Business Thinking

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

Feature image for Focus Is Saying No To Good Ideas

Focus Is Saying No To Good Ideas

Several stories about one of the hardest maxims to put to practice in business.

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Focus on the Cases

Professor Rand Spiro on why (and how!) business cases are more important to learn from than synthesised business concepts.

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Dancing Landscapes in Business

Cognitive Flexibility Theory creator Rand Spiro on what complexity theory has to say about the wickedness of business.

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Cultural Advantage is Counter Positioning

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.

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Putting Amazon’s PR/FAQ to Practice

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.

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The Most Useful Question to Ask About Expertise

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.

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How to Hunt for Concept Instantiations

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.

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Inverting the Cash Strapped Hiring Process

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.

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Feature image for What Good, Cash-Strapped Hiring Looks Like

What Good, Cash-Strapped Hiring Looks Like

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.

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What Danny Meyer Did

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

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