Notes

It’s impossible not to believe in anything. Human beings need to believe in something, and in the absence of explicit beliefs, they will start forming tacit/unknown beliefs, which are often even more dangerous due to their hidden nature.

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.

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.

Technological advancements are not good or bad in and of themselves. They can either enable us to live a better life and allow for the creation of wealth, or they can enable those already in power to extract even more wealth, thus leading to a poorer life for everyone.

When we reach the date, we become ineffective at our jobs because we’re part of the problem and not part of the solution anymore—at which point our only utility is as scapegoats for when something goes wrong.

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.

Known habits are a good thing insofar as they create a structure, because structure sets you freean operating cadence. For example, an operating cadence is a known habit.

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.

Reasoning from first principles is the best way to mitigate biasidentify unknown habits and identify unknown habits.

While our bodies and minds need rest to operate at peak capacity, too often we rest by doing nothing and succumbing to brain rot, e.g., by watching TV shows or playing video games for hours on end, with the goal of numbing the mind.

No matter how hard we try to be constantly productive, we must accept that life is seasonal: there are periods of high productivity when we produce output, and then there are periods of low or nil productivity when we rest and accept input—although we must do it in a thoughtful way.

Selection bias happens whenever we draw a conclusion based on a skewed data sample, which hinders the validity of such a conclusion. It is quite tricky to spot, but once you’re trained to see it, you start seeing it everywhere.

Confusing correlation with causation is at the heart of many strategy mistakes. When this happens, it’s typically not because the strategist doesn’t know that correlation is not causation but rather because they are not disciplined enough to distinguish between the two.

When an idea is blatantly wrong or flawed, it’s easy to dismiss.

Because communities of practice are loosely knit, they cannot be created by external forces such as management pressure. They can only be supported and nurtured if they are truly essential to the organization.

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:

There’s a two-way feedback loop between communities of practice and the organization to which they belong:

While cross-functionality creates silosloosely knit, communities of practice break them down: because they are loosely knit, and centralize conversations around a specific subject matter, they help avoid situations where a cross-functional team isolates from everyone else, promoting knowledge sharing and reuse.

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:

When you’re attempting to change a system, remember that a system’s primary directive is to preserve itself. Unfortunately, this tendency can and will often become unhealthy if the system is optimizing for short-term comfort at the expense of long-term survival or if the system is acting on bad information.

Social gatherings must have a purpose if they are to succeed.

Most consumers buy across a range of brands and prices, depending on the shopping occasion and other factors.

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.

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.

There are three types of failure archetypes:

You cannot change a system until you understand the way it operates and the mechanisms it enacts in an attempt to preserve itselflearning why they exist. In other words, before you break the rules, you need to go through the process of learning why they exist.

In marketing, brands serve two different purposes: a functional purpose and a cultural purpose.

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.

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.

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.

There’s a famous quote that’s typically attributed to Victor Frankl, although it’s not actually his:

Having people who agree with you does not make you right.

Learning a new domain typically happens in four phases:

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.

Ideas can be categorized into one of two buckets:

Lifecycle marketing efforts work best when you work to accelerate existing customer behavior rather than attempting to stimulate new behavior altogether.

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.

Purpose is not irrelevant for brands, but it can’t just be lip service.

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.

Experimentation guidelines allow you to quickly and safely tackle challenges and capitalize on opportunities, and get closer to your shared vision.

Everyone is involved in commerce in some way, shape, or form.

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.

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 (which is typically caused by information abundance) leads to market fragmentation in an inverse U-shaped relationship:

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.

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).

Cultural fragmentation (which is typically caused by information abundance) is in an inverse U-shaped relationship with social cohesion:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good consultants work on problems in isolation and then come back to the client with the solution.

As information becomes more abundant and more easily accessible, culture becomes more and more fragmented.

There are two phases to any project:

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.

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.

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.

There are four types of product risk, and each poses a different existential threat to a startup.

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.

Just like good management (see Good management requires consistencybuild mental availability), good advertising requires consistency over a long time horizon to build mental availability.

For a long time, marketers have been trying to capture what makes good advertising. Unfortunately, it is tough to capture.

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.

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.

Humans have developed the ability to anticipate danger months, years, or decades out. This causes stress, even though there is no immediate danger.

#cahnge-management

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 where results are coming from.

#leadership

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.

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.

The ultimate goal of any brand management strategy should be to turn your brand into a reference for its category.

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.

We’ve established that Brands should stand for purpose, not search for it.

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.

#referrals #acquisition

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.

There’s a difference between random systems and chaotic systems:

Codebases should be built for humans, not machines, because they’re inhabited by humans.

Collaboration is not about compromise: if you compromise and end up with a sub-par solution, everyone suffers as a result.

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:

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.

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:

For very large brands, composable can sometimes be a necessity.

There are only two good reasons for an e-commerce brand to go composable today:

In consulting, the two parties are on fundamentally different journeys. This makes the highs higher and the lows lower.

Good consulting is less like real work and more like a long conversation.

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.

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.

There are two ways for people to change: conversion and maturation.

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.

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.).

#tbd

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.

It is not always feasible for a brand to launch new products to expand their IP.

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.

It’s useless to collect data if you aren’t doing anything meaningful with it.

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.

#decision-making #learning

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).

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?

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:

Organizations that are both fast and stable outperform competitors who only exhibit one of these traits, because Structure sets you free.

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.

Life is already hard enough without us trying to make it even harder.

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’s underlying strategy, for a long time, has been to identify the most interesting arbitrage opportunity and capitalize on it before it’s exhausted.

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.

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.

Because the quality of your information shapes the quality of your decisions, eliminating bias naturally leads to better decisions.

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.

Sometimes, your emotions may lead you astray.

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.

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.

When selling to a customer, you should uncover:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Just like Advertising must be consistent, one of the critical factors to being a good manager is consistency in your behaviors.

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 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).

The best pieces of writing have three traits in common. They are:

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

#tbd

Shopify and other “e-commerce site builders” are becoming obsolete in their current form.

Stress is often caused by a perceived lack of control.

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.

There is a concept called “bounded rationality,” which means people act fairly rationally when making decisions and account for all the information they have.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Focus on the process, not the outcome

#partnerships #collabs #culture

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.

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.

#management

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:

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:

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.

In most marketplaces, a few sellers drive most of the outcomes.

Marketplaces are usually 80-20. You don’t start selling in one if you’re not equipped to deal with the additional complexity.

Tools simply make existing workflows more efficient, while mediums create new agency.

The line of demarcation between media and commerce is fading more and more.

Synergies help unrelated assets succeed

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 used to be an afterthought, just ugly band t-shirts with logos and concert dates printed on the back.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Being optimistic for no reason is a recipe for disaster, because optimism is always at odds with human stupidity.

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.

Organization design comprises three factors: structure, incentives and culture.

Org design is not a mysterious skill: it’s just a matter of iteration.

What seems a people problem is very often a situation problem.

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.

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.

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.

In the past, rare objects were objects that were not widely circulated.

While it’s true that Most ideas can only be post-rationalizedThe map is not the territory, we must always remember that The map is not the territory. If we forget it, it can lead to

The same idea as Don’t play life on hard mode applies to business strategy:

The purpose of a product team is to solve problems in ways our customers love, yet work for our business.

Product strategy derives from focus (see Strategy deals with present challenges) on your product’s vision and current objectives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

Building shared vision in an organization is important because An operating cadence needs shared visionShared vision promotes systems thinking and Shared vision promotes systems thinking.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

be-wary-of-flawless-ideas

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.

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

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.

Because Structure sets you freeWillpower is fallible, you don’t need to worry that Willpower is fallible.

In an organization “structure” is any piece of process around how people work (e.g., operating principles, policies, document templates, recurring meetings, etc.).

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.

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.

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.

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, like ERPs, are built to store data in the most efficient possible way.

Because it ties your self worth to not making mistakes, and mistakes are necessary for knowledge-management.

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

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.

A startup typically faces four types of product risk:

Getting what you want is a sign of intelligence.

When empowering team members, share your mental models for decision-making rather than simply making decisions on behalf of someone else on the team.

Creators and consumers have the ability to co-create and amplify a brand through their daily actions, and the lines between them are fading.

Only you know what a “good life” means. Don’t let others define it for you.

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.

Luxury used to be having money to buy things. It was the accumulation of wealth.

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).

From: https://pupius.com/resources/meeting-maturity-levels

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 possible relationships between the consultant and its client:

There are three types of non-fiction works:

When designing a new initiative, define what success looks like and don’t assume it’s the same as for everyone else.

Transient notes are valuable scratchpads for supporting working memory, but knowledge should accrete (see Note-Writing Practices Provide Weak FeedbackDesigning a Better Thinking-Writing MediumIdeas need to be grappled with, Designing a Better Thinking-Writing MediumIdeas need to be grappled with). Transient notes should be an input for evergreen notes, which you refine and cultivate over time (Ideas need to be grappled with).

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.

#stores

#management #leadership

One good use of loyalty programs is to collect insights and data, e.g., through surveys, focus groups, etc.

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 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.

It then follows that wealth redistribution maximizes collective utility.

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.

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 is not just about generating direct revenue.

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:

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.

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.

#tbd

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.

#coaching