Business Thinking

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.

The process behaviour chart is the easiest way to differentiate between routine and exceptional variation. This is everything you need to know to use it well.

Is it possible to be data driven and operationally rigorous and still be human centric at the same time? Deming — who came up with these data techniques — believe that it is possible. I'm not so sure.

'Knowledge' here is defined as 'theories or models that help you predict better'. How an idea from W. Edwards Deming may well be a working philosophy of business.

It turns out that operational excellence results from the pursuit of a certain form of knowledge and using metrics in business is about the pursuit of this knowledge. This is Part 3 of the Becoming Data Driven series, and the result of a deep dive into the field of Statistical Process Control.

The answer, like most things from Statistical Process Control, is more surprising and more obvious than you might think.

Goodhart's Law is useless. It tells you about a phenomenon, but it doesn't tell you how to solve it. We look at how organisations actually prevent Goodhart's Law, and illustrate this with Amazon's Weekly Business Review as an example.

Technological Windows is Steve Jobs's conception of the game of consumer technology. We look at how he used it over the course of his career. Note: this is a follow-up to and an update for the Commoncog Case Library Beta.

Two case studies of real world competitive advantage, followed by a question: was this a moat or not?

A concrete story of positive process improvement, deep from the trenches of early customer service at Amazon.