Business Thinking

Competitive advantages in business that come from cultural differences tend to be counter-positioning, not process power. Why this is surprising, and why it matters.

What it's like putting Amazon's famed Working Backwards process to practice in a small company context, and what was surprising and difficult about it.

What a question about growth marketing tells us about expertise — and why expert-novice differences are so useful to probe if you're a practitioner.

If you read history for concept instantiations, then: a) how do you hunt for cases for each concept, and b) how do you identify new concepts from the history you read? We look at answers to both questions.

If everyone competent iterates their way to the same kind of hiring process, then you can probably use that process as a smell test when you're evaluating companies.

Bootstrapped operators who take their hiring seriously all eventually end up designing a system with the same fundamental approach. Here's how you can do it too.

A look at several concept instantiations embedded in Danny Meyer's 2006 business biography, Setting The Table.

If your incentive set leads to differentiated behaviour, why don't more competitors copy it? Because it's hard to copy, that's why. Here are two reasons how.

The second part of a three part piece on incentives. It turns out that if you've grokked the primary incentives of an industry, you can do one other thing: identify aberrations, and use that as a guide to dig further.

What an understanding of incentives can do for you, through the lens of one industry that we're all familiar with.