Board

Small businesses don't grow large by accident. But most hit an invisible ceiling on the way up. Does strategy matter for breaking past this ceiling?

If rationality is so important to success in business and in life, how is it possible for an entire generation of superstitious Chinese businessmen to succeed?

Education robs us of the ability to do trial and error. And yet trial and error is how a generation of traditional Chinese businessmen learnt their craft.

Career moats are inspired by Warren Buffett's conception of a business's 'economic moat'. Here we take a look at a particular type of economic moat, to see what we can take from it when applied to an individual career.

A reading technique that's ridiculously simple, and surprisingly effective when used in service of reading for career goals.

David Maister's Managing the Professional Service Firm reveals some very fundamental principles about the business of consulting.

The Chinese Businessmen Paradox: what is it that makes uneducated, superstitious Chinese businessmen successful?

How to take ideas from books and blog posts and turn them into effective personal experiments.

A summary of everything a practitioner needs to know about memory retention when learning, in the pursuit of building career moats.

Five ways to do noise reduction, from the field of judgment and decision making.

Results from the BIN paper, or why reducing noise in your decision making is far easier than fighting your cognitive biases.

Is it really worth it to generate well-calibrated probabilistic predictions? Or would you do better if you assume that all prediction is too difficult, and act as if this were the case?

A comprehensive summary of superforecaster techniques from Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner's Superforecasting. Because — let's face it — you want to predict the future, don't you?

What happens when you adapt the scoring system of the Good Judgment Project to your intuitions at work?

Why it's useful to study the results of the Good Judgment Project in service of building expertise.

An incredibly concise articulation of the difference between experience and expertise, by way of psych professor Greg Northcraft.

From Gary Klein's book The Power of Intuition comes a useful overview of dealing with uncertainty.

When you're taking action in the face of uncertainty, you have to make peace with the idea that you're never going to know if you're doing the right thing. This pandemic is one way of remembering what that's going to feel like.

How learning and using the four theories of truth can help us become better thinkers, better practitioners, and (hopefully!) better writers.

Strategic inflection points can kill businesses and careers. How do you identify them and prepare your careers in reaction to them?

Understanding the underlying business models that underpin your industry often leads to better career moves. Here's what this looks like in practice.

How does compensation affect the decision to quit a job? An excerpt from my upcoming book Keep Your People: The Startup Manager's Guide to Employee Retention.

Why it's useful to do an audit of your job market during this recession — even if you already have a career moat.

My obsession with building career moats stems from my family's experience with the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Some reflections on job security, then and now.

Ram Charan's 2001 book on business principles is probably the best concise introduction to how a business works.

Product validation frameworks often describe processes without talking about taste. Here's why this is almost always a bad idea.

If you want to start a business as your career moat, don't go looking to startup culture for business advice. Startup wisdom is far less useful than you think.

What Amazon's Working Backwards process tells us about product development methodologies at large.

A story of a Singaporean SME, breaking out of the SME loop.

April Dunford's book on product positioning is awesome, and has some overlap with those of us who are interested in positioning an individual career.