The Garden

AI and the future of knowledge work

Around 1900, a factory that wanted electricity had to make it. Power was a capability you built in-house, with your own generators, your own plant, and your own staff to run it; as late as 1909, 64 percent of the electric motor capacity in US manufacturing still ran on power generated on site.

Efficiency must be defensible

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.

AI moves validation downstream

When the cost of production is high, validation needs to happen at the planning stage; when the cost of production is low, it’s easier to just produce whatever thing needs to be tested (software, copy, creative, etc.) and see how it performs in the wild.

All good strategies are unique

When devising a business strategy (or what they think is one), companies too often look at their competitors or other similar players and try to reverse-engineer what they are doing. They do this because they want validation that the path they are on is worth pursuing.

Competitive advantage is your value-cost gap

Your competitive advantage is most easily quantified as the gap between the perceived value of your products (i.e., your pricing power) or services and the cost you incur to deliver those services.

Economies of scale are not exclusive

While access to economies of scale does create efficiencies, it is not a competitive advantage per se.

Tacit knowledge is hard to capture

While explicit knowledge can be captured, tacit knowledge cannot be captured—or at least, not in a very practical way.

Wisdom is knowing what’s worth wanting

Getting what you want is a sign of intelligence.

Best practices are a floor, not a ceiling

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.

Strategy requires original insights

Strategy requires someone with a deep understanding of the subject matter to have an original insight.

AI absorbs work in a predictable order

AI doesn’t take over whole professions. It absorbs work in a predictable order: execution before strategy, and necessities before advantages.

Capabilities move to those for whom they’re the product

When a capability becomes cheaper to buy than to build, it doesn’t disappear. It moves out of the companies for whom it’s a necessity and into the companies for whom it’s the product.

Cheaper execution raises the cost of not executing

When a company competes on a function, falling execution costs don’t shrink the work. They expand it: as the cost of building falls, the cost of not building rises, because every competitor is building more too.

Execution is translation, strategy is meaningmaking

Execution is turning a known intent into output. Strategy is deciding what the intent should be: what’s worth doing, in what order, and why.

Ideas look better before they’re executed

An idea judged on paper is judged on its pitch. Execution is where it meets reality, and plenty of ideas that looked strong on paper don’t survive it.

Necessities converge on the standard answer

A necessity is a function a company needs but doesn’t compete on. Necessity work still involves judgment—what counts as good enough, which trade-offs to accept, what this particular contract needs—but it’s judgment with a standard answer.

Necessities have a point of diminishing returns

A function a company doesn’t compete on has a point of diminishing returns. Past “good enough”, the next dollar is better spent elsewhere.

Strategy and execution are a spectrum

Strategy and execution aren’t a binary. Every piece of work sits somewhere on a spectrum, depending on how much of the intent is still open when it reaches you.

Whether a function is an advantage depends on the company

No function is an advantage everywhere, and few are a necessity everywhere. The same profession can be what one company competes on and mere upkeep for the next.

Context is relational

The context that produces original insight doesn’t belong to the company alone, or to the person alone. It comes from the relationship between the two.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Winning Long-Term Games

Establish short feedback loops

A feedback loop is a sensory mechanism that tells you whether the work you are doing is moving you closer to your ultimate outcome.

Focusing on monetary value impoverishes cultural work

When we look at cultural objects through the lens of their monetary value, we impoverish them. This is because: