Business Thinking

How do you get better at understanding — and therefore doing — business?

Feature image for A Big Part of Being Data Driven is Will Not Skill

A Big Part of Being Data Driven is Will Not Skill

What it's like being data driven in the restaurant business ... and what it tells us about becoming data driven in business more broadly.

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The Amazon Weekly Business Review

Everything you need to know about the Amazon Weekly Business Review: how it works, why it works, and how it helps Amazon win.

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Learning About Moats the Hard Way

How even legendary conglomerator Henry Singleton got caught out by competitive arbitrage at the end of his career.

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The Limits of Operational Excellence

An answer to a puzzle: why is that some businesses go down the Deming path, become data driven, achieve operational excellence, and die, and others acquire Process Power and win?

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The Secret at the Heart of Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement sounds simple, even obvious. And yet there's a profound secret at its heart that doesn't seem to get talked about.

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Making Sense of Deming

A comprehensive summary of W. Edwards Deming's ideas, whose System of Profound Knowledge is one of the most powerful things you'll find on the Operations side of the business expertise triad. Read this, so you don't have to read multiple books to apply his ideas.

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Becoming Data Driven, From First Principles

People often say things like "become data driven" without explaining what that means or how to do it. This is everything you need to know to actually become data driven, from scratch, using the same first principles that Amazon, Koch, and Toyota used back in their day.

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A Most Unlikely Master of Capital Allocation

If the most unlikely, most un-businesslike person could become a masterful capital allocator late in her life, then perhaps you could, too.

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Data and the Capital Cycle: How Koch Became an Empire

How Koch Industries became an empire. We draw on ideas from both the Becoming Data Driven series and the Capital Expertise series.

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Marvel Studios’s Origin Story

The creation of Marvel Studios was contingent on some very creative financial dealmaking. A story of superb capital expertise in action.