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Wisdom and Insight are Not Quite Portable
Experts promise hacks and easy formulas, but actually succeeding at something often is much harder, sometimes even impossible. Is it…
Frameworks/Mental Models
Someone should have told us but no one did. Important frameworks every leader should know.
35 posts
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Mental Models - A Subtractive Approach
Most common discourse on mental models takes an additive approach. But this tends to be half-baked, often useless in practice.…
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Blake Mouton Leadership Grid - A Model on Leadership Styles
Most leaders and managers tend to fall into patterns in how they choose between prioritizing people concerns vs needs of…
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Singular Big Bet vs Multiple Small Bets-Two Contrasting Approaches to Strategy
In their book, Business Experimentation, Rob James and Jules Goddard highlight two approaches to strategy that are diametrically opposite to…
Strategy as Tetris rather than Chess
Is chess a good analogy to describe decision making and strategy in organizations? For most folks, probably not.
Less in…
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What is Implicit Leadership Theory and How it Affects Careers
What makes someone “leadership material”? We would like to think there’s an objective answer to that question. But often…
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Why Developing Negative Capability is Critical in Leadership
We think of capability as a positive term— it’s active and additive rather than passive and subtractive. In leadership,…
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A Strategy of Small Wins and Small Bets - Typical Mistakes and How to Get it Right
In 1984 Karl Weick published a seminal paper titled Small Wins in the American Psychologist Journal. Four decades later, the…
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35 Essential Mid Career Change Frameworks
Changing or quitting careers is hard. Doubly so in mid-career. Should I quit or stay? I grappled with that question…
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The Mundanity of Excellence - Greatness as Mastering the Mundane
Greatness and mastery always look shrouded in mystery from the outside. But look closely and it's more about…
Strategic Agility - Balancing Long Term Focus with Short Term Actions
Leadership, management, and organizations are riddled with paradoxes. The more we recognize them the more we can be effective in…
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How Bezos Thinks - All his Frameworks and Mental Models
In 1994 Amazon was just an idea in someone’s head, that of Jeff Bezos. Today it's a…