Action Figure Daniel

Blog

  • “Good Strategy/Bad Strategy” by Richard P. Rumelt

    • Good strategy
      • Should be concise and should answer questions
      • Is unexpected and includes policies and resources
    • “I’m just going to wait for the next big thing.”
    • Competition is always overlooked
    • Complementary system design is good strategy
    • Sam Walton broke the conventional definition of “store” by focusing on the network
    • Bad Strategies:
      • Fluff
      • Avoidance of the challenge
      • Goals
      • Bad strategic objectives
    • Focus is key
    • Avoid template solutions
    • Coherent action backed up by a good argument
      • Diagnosis of the challenge
      • Guiding policy for dealing with the challenge
      • Coherent actions that work together to implement the policy
    • Strategy should coordinate actions in a coherent way
    • Create a “proximate” goal (something clear and near)
    • Quality matters when quantity doesn’t scale
    • Learn from how young companies succeed, not from they operate when big
    • Strategies are sometimes hidden, even to the people enacting them
    • Growth for growth’s sake is not wise
    • High-profitability is not the same as increasing wealth
    • People rarely predict peak and decline (even though most markets do this); more often we predict plateaus
    • Consultants undo the entropy!
    • Direct the competitive effort outward
    • Strategy is a hypothesis
    • Vertical integration can help if you need to pivot in a coordinated way
    • We like to grab and hold onto the first idea that comes to mind; try to push for another idea
    • Privately record your predictions and then compare to real outcomes
    • There are no “cost of goods” there are “costs of decisions”

  • “Perfectly Confident” by Don A Moore

    • Positive thinking is only good if it changes your behavior
    • We bias to look for information that let’s us say “Yes” to questions
    • Asking “What is the chance that you are wrong?” helps us understand our overconfidence
    • Point predictions problems (vs spread predictions)
      • The number will be wrong
      • Possibilities have a range of probabilities
      • Single numbers inflate confidence in the number
    • Desirability increases confidence
    • Before you walk into a negotiation, figure out your Best Alternative
    • Clarifying standards improves estimation accuracy
    • We want to promote “good bets” not “result orientation”
    • Ask yourself “which” choice you want (comparing all available options) instead of “whether” (not comparing)
    • Do a pre-mortem by planning for what can go wrong
    • “Invert! Always invert!”
    • Adding details improves accuracy
    • The lowest bid is often not picked
    • “If, after playing for 30 minutes, you don’t know who the Patsy is, you’re the Patsy.”
    • Providing ranges of certainty does more than absolute certainty
    • Accuracy beats optimism and pessimism

  • “Better, Not Perfect” by Max H Bazerman

    • “Morality” is “improving our contribution to society”
    • Most of us do something “wrong” daily
    • People think that they want to do better but often don’t really
    • Call it “deep pragmatism” instead of “utilitarianism”
    • We want to feel connected to our contribution, even if we don’t realize it
    • People tend to overestimate their skill on hard tasks and underestimate their skill on easy tasks
    • Few decisions should be made in isolation but need to be compared
    • Think about a future state where you don’t know your place
    • In negotiations, try to grow the pie, not just win more share
    • The best strategies are “nice, simple, and forgive”
    • Try to be a “super-observer”
    • About half of produced food is thrown away
    • Focus your time where you have a comparative advantage (better than then next best person)

  • “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacsons

    • Religion does best when it focuses on spirituality
    • Controlling the whole experience became important to soliciting engagements
    • Apple was at the intersection of devices, software, and experience
    • “If you’re not cannibalizing yourself, someone else will”

  • “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson

    • England got to the American colonization party late
    • The Spaniards colonized highly populous areas giving them coercive labor
    • The English colonized sparse areas that required everyone to walk
    • Broad political power is important for a functional democracy
    • Democracy is not important for wealth but respect of private property is
    • “State” is “legitimized violence”
    • The black plague created a critical juncture that allowed Western Europe to break serfdom while Eastern Europe reinforced it
    • Extraction can create short-term growth by redeploying resources; however, it cannot sustain this growth through reallocation
    • Maize stores well
    • Conflict and property resolution is more complex when you can’t freely move
    • Allowing upward mobility enables new blood and ideas
    • Creative destruction is important to drive innovation
    • There needs to be incentives to adopt changes
    • Sometimes changes are rejected because they fear empowering those who rule over them
    • South East Asia countries reverted development as a result is Dutch conquest
    • When the external slave markets dried up, slavers redeployed to internal use
    • Political centralization with plurality is how you maintain growth
    • Modernization does bring growth if it enables creative destruction