Business Thinking

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

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Prioritise The Highest Order Bit

Why focusing on the most important thing often means letting other things blow up.

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Product Development as Iterated Taste

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

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The Games People Play With Cash Flow

One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice.

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Good Synthesis is the Start of Good Sensemaking

When you're faced with uncertainty, the best thing you can do is analyse your inputs, synthesise a new model, and then destroy it to start over again.

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Chinese Businessmen: Cash Flow Is King

What free cash flow has to do with growth, and why Chinese businessmen in the South East Asian diaspora obsessed over it.

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The Consulting Business Model

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

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Don't Take Generic Business Advice From VCs

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.

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Breaking Out of the SME Loop, A Story

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

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Chinese Businessmen: Maybe Strategy Matters

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?

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Chinese Businessmen: Superstition Doesn't Count

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?