Commoncog is a publication dedicated to accelerating business expertise.
There are two ways that Commoncog does this. The primary way is that it publishes business cases that help you get better at business pattern matching, faster. A secondary way is that it runs experiments in real businesses and then publishes those ideas that have been tested in practice.
Commoncog also builds software and tests expertise research that helps with its mission.
Commoncog’s Two Approaches
The two approaches, in brief:
1) The Commoncog Case Method
Commoncog helps to accelerate your business pattern matching. It publishes business cases in concept sequences, using a theory of expertise called CFT.
CFT stands for ‘Cognitive Flexibility Theory’. It is used by the US Military to accelerate expertise. The theory states that you may speed up skill in certain domains by increasing exposure to real world instantiations of concepts. Studying abstract concepts in domains like business, medicine, and investing is not very useful. Reading history on its own is also not very useful. The theory states that you need to study real world cases with the goal of calibrating your understanding of the concept in action. This exercise rapidly improves your pattern matching ability.
As an example, if you want to understand what building successful new products look like, you should look at 10-20 cases of companies and innovators navigating uncertainty in order to calibrate your sense of the Idea Maze. Reading such cases is much faster than gaining equivalent experiences in your life. Ditto for process improvement, or becoming data driven, or building and exercising power in business.
The theory helps explain why famous investors like Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger spend large amounts of time reading annual reports and biography. It gives us a mechanism for copying them.
Commoncog does part of this work for you. It seeks out, researches, commissions, and then publishes business cases in CFT concept sequences to help readers accelerate their business expertise. You get all the benefits of an extensive reading program, without the lifestyle sacrifices.
The Commoncog Case Library is custom built software designed to help members consume such cases.
2) Empirically Tested Business Ideas
Business writing tends to be fluff — it is either written by those who have never run a business seriously, or it is written at a level of detail that is not useful. Commoncog publishes business ideas that have been tested against reality: either in Commoncog’s own businesses, or through a consulting arrangement with other companies.
Such experimentation takes a long time. As a result, Commoncog does not publish many of them. When it does, it tends to publish articles over a period of months. For instance, the deep dive into Becoming Data Driven took over two years, after an initial consulting engagement with ex-Amazon executives.
Model & Structure
Commoncog offers a membership program. Membership subscriptions allow the publication and research to be self-sustaining. Operators and investors use the membership like an ongoing MBA, for a fraction of the time costs.
Commoncog also does consulting engagements, though this is very selective.
The publication is held in a holding company structure that occasionally originates new businesses. This structure enables much of the business experimentation. We do not talk about every business experiment that is currently being incubated.
Commoncog’s approach has been described as ‘50% academic / 50% practical’, and ‘the intersection between good writing, good thinking, and actual business experience’. We prefer to think that everything Commoncog covers must be useful — that is, must be rooted in some real world domain, with enough evidence that it’s worth trying out in your life.
One way to talk about what Commoncog covers is to talk about what it doesn’t. Commoncog is not interested in fancy business frameworks. It is not interested in high-falutin’ theories. It is interested in academic research only in so far as it has been tested through application (there’s usually a fair amount of work to put research to practice, so you have to be prepared to do that work, or check that the work has already been done!) Finally, Commoncog is suspicious of recommendations from non-practitioners.
That isn’t to say that Commoncog’s authors are uninterested in those things. Only that Commoncog promises to not write about those things; it assumes you have only the time for actionable ideas.
Commoncog’s Principles
Commoncog has a small handful of principles:
- The primary recipe here is ‘take interesting idea that seems to be useful, try it out in a real business, and then write up the results’. If we write about something that we haven’t tried, we’ll tell you about it. If it doesn't work out, we'll tell you about it. Full disclosure.
- Commoncog will bend this writing towards usefulness. Many business books and blogs are theoretical, motivated by attention, or irrelevant to the individual career. It's not clear, for instance, how some business ideas may work out when put to the test in a specific business, or used over a period of years. Ideas on Commoncog must be presented at a level that may be put to practice.
- We will write with the appropriate level of epistemic humility, and we will cite with an appropriate level of epistemic rigour. On humility: we will use more confident language if we are writing about topics within my circle of competence, and less if we are not. We will be upfront as to which it is. On rigour: when we cite scientific studies, we will keep in mind the weaknesses of null hypothesis statistical testing. We will perform checks — limited by time and my statistical sophistication — to verify that results are not rubbish. When citing practitioners, we would vet their recommendations according to my hierarchy of practical evidence. This is because you deserve to know if the techniques we write about are rubbish. (More about this principle here).
History & Background
Commoncog was founded by me, Cedric Chin, in 2018. It was originally intended as an experiment to learn content marketing. For a number of years, it was run as a blog to document my own journey in improving as a business operator. Today Commoncog serves as a research lab for skill acceleration in business.
I helped build EPOS — a point-of-sale provider in Singapore and Vietnam — for three years, between late 2014 and 2017. Our business thesis was that POS systems were the way we could ‘own’ a business’s data, which in turn would form the beachhead from which we could sell other products like CRMs, inventory management, accounting packages, etc. We pivoted to this business after a year of consulting, sold both hardware and software, and bootstrapped our way from 0 to $4.5 million annual revenue in two years. I left at the end of 2017. A few years after I left as his right-hand man, my boss hit his number with the business and is now effectively retired.
I then ran marketing — part time — for a SaaS company named Holistics for a period of two years. I was writing on Commoncog throughout the period. In 2021 I ran a repositioning exercise that doubled Holistic’s annual recurring revenue over the course of eight months. This was a seven figure increase, with no additional marketing spend. It was at that point that I realised Commoncog could be used as a platform to run similar experiments with other businesses.
As a teenager I started an influential — for its time — web publishing blog named Novelr, and helped to create the Web Fiction Guide. I also built a Hacker’s club whilst at university in Singapore.
I like Python, Go, green tea and cats, and good books — lots of good books, though you can probably guess from this site.
Contact
I’m always happy to receive email. You may reach me at cedric [@] commoncog.com, or ping me on Twitter.