Use systems thinking to draw diagrams of forces, balancing loops, and reinforcing loops to understand complex problems. This approach clarifies interactions, exposes hidden assumptions, and addresses root causes instead of just symptoms.
Prioritize gathering comprehensive context and information before making decisions, especially for undoable ones. Your decision-making skill directly correlates with your ability to acquire high-quality information from various sources.
Actively foster a growth mindset in yourself and others, recognizing that understanding this concept is liberating. This empowers continuous self-improvement and helps people transcend fixed mindsets.
Employ the ’trust battery’ mental model to objectively discuss and manage trust as a gradient between individuals. This facilitates constructive feedback and allows individuals to earn greater autonomy by building trust with their team.
Design both physical and virtual environments to subtly nudge desired behaviors and uphold high quality standards. Ensure everything within your control reflects the quality you expect in your products, making it easy to do the right thing without expending willpower on mundane tasks.
Critically evaluate all existing processes, retaining only those that enable the impossible or significantly simplify tasks. Eliminate processes that merely dictate behavior against common sense, as they are largely unproductive.
Cultivate an anti-fragile organization by prioritizing rapid reaction to adverse events over prevention. Actively seek opportunities to introduce change and disruption, making ’thriving on change’ a core value for adaptability and resilience.
Strive to build the ’largest small company’ by intentionally preserving the positive attributes of small companies—impact, autonomy, and strong relationships—as you scale. Continuously reinvent practices to improve company building and eliminate non-value-adding activities.
Adopt a ‘human-assisted technology’ approach, focusing on empowering people with tools that give them superpowers rather than replacing them. The goal is to achieve the best results through collaboration between humans and machines.
Drive continuous improvement by competing against absolute standards, not just current competitors. Define the ideal outcome, then identify the next best and most realistic steps, consistently pushing towards that ultimate vision.
Study history from multiple viewpoints to understand how great companies were built and problems were solved. Reconstruct past situations to derive lessons and mental models applicable to current challenges.
Scale your organization by hiring for high future potential and accelerating their growth through coaching, book clubs, and internal context-sharing. Foster a growth mindset to help individuals excel in their craft.
Recognize the shift from complicated to complex problems in modern business, where cause and effect are unclear and secondary effects are crucial. Optimize for holistic outcomes and product perfection rather than solely measurable, step-by-step efficiency.
Keep a log for major decisions, documenting the choice, key information, and rationale. Periodically revisit this log to assess decisions with hindsight, learn from mistakes, and identify missed information, thereby improving your decision-making process.
Utilize video games as distilled learning environments for repeated practice in decision-making, resource management, and strategy under pressure. These skills are directly transferable to real-world business challenges.
Foster internal multiculturalism and allow diverse office cultures to flourish, encouraging everyone to bring their authentic selves to work. Diversity of thought and background enhances meeting quality and organizational strength.
Emphasize adaptability over efficiency, especially in dynamic environments, to avoid creating hidden dependencies that slow down large companies. Efficiency can sometimes lead to worse outcomes by centralizing resources.
As a leader, act as the ultimate holder of quality standards, ensuring everything shipped meets a minimum bar. Use your ‘spotlight’ to actively investigate areas that don’t meet expectations, initiating conversations for improvement.
Develop a ‘How I Work’ document to share your working style, preferences, and communication habits with colleagues. This short-circuits the learning process for new team members, helping them interact effectively without misinterpreting your actions.
Apply ’trust, but verify’ with new colleagues, especially in critical areas, by challenging assumptions and rebuilding analyses from raw data. Continue this until a consistent track record of accuracy is established, then reduce verification.
Treat your time as a valuable capital asset, tracking its allocation and rebalancing it quarterly. This ensures your focus aligns with strategic priorities and prevents passive consumption of your time.
Cultivate the habit of making every dollar count, especially in the early stages of a business. This financial discipline, often learned through necessity, is crucial for sustainable growth.
Improve your craft by broadening your skills and learning outside your direct field, such as an engineer learning to draw. This fosters empathy for colleagues in different disciplines and provides new perspectives.
Actively counteract hindsight bias by using tools like a decision log to accurately recall the complexity of past choices. This practice helps leaders avoid underestimating decision difficulty and fosters better judgment.
Read widely and consistently, viewing books as ‘cheat codes for real life’ that provide access to the accumulated knowledge and experiences of others’ careers. This accelerates personal learning and development.
Incorporate a challenging, non-autopilot task into your morning routine, like shaving with a straight razor. This focused, meditative practice can sharpen your mind and set a committed tone for the day.
Develop a healthy irreverence for existing companies and their established practices. This mindset can free you to challenge norms and innovate more effectively.