The authoritative guide on how Amazon does WBRs (from former exec Colin Bryar): how it works, how to do it, and how Amazon uses it to win.| Commoncog
If you want to get rich, the irony is that small markets are often better than large ones.| Commoncog
Learning the right lessons from my old boss, in the wake of a successful acquisition.| Commoncog
How all good entrepreneurs run experiments at the earliest stages of a business, and how you can use this approach for your own career.| Commoncog
Continuous Improvement sounds simple, even obvious. And yet there's a profound secret at its heart that doesn't seem to get talked about.| Commoncog
Why are the Tatas so much less corrupt than their contemporaries? How is their conglomerate still intact after five generations? The answer to an Asian conglomerate mystery, and Part 13 of the Asian conglomerate series.| Commoncog
Things we wished someone told us, before we put the JTBD interview to practice.| Commoncog
Most Asian conglomerates are family-controlled businesses. Succession in any family business is a tricky thing. We look at a few cases as part of the Asian Conglomerate Series.| Commoncog
We trace Michael Dell's skill at the art of capital in business, and use it to examine how skill at capital allows you to make moves that aren't available to a novice business operator.| Commoncog
All great business people share a common, intuitive mental model of business. We look at how researcher Lia DiBello extracted that mental model.| Commoncog
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.| Commoncog
How Robert Kuok used the joint venture to expand his business empire ... and what this tells us about business in Southeast Asia.| Commoncog
One simple idea that falls out of the Heart of Innovation book — that you can use immediately — is this idea of selling into situations, not selling to ideal customer profiles. It’s what the pros do anyway.| Commoncog
How one of the oldest business empires on the subcontinent got started, and how one man’s values laid the foundation for five generations of business conduct.| Commoncog
Three cases from The Heart of Innovation, picked to demonstrate the ideas of Deliberate Innovation.| Commoncog
'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.| Commoncog
A theory of demand (and product market fit) that explains it all, and does NOT require ‘pain’ to do it.| Commoncog
Every Asian Tycoon we’ve examined got their start in a world with tariffs. They could thrive and adapt under severe uncertainty. So can we. Here’s how to calibrate for that world.| Commoncog
We study the rise of Vanguard, the index fund management company, as a case study of how customer demand is not always about pain.| Commoncog
How and why the Jobs to be Done Framework can help you sell more, faster, and accelerate your understanding of demand.| Commoncog
The life and times of one of the most skilled tycoons of South East Asia: Robert Kuok. This is the fourth case on the rise of a tycoon in the Asian Conglomerate series.| Commoncog
Every Asian tycoon becomes a tycoon in the exact same way. Learning to see this core pattern is half the battle.| Commoncog
Two examples of operators who were strong on the capital side of the business expertise triad, but weak in just about everything else.| Commoncog
Andy Beal's story is an astounding story of capital allocation, incidentally making him America's richest banker. A guest post by Frederik Gieschen.| Commoncog
Some implications of using the triad mental model of business as a North Star for learning. Part of a series on business expertise.| Commoncog
Cognitive agility is the speed with which an individual is able to update their mental models in response to new information. This is what the study of cognitive agility tells us about how we learn — and fail to learn — in business and in life.| Commoncog
How the Ambanis became the richest family in Asia. This is the third case on the rise of a tycoon, and the last one before we start talking about the core pattern in all of these Asian Tycoon’s lives. Part 6 in the Asian Conglomerate Series.| Commoncog
How to get better, faster at the skill of uncovering demand, which underpins the skill domains of sales, marketing, and product.| Commoncog
How do Asian conglomerates play in capital markets, given pliable governments and weak regulators? We examine the career of one activist investor, to see what that tells us about the Asian tycoons we’ve been studying.| Commoncog
How to think about corruption when talking about Asian businesses. Part 4 of the Asian Conglomerate series.| Commoncog
How Samsung became the largest chaebol in South Korea, and gained so much power over the country’s economy.| Commoncog
What can we learn from the study of Asian conglomerates, and the small group of tycoons that control them?| Commoncog
The answer, like most things from Statistical Process Control, is more surprising and more obvious than you might think.| Commoncog
Building effective organisations is a remarkably useful, if rare, skill. This is what it looks like, what it consists of, and how to tell if someone has it.| Commoncog
The culmination of the Power in Business mini series. What it’s like doing business without the Rule of Law.| Commoncog
How do you gain power, use power, and identify those who have power, so that you may protect yourself against them? Part two of three in a series on power in business.| Commoncog
Understanding how power works in business is necessary to understanding business in developing markets. A members-only mini series.| Commoncog
What the best book on business strategy actually looks like in practice. Also: why it's important to read business narratives to learn more.| Commoncog
What we can learn from seeing businesses as organisms in an ecosystem ... using the particularly odd example of HEICO as the barnacle to TransDigm’s whale.| Commoncog
A look at the main provocation of Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality: that you can solve (certain) business problems with hospitality, and that it only takes a little thoughtfulness to do so.| Commoncog
Product market fit is a crapshoot. Here's what's actually useful in the hunt for a new business idea.| Commoncog
A recurring pattern that seems to show up again and again in business: expansion is dangerous, and everyone really only learns this through pain.| Commoncog
A useful operating principle to sidestep the biggest misconception around becoming data driven in business.| Commoncog
Let's break down Danny Meyer's business expertise as an exercise in biography reading.| Commoncog
How Eleven Madison Park survived the 2008 Global Recession ... and what this tells us about operating through the capital cycle.| Commoncog
What it's like being data driven in the restaurant business ... and what it tells us about becoming data driven in business more broadly.| Commoncog
How even legendary conglomerator Henry Singleton got caught out by competitive arbitrage at the end of his career.| Commoncog
A comprehensive summary of W. Edwards Deming's ideas, whose System of Profound Knowledge is one of the most powerful things you'll find on the Operations side of the business expertise triad. Read this, so you don't have to read multiple books to apply his ideas.| Commoncog
People often say things like "become data driven" without explaining what that means or how to do it. This is everything you need to know to actually become data driven, from scratch, using the same first principles that Amazon, Koch, and Toyota used back in their day.| Commoncog
One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice.| Commoncog
If the most unlikely, most un-businesslike person could become a masterful capital allocator late in her life, then perhaps you could, too.| Commoncog
How Koch Industries became an empire. We draw on ideas from both the Becoming Data Driven series and the Capital Expertise series.| Commoncog
The unspoken secret about new company formation is that you need to get lucky. Roll the dice, get a business outcome. Capital allocation matters because it gives you a path to winning even when you lose the initial roll.| Commoncog
The skill of capital allocation — a mysterious, under-discussed element of remarkable business performance.| Commoncog
What a famous investing framework — part of the modern canon of value investing — tells us about the expertise of capital in business.| Commoncog
One of the great paradoxes of business is that management is prediction, but entrepreneurship ... isn't. What a theory of expertise in entrepreneurship tells us about creating new things in business.| Commoncog
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.| Commoncog
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.| Commoncog
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.| Commoncog
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.| Commoncog
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.| Commoncog