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Alessandro Desantis

Notes

Frameworks and working theories in various stages of maturation.

Efficiency must be defensible

🌳 Revisited

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

🌿 Revisited

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

🌿 Revisited

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

🌿 Revisited

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

🌿 Revisited

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

Tacit knowledge is hard to capture

🌿 Revisited

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

🌿 Revisited

Getting what you want is a sign of intelligence.

Best practices are a floor, not a ceiling

🌱 Revisited

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

🌱 Revisited

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

AI absorbs work in a predictable order

🌱 Revisited

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

🌱 Revisited

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

🌱 Revisited

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

🌱 Revisited

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

🌱 Revisited

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

🌱 Revisited

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

🌱 Revisited

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

🌱 Revisited

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

🌱 Revisited

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

🌱 Revisited

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.

Establish short feedback loops

🌳 Revisited

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

🌱 Revisited

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

Interestingness comes from within

🌱 Revisited

You cannot go looking for interesting ideas, because nothing makes an idea inherently more interesting than another.

Technology is default neutral

🌱 Revisited

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.

Emotions must be regulated

🌱 Revisited

Sometimes, your emotions may lead you astray.

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