Mental Models for Career Changes
Career changes are some of the biggest moves we will ever make, but they don’t have to be daunting. Using mental models to make decisions we determine where we want to go and how to get there. The …
Business
How Performance Reviews Can Kill Your Culture
Performance reviews are designed to motivate and bring the best out of our teams, but they often do the opposite. Here’s how to bring out the best in your people. *** If you ask people what’s wrong …
Jeff Bezos: Big Things Start Small
An interview with Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos touches on the timeless lessons he’s learned for business success. The three big ideas are (1) thinking on a different timescale, (2) putting the …
The Importance of Working With “A” Players
Stop me if this sounds familiar. There is a person who toils alone for years in relative obscurity before finally cracking the code to become a hero. The myth of the lone genius. It’s the stuff …
Batesian Mimicry: Why Copycats Are Successful
One of our first interview guests for The Knowledge Project was the former NFL executive Michael Lombardi. In our interview, we discussed topics ranging from the nature of leadership to decision …
Creating a Growth Mindset in the Workplace
Carol Dweck‘s concept of Mindset permeates through every aspect of our lives. One area particularity affected is in the workplace. We spend half of our day at work (some of you likely spend more …
Simple Rules for Business Strategy
The book Simple Rules by Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt has a very interesting chapter on strategy, which tries to answer the following question: How do you translate your broad objectives into a …
Jared Diamond: How to Get Rich
We’re constantly asked for examples of the “multiple mental models” approach in practice. Our standard response includes great books like Garrett Hardin’s Filters Against …
Ken Iverson: The Cure for the Common MBA
We’ve written before about the legendary businessman Ken Iverson, the former CEO of Nucor Steel, who took it from a tiny steel operation to a true steel powerhouse in his own lifetime. To recap, …
Andy Grove and the Value of Facing Reality
“People who have no emotional stake in a decision can see what needs to be done sooner.” — Andy Grove *** What do you do when you wake up one day and realize that reality has changed, and …
The HP Way: Dave Packard on How to Operate a Company
In 1960, David Packard gave an informal speech that wasn’t originally intended for publication. In fact the speech only surfaced again during the debate over the merger between Hewlett Packard …
Luck Meets Perseverance: The Creation of IBM’s Competitive Advantage
On Monday October 28, 1929, the stock market took one of the worst single-day tumbles anyone alive might have seen, with the Dow Jones averages falling about 13%. The next day, October 29th, the …
There Are No Called Strikes and Other Lessons You Learn in Business School
Matthew Frederick teams up with Michael Preis to offer some important learnings from the world of business — which isn’t really a discipline in and of itself but rather, as they write in the …
Creating Effective Incentive Systems: Ken Iverson on the Principles that Unleash Human Potential
The issue of setting compensation seems to be struggled with in every organization. Most are pretty lazy about it — hiring someone else to take care of it and failing to think through the incentives …
Why Micromanaging Kills Corporate Culture
“The more he kept sweating the details, the less his people took ownership of their work.” *** The most important part of a company’s culture is trust. People don’t feel …
Lessons on Leadership: Michael Abrashoff on Turning the Worst Ship in the Navy into the Best
“Organizations should reward risk-takers, even if they fall short once in a while. Let them know that promotions and glory go to innovators and pioneers, not to stand-patters who fear …