How Robert Kuok became the richest man in Malaysia ... for over 20 years.| commoncog.com
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
The creation of a multi-billion dollar food chain.| commoncog.com
Full list of Commoncog Case Library cases| commoncog.com
What if we treated time management as a bet allocation problem? Say that we have a finite number of hours, which we might spend on a variety of career activities. How do we figure out what to spend our time on, instead of merely thinking about time management as how to tackle our todo lists?| Commoncog
What happens if you treat time management like we would portfolio allocation. Not much, as it turns out.| Commoncog
How do you evaluate if a career activity is worth doing? By looking at its component tasks, and calculating the information rate of each step.| Commoncog
A podcast on expertise, in business and in life.| Commoncog
A recommended path to consume Commoncog’s continued exploration of business expertise — from soup to nuts.| Commoncog
Famous investors read a lot. But it's not enough to copy their reading habit. It turns out there's cognitive theory of expertise that explains how you may get more out of your reading — in order to learn like Charlie Munger.| Commoncog
Any discussion of practicing mental models must begin with a discussion of rationality. We look at what the research tells us about it.| Commoncog
There has been an uptick in self-help books and blogs about mental models. But, there's a problem when putting it in practice.| 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
Announcing the launch of the Commoncog Case Library, setting the Learning in Ill-Structured Domains series free, and one more thing.| Commoncog
Have you ever tried putting deliberate practice to practice? If you have, it's likely that you'll have noticed just how difficult it is to apply deliberate practice principles to your career. Anyone that tells you otherwise is lying; here's why.| Commoncog
A book summary of a 2016 book called Peak which summarised three decades of research into the nature and development of expertise.| Commoncog
Let's take a moment to summarise what we’ve covered over the past few chapters, and then talk about what you should look forward to in the coming months.| Commoncog
One of the most profound management things I learned was that “the manager’s job is to increase the output of the team.” Here's what it means.| Commoncog
All good managers are able to delegate well; therefore, all good managers know how to train.| Commoncog
Have you ever wished that you could go back to the good old days, before you were a manager? When your work days were uninterrupted periods of concentration and progress? When meetings were rare? When you could actually plan your day?| Commoncog
One-on-ones are regularly occurring meetings between a manager and a subordinate that happen at consistently-scheduled intervals. They are the last technique we’ll explore in the Starter Manager Guide.| Commoncog
Ebook downloads for the Commoncog Starter Manager Guide| Commoncog
Delegation is a huge part of management. Many people believe that management consists of ‘telling people what to do’.| Commoncog
We take a look at how you might turn extracted, tacit expertise into a training program for yourself or others.| Commoncog
April Dunford's book on product positioning is awesome, and has some overlap with those of us who are interested in positioning an individual career.| Commoncog
A collection of cases about Asian tycoons and their conglomerates. + 16 real world case studies.| commoncog.com
How Jamshetji’s sons carried out his legacy — and laid the foundation for the business empire — after his death.| commoncog.com
How to resist thinking of large language models as friends. Or sentient things. Or intelligences you have to treat like God.| 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
A live course, limited to 30 people. Applications close 21st July.| 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
Commoncog is about accelerating business expertise. Updates weekly.| Commoncog
‘Market’ is a shorthand for ‘factors influencing the market’, which is one of the three legs of triad mental model of business expertise. If you don’t know what that is, read this page first. The ‘Market’ topic cluster includes strategic adversarial thinking, though large bits of strategy also involve| 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
A few weeks ago, I helped Amplitude head of product education John Cutler extract tacit expertise around diagnosing and improving product organisations. Here's how that went.| 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 Will Guidara designed a system to repeatedly create ‘Legends’.| commoncog.com
Can we take ideas from finance and apply them to the rest of our lives? I've been acting as it is. The truth isn't that simple.| Commoncog
Experts make decisions in ways that are very, very different from conventional decision science models. This makes expertise a lot more important to good decision making than you might think.| Commoncog
A series on uncovering customer demand — the skill that underpins good growth, marketing, sales, and product.| Commoncog
Commoncog uses a unique case approach to business education. What it is, how it works, and why it’s superior to the traditional case method.| 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
Here we try to answer a deceptively simple question: when someone offers advice, how do you evaluate that advice before putting it into practice?| Commoncog
How the invention of RAID changed the nature of the data storage industry.| commoncog.com
'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
Instrumental rationality is the sort of thinking that allows you to achieve your goals. We take a closer look at what decision science says is the 'best' way to pursue this purpose.| Commoncog
A theory of demand (and product market fit) that explains it all, and does NOT require ‘pain’ to do it.| Commoncog
I relocated for a three month expertise acceleration experiment in Judo. These are my notes from two months in: what I learnt, what was hard, and what deliberate practice actually feels like.| 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
Make sure you're playing the real game, not some more complicated game you've made up for yourself.| Commoncog
The bare minimum you need to know to be an adequate manager. Short enough to finish in three hours. Meaty enough to take 6-8 months to master.| Commoncog
A look at Laura Militello and Robert Hutton's Applied Cognitive Task Analysis, a simplified method for getting at the tacit expertise of others.| 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
What happens when you adapt the scoring system of the Good Judgment Project to your intuitions at work?| Commoncog
Why it's useful to study the results of the Good Judgment Project in service of building expertise.| Commoncog
A couple of things to keep in mind when faced with the deluge of predictions to welcome 2020.| Commoncog
David Epstein's mediocre book argues the merits of being a generalist. Instead of reading it, read this and subscribe to Epstein's newsletter.| Commoncog
A technique for evaluating non-scientific advice, from practitioners.| Commoncog
There are 3 kinds of non-fiction book: 💁♀️ narrative, 🌳 tree, and 🌿 branch. Not every non-fiction book is worth reading, and not every book should be read the same way. These categories explain why.| Commoncog
YouTube is the biggest thing to have happened to tacit skill acquisition in the past couple of decades. Here's how to use it.| Commoncog
Much of expertise is tacit: that is, it cannot be captured through words alone. We look at techniques, drawn from the field of Naturalistic Decision Making, designed to acquire the tacit knowledge of experts.| Commoncog
Anyone who has grown up in Asia has lived in the shadow of the great conglomerates. Conglomerates are the norm here; most of the products and services we consume or interact with are owned by a small group of companies, and controlled by a smaller group of tycoons. What can| 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
Much of life is about learning from experience. Not in class. Not mentorship. Not deliberate practice. And so the question: how do you learn better when it comes to learning from trial and error?| Commoncog
A lesson from a four month accelerated expertise experiment. Or: why creating new drills for a deliberate practice training program isn't as difficult as you might think.| Commoncog
The answer, like most things from Statistical Process Control, is more surprising and more obvious than you might think.| Commoncog
Working Backwards is the first book that explains how Amazon really works.| Commoncog
'Operations’ is a shorthand for ‘factors involved in effective operations’, which is one of the three legs of triad mental model of business expertise. If you don’t know what that is, read this page first. Operations is a broad topic. Good businesspeople tend to have a firm grasp of| Commoncog
What do we actually know about burnout? What does the research say? Is burnout preventable? All the research, in one free, updated place.| Commoncog
There's a saying commonly attributed to Charlie Munger that goes 'Take a Simple Idea and Take It Seriously'. Work out all the implications. Seek out all the case studies. Here's a story of two investors who did exactly that.| Commoncog
Everything that we covered in 2024, and what to expect in the coming year.| Commoncog
What tacit knowledge is, and why it is the most interesting topic in the study of expertise today.| 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
What if you could reach into the heads of great businesspeople and pluck out the superstructure of their expertise? Commoncog has a unique approach to the study of business. This is that approach. In the late 1980s, the US Military began funding a branch of psychology called ‘Naturalistic Decision Making’| 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
Cedric talks to Stan Slap, international consultant to the Fortune 500, on a powerful, coherent model for shaping employee culture.| Commoncog
How do you shape employee culture? How do you win employee commitment? Under The Hood has a coherent model for building this skill.| Commoncog
How do you accelerate learning in ill-structured domains? A series on Cognitive Flexibility Theory, and how to use it.| Commoncog