Business Thinking

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

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The Capital Cycle

What a famous investing framework — part of the modern canon of value investing — tells us about the expertise of capital in business.

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Understand the Shape of the Game You're Playing

What it looks like when you come up with a diagnosis for your business, a thing that is necessary for strategy.

 Members only
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Lee Walker and the Dell Growth Plateau

How Lee Walker overcame Dell's biggest growth plateau in 1986. A story about capital, imagination, and creative deal-making.

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Fundraising Without Investors

Two personal stories of capital expertise 'in the small' — or why financing creativity can be just as important to smaller businesses, as it is in larger, more sophisticated ones.

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The Skill of Capital

What, exactly, is the skill of capital? What does it consist of? How do you recognise it? We walk through three stories, and then talk about the shape of the skill in practice.

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Executing on Becoming Data Driven: The Technicals

A technical overview of how I'm applying the methods and ideas of the Becoming Data Driven in Business series.

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Dell's Capital Expertise

We trace Michael Dell's skill at the art of capital in business, and use it to examine how skill at capital allows you to make moves that aren't available to a novice business operator.

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Executing on Becoming Data Driven: The Politics

Every analytics project consists of two parts. The technical part, and then the 'get the organisation on board' part. We talk about why the latter is the real challenge.

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When Action Beats Prediction

One of the great paradoxes of business is that management is prediction, but entrepreneurship ... isn't. What a theory of expertise in entrepreneurship tells us about creating new things in business.

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What To Think When Looking at a Chart

In a business context, what should you think when presented with a time series? Or: a really dumb question that nobody seems to talk about.

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