Business Thinking

'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.

Most companies skimp on process improvement. But the surprising thing is that they do so not because they're bad or lazy — but because there are system dynamics that prevent them from doing so. We take a look at what those are.

Every experimentation and iteration loop looks the same, but the vast majority of folk in business don't seem to have the discipline to execute till the end. Why this is, and why it's hard.

Focus may be about saying no to good ideas, but it certainly doesn't mean doing one thing at a time. This is what focus looks like at an organisational level, told through the story of a business turnaround and the Marine Corps approach to war.