 months ago November 7, 2024 at 4:56 AM
The Trusted Advisor cover

The Trusted Advisor

By David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, Robert M. Galford • Watered 6 months ago November 3, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Building a Second Brain cover

Building a Second Brain

By Tiago Forte • Watered 6 months ago October 27, 2024 at 4:56 AM

Maximizing Your Marketing ROI through Customer Experience

🇬🇧 English • Published 6 months ago October 24, 2024 at 12:00 AM

My presentation for the Nebulab team on how consumer brands can apply Experience-Led Growth to escape ROAS hell.

Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High cover

Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High

By Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan, Joseph Grenny, Al Switzler • Watered 6 months ago October 14, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Ma Chi Me Lo Fa Fare? Come Il Lavoro Ci Ha Illuso cover

Ma Chi Me Lo Fa Fare? Come Il Lavoro Ci Ha Illuso

By Maura Gancitano and Andrea Colamedici • Watered 7 months ago September 16, 2024 at 4:56 AM
People, Power, and Profits cover

People, Power, and Profits

By Joseph Stiglitz • Watered 7 months ago September 14, 2024 at 4:56 AM
The Charisma Myth cover

The Charisma Myth

By Olivia Fox Cabane • Watered 7 months ago September 14, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Ave Mary cover

Ave Mary

By Michela Murgia • Watered 9 months ago July 21, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Dare La Vita cover

Dare La Vita

By Michela Murgia • Watered 9 months ago July 20, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come cover

Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

By Jessica Pan • Watered 9 months ago July 16, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Improve Your Social Skills cover

Improve Your Social Skills

By Daniel Wendler • Watered 9 months ago July 12, 2024 at 4:56 AM
How to Talk to Anyone cover

How to Talk to Anyone

By Leil Lowndes • Watered 10 months ago July 8, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Creative Dysregulation cover

Creative Dysregulation

By Kelly Wilde Miller • Watered 10 months ago July 7, 2024 at 4:37 PM
How to Work a Room cover

How to Work a Room

By Susan RoAne • Watered 10 months ago June 27, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey cover

Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey

By Bob Hoffman • Watered about 1 year ago April 1, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Obsessed cover

Obsessed

By Emily Heyward • Watered about 1 year ago March 31, 2024 at 4:56 AM
How Brands Grow cover

How Brands Grow

By Byron Sharp • Watered about 1 year ago March 25, 2024 at 4:56 AM

The Web3 Rightshifting

🇬🇧 English • Published about 1 year ago March 21, 2024 at 12:00 AM

Tim Richardson (Your Basket Is Empty) and I chatting about the potential of Web3 to create new customer touchpoints in digital commere.

Il Regno cover

Il Regno

By Emmanuel Carrère and F. Bergamasco • Watered about 1 year ago March 9, 2024 at 4:56 AM
eCommerce Engine - Roadmap on How to Transform Your DTC Brand Into an 8-Figure Powerhouse cover

eCommerce Engine - Roadmap on How to Transform Your DTC Brand Into an 8-Figure Powerhouse

By Justin Gecevicius and Darius Kunca • Watered about 1 year ago March 4, 2024 at 4:56 AM
The Crux cover

The Crux

By Richard Rumelt • Watered about 1 year ago February 27, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy cover

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy

By Richard Rumelt • Watered about 1 year ago January 25, 2024 at 4:56 AM
Io Sono Vivo Voi Siete Morti cover

Io Sono Vivo Voi Siete Morti

By Emmanuel Carrère • Watered over 1 year ago December 30, 2023 at 4:56 AM
The Business of Aspiration cover

The Business of Aspiration

By Ana Andjelic • Watered over 1 year ago December 5, 2023 at 4:56 AM
Thinking in Systems cover

Thinking in Systems

By Donella H. Meadows • Watered over 1 year ago November 29, 2023 at 4:56 AM
Clear Thinking cover

Clear Thinking

By Shane Parrish • Watered over 1 year ago November 9, 2023 at 4:56 AM
12 Rules for Life cover

12 Rules for Life

By Jordan B. Peterson • Watered over 1 year ago October 29, 2023 at 4:56 AM
Ego Is the Enemy cover

Ego Is the Enemy

By Ryan Holiday • Watered over 1 year ago October 24, 2023 at 4:56 AM
$100M Leads cover

$100M Leads

By Alex Hormozi • Watered over 1 year ago October 9, 2023 at 4:56 AM
Rainmaking Conversations cover

Rainmaking Conversations

By Mike Schultz and John E. Doerr • Watered over 1 year ago October 2, 2023 at 4:56 AM
Professional Services Marketing cover

Professional Services Marketing

By Mike Schultz, John E. Doerr, Lee Frederiksen • Watered over 1 year ago August 20, 2023 at 4:56 AM
L’insostenibile Leggerezza Dell’essere cover

L’insostenibile Leggerezza Dell’essere

By Milan Kundera • Watered over 1 year ago August 19, 2023 at 4:56 AM
The Boutique cover

The Boutique

By Greg Alexander • Watered almost 2 years ago July 3, 2023 at 4:56 AM
Flawless Consulting cover

Flawless Consulting

By Peter Block • Watered almost 2 years ago June 19, 2023 at 4:56 AM
The McKinsey Way cover

The McKinsey Way

By Ethan M. Rasiel • Watered almost 2 years ago May 31, 2023 at 4:56 AM
The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership cover

The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

By Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp • Watered almost 2 years ago May 14, 2023 at 4:56 AM
Tranquility by Tuesday cover

Tranquility by Tuesday

By Laura Vanderkam • Watered almost 2 years ago May 14, 2023 at 4:56 AM
Exhalation cover

Exhalation

By Ted Chiang • Watered about 2 years ago April 16, 2023 at 4:56 AM
Finite and Infinite Games cover

Finite and Infinite Games

By James Carse • Watered about 2 years ago March 24, 2023 at 4:56 AM
Noi, Bambine Ad Auschwitz cover

Noi, Bambine Ad Auschwitz

By Andra Bucci and Tatiana Bucci • Watered over 2 years ago January 2, 2023 at 4:56 AM
Continuous Discovery Habits cover

Continuous Discovery Habits

By Teresa Torres • Watered over 2 years ago December 28, 2022 at 4:56 AM
Il Bambino Scomparso cover

Il Bambino Scomparso

By Frediano Sessi • Watered over 2 years ago December 28, 2022 at 4:56 AM
To Sell Is Human cover

To Sell Is Human

By Daniel H Pink • Watered over 2 years ago December 5, 2022 at 4:56 AM
The Challenger Sale cover

The Challenger Sale

By Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson • Watered over 2 years ago October 17, 2022 at 4:56 AM
From Impossible to Inevitable cover

From Impossible to Inevitable

By Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin • Watered over 2 years ago September 17, 2022 at 4:56 AM
L’Avvocato Dell’Atomo cover

L’Avvocato Dell’Atomo

By Luca Romano • Watered almost 3 years ago July 12, 2022 at 4:56 AM
Predictable Prospecting cover

Predictable Prospecting

By Marylou Tyler, Jeremey Donovan • Watered almost 3 years ago July 12, 2022 at 4:56 AM
Empowered cover

Empowered

By Marty Cagan and Chris Jones • Watered almost 3 years ago June 21, 2022 at 4:56 AM
High Output Management cover

High Output Management

By Andrew S. Grove • Watered almost 3 years ago April 26, 2022 at 4:56 AM
Measure What Matters cover

Measure What Matters

By John Doerr • Watered about 3 years ago April 4, 2022 at 4:56 AM
Inspired cover

Inspired

By Marty Cagan • Watered about 3 years ago March 7, 2022 at 4:56 AM
Escaping the Build Trap cover

Escaping the Build Trap

By Melissa Perri • Watered about 3 years ago February 23, 2022 at 4:56 AM
Switch cover

Switch

By Chip Heath und Dan Heath • Watered about 3 years ago February 10, 2022 at 4:56 AM
From Start-Up to Grown-Up cover

From Start-Up to Grown-Up

By Alisa Cohn • Watered about 3 years ago February 1, 2022 at 4:56 AM
Trillion Dollar Coach cover

Trillion Dollar Coach

By Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle • Watered about 3 years ago January 22, 2022 at 4:56 AM
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat cover

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

By Samin Nosrat, Wendy MacNaughton, and Michael Pollan • Watered over 3 years ago January 17, 2022 at 4:56 AM
Scaling Up Excellence cover

Scaling Up Excellence

By Hayagreeva Rao and Robert I. Sutton • Watered over 3 years ago January 13, 2022 at 4:56 AM
The Coaching Habit cover

The Coaching Habit

By Michael Bungay Stanier • Watered over 3 years ago January 4, 2022 at 4:56 AM
100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late cover

100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late

By Luca Dellanna • Watered over 3 years ago December 30, 2021 at 4:56 AM
The Fifth Discipline cover

The Fifth Discipline

By Peter M. Senge • Watered over 3 years ago December 27, 2021 at 4:56 AM
Gravitas cover

Gravitas

By Caroline Goyder • Watered over 3 years ago December 15, 2021 at 4:56 AM
The Fearless Organization cover

The Fearless Organization

By Amy C. Edmondson • Watered over 3 years ago December 14, 2021 at 4:56 AM

Extensions Are Dead, Long Live Extensions!

🇬🇧 English • Published over 5 years ago November 26, 2019 at 12:00 AM

My talk at the 2019 SolidusConf covering the future of Solidus extensions, including automation, governance, and best practices.

See you soon?
© 2025 Alessandro Desantis