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This syllabus is the recommended path to consume Commoncog’s exploration of business expertise.
You should read articles in each chapter before moving on to the next chapter. Concepts developed in earlier chapters are often foundational to the concepts presented in latter chapters.
Most of these ideas are fairly advanced, and assume basic business experience. Think of Commoncog as a finishing school, a place to understand what works in business after you’ve done a few years in the trenches (or, say, after completing your MBA).
If you want a list of Commoncog’s best non-business writing, see here.
Commoncog splits expertise in business into a triad: skill at Operations, the Market, and Capital. Why do we do this, and how can we be sure that it works? These articles explain the research that underpins this model of business expertise, and why we believe it to be credible.
Stuff you should already know, especially if you've been in the game of business for some time.
The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. In order to do that, you need to understand the nature of customer demand.
How do you do what you do, and how do you get better?
Competitive arbitrage is the biggest problem in business. An understanding of competitive arbitrage informs so many other series and essays in Commoncog that it's incredibly important to start with this.
Some of the previous articles had a sequence of cases attached. These cases use something Commoncog calls the Calibration Case Method. The method is underpinned by a theory of expertise called Cognitive Flexibility Theory, which is used by the US military, amongst others, to accelerate skill. You should understand why this works, and how to use it to speed up your own business expertise.
A huge part of operational excellence is learning to use data, and then subjecting various parts of your company to a thing called 'process control'. This is covered in the Becoming Data Driven in Business series.
You should internalise what one of these Powers looks like in practice. Go through one of the case sequences here, which is chosen because the underlying concept is easy to understand:
People with limited understanding of business think that business is all about making profits. But those who actually run business know that running a business is about managing cash flows.
How do you do org design? How do you build effective organisational cultures?
How do you figure out the nature of the market you're operating in?
What is capital expertise in the context of business? What do good capital operators look like? The Expertise of Capital in Business Series examines this:
It’s useful to study a single type of business as an exercise in a) seeing how skill at that specific industry is expressed through the three legs of the business expertise triad, and b) so we may learn how to read biographies and case studies of that industry. The restaurant industry is particularly good because it is easy to understand.
A lot of markets can only be understood through the lens of complex adaptive systems. Read this before moving on to the other topics.
Why doing everything right might still not mean winning.
Given that you understand a market is a complex adaptive system, here are some more tactical approaches to position against competitors.
Capital Allocation is one of the most important determinants of enterprise value. This is a concept sequence that illustrates the gold standard for capital allocation:
A short series on power in business, originally published to prepare readers for a series on Asian tycoons and Asian conglomerates.
What can we learn from studying Asian tycoons in messy, developing regimes? We use this series of essays to explore how to use Power in business, how to do business in low rule-of-law environments, and how to think about government intervention in markets as both risk and opportunity.
What is Product Taste? What does it look like? How do you cultivate it?
The idea maze is the trial and error process that you go through when you're trying to find a startup idea that works. It is a mostly useless idea. Here's what to do instead.