Cedric here, with a short note.
Two months ago I released the Business Expertise Series for free. The series covered NDM researcher Dr Lia DiBello’s work on the expertise of business, and introduced the concept of a) cognitive agility, and b) a three sided ‘triad’ mental model of business expertise.
The triad model consists of:
- Supply — or factors related to company operations.
- Demand — or factors related to the market.
- Capital — or factors related to capitalisation.
To be somewhat reductive about it, good businesspeople know how to make things, know how to sell the things they’re making, and know how to finance the making and selling of things. (Ha!) More importantly, DiBello’s research argues that the best businesspeople understand the interactions between all three legs of the triad for their specific industry.
So: cool triad, great categorisation scheme. But there was one problem: a sizeable percentage of Commoncog’s readers struggled with the names of the three sides of the triad. After a number of individual complaints, I started a thread on Twitter and in Commoncog’s private member forums asking for opinions, and found that half of the responses saying they were ok with the original nomenclature of ‘supply, demand and capital’, and about half asking for a change. Finally, one of Commoncog’s members pointed out to me that the folk who were good with the ‘Supply/Demand/Capital’ name were either a) investors, or b) comfortable with academese. The business operators in the blog’s audience tend to have to translate ‘Supply’ and ‘Demand’ in their heads, on the fly — it was simply too theoretical.
That made me think. Commoncog is supposed to be written for the business operator. Getting people to do a one-step translation in their heads is no way to be reader friendly.
Going forward, I'm going to refer to the three legs in the triad as:
- Operations (formerly Supply),
- Market (formerly Demand), and
- Capital.
Commoncog’s site design has been updated accordingly.
I’ll be updating blog posts throughout the site to reflect this name change, and adding links to this explainer post where necessary.
I hope that makes things easier!
Originally published , last updated .
