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December 31, 2019 - May 22, 2020
a hedgehog will be better at marketing roles, communicating a vision clearly and succinctly. A fox will be better at strategic roles, wading through the nuances of uncertainty and complexity. And you will need both types of people on your teams.
Peter principle in his 2009 book of the same name, which has become known by the phrase managers rise to the level of their incompetence. What he’s saying is that people get promoted to a new role based on how they performed in their previous role; however, the abilities required of their new role may be completely different, and possibly ill-suited for them.
When people are excelling, it’s natural to reward them with promotions for their excellent performance. However, you need to keep the Peter principle in mind when doling out those promotions, so that you don’t put people in roles where they are unlikely to succeed.
Apple is known for popularizing a mental model called directly responsible individual, or DRI for short. After every meeting, it is made clear that there is one DRI who is responsible and accountable for the success of each action item.
The DRI concept helps avoid diffusion of responsibility, also known as the bystander effect, where people fail to take responsibility for something when they are in a group, because they think someone else will take on that responsibility.
concept of a vacuum, a space devoid of all substance, including air.
In a power vacuum, the “vacuum” is created when someone who had power suddenly departs, leaving the opportunity for someone else to quickly fill the void. Throughout history, power vacuums have been common when despotic leaders are deposed, and others then rush in to seize their power
deliberate practice. It works by deliberately putting people in situations at the limit of their abilities, where they are constantly practicing increasingly difficult skills and receiving consistent real-time feedback.
Deliberate practice is more intensive than what you think of as regular practice. A kids’ soccer practice where the children spend the beginning of the session passing the ball back and forth is passing practice. However, it is not deliberate passing practice because the kids are not practicing at the edge of their abilities and also are not receiving real-time feedback on how to improve.
the spacing effect, which explains that learning effects are greater when that learning is spaced out over time, rather than when you study the same amount in a compressed amount of time.
To really learn something, you must reinforce it over and over again.
The spacing effect further holds that spacing between reinforcements can be increased over time.
The spacing effect should inform your deliberate practice. You don’t completely master a skill and move on. Rather, you must rotate among skills, reinforcing what you’ve learned over time.
Being vague and abstract is much easier to do because it avoids the hard work of identifying specific examples and the psychological stress of debating the nuances around those specifics.
But for your feedback to be effective, you are going to need specifics.
Radical candor is giving feedback in a way that both challenges directly and cares personally (upper right quadrant of the matrix). Your feedback is completely candid and gets to the root of an issue, its radical form.
Ruinous empathy (upper left quadrant)—when you care personally but don’t challenge directly.
You basically sort your own level of conviction about a decision on a grate, extremely high or extremely low.
The Pygmalion effect is a model that states that higher expectations lead to increased performance, as people try to meet the expectations set for them.
golem effect is the phenomenon where lower expectations lead to lower performance. (That one’s named after a clay creature in Jewish mythology that came to life, grew increasingly corrupt and violent, and eventually had to be destroyed.) Both are types of self-fulfilling prophecies.
impostor syndrome, in which someone is plagued with the feeling that they are an impostor, fearing being exposed as a fraud, even though in reality they are not. Surveys indicate that 70 percent of people become inflicted with impostor syndrome at some point in their careers. Have you? When people fall victim to impostor syndrome, they dismiss their successes as luck or deception and focus on their failures or fear of failure. This constant focus on failure can lead to high stress and anxiety, and negative behaviors like overexertion, perfectionism, aggression, or defeatism.
You can take the following steps to help people overcome impostor syndrome: • Highlight its prevalence (“Everyone’s felt this way before; I’ve felt this way before”). • Explain that small failures are expected when you are operating out of your comfort zone.
Dunning-Kruger effect, named after social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. This model describes the confidence people experience over time as they move from being a novice to being an expert. You usually make a lot of progress when you start out learning something, because there is so much new to learn. For example, you can learn to juggle three tennis balls relatively quickly. This quick progress up the learning curve propels you to have high confidence in your abilities. However, you may trick yourself into thinking that this must be a really easy skill, when in reality you are
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hindsight bias, where, after an event occurs, in hindsight, there is a bias to see it as having been predictable even though there was no real objective basis on which it could have been predicted.
Counterfactual thinking (see Chapter 6) can reduce hindsight bias because it forces you to consider other ways events could have unfolded.
Self-serving bias (see Chapter 1) suggests that you will be more inclined to say that your own or your group’s mistakes could not have been predicted
You need a high amount of additional context to fully understand such high-context communication, appreciating the nuances of nonverbal cues, voice intonation, and adherence (or lack thereof) to usual processes as clues.
Dunbar’s number—150—which is the maximum group size at which a stable, cohesive social group can be maintained. (It’s named after anthropologist Robin Dunbar.) The idea behind Dunbar’s number is that at about 150 group members and below, you can relatively easily know everyone in the group and their roles within it. Above this number, however, you cannot easily remember everyone and what they do.
When you take advantage of price differences for the same product in two different settings, it’s called arbitrage.
competitive advantage. This mental model describes a set of factors that give you an advantage over the competition that you can sustain over the long term.
consensus-contrarian matrix:
“Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean”
many secrets are similarly hidden in plain sight.
“The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
). Instead of asking why now?, ask now what? When you see something change in the world around you, ask yourself what new opportunities might open up as a result.
resonant frequency. This model comes from physics and explains why glass can break if you play just the right note: Each object has a different frequency at which it naturally oscillates. When you play that frequency, such as the right tone for a wineglass, the energy of the wave causes the glass to vibrate more and more until it breaks.
OODA loop, which is a decision loop of four steps—observe, orient, decide, act (OODA).
TheOODA loop(Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is a four-step approach to decision-making that focuses on filtering available information, putting it in context and quickly making the most appropriate decision while also understanding that changes can be made as more data becomes available.
The faster you can make your OODA loop, the faster you can incorporate external information, and the faster you’ll reach your destination, be that product/market fit or something else.
The organization with the fastest OODA loop learns faster than its competitors, consistently makes better decisions, and adapts faster to the unfolding technology landscape.
Pivoting is usually difficult because it cuts against organizational inertia, involves openly admitting failure, and requires finding a better direction, all at the same time.
Asking customers what job they really want done can tell you the root of their problem and eliminate faulty assumptions on either side, ultimately resulting in a solution with a higher chance of success.
It doesn’t matter where the missile is aimed pre-launch. Successful entrepreneurs are constantly collecting data—and constantly looking for bigger and better targets, adjusting course if necessary. And when they find their target, they’re able to lock onto it—regardless of how crowded the space becomes.
Once you achieve product/market fit or whatever type of fit you are trying to achieve, it is time to protect your position. Warren Buffett popularized the term moat,
the deep ditch of water surrounding a castle to describe how to shield yourself from the competition, thereby creating a sustainable competitive advantage.
Protected intellectual property (copyright, patents, trade secrets, etc.) • Specialized skills or business processes that take a long time to develop (for example, Apple’s vertically integrated products and supply chain, which meld design, hardware, and software) • Exclusive access to relationships, data, or cheap materials • A strong, trusted brand built over many years, which customers
turn to reflexively • Substantial control of a distribution channel • A team of people uniquely qualified to solve a particular problem • Network effects or other types of flywheels (as described in Chapter 4) • A higher pace of innovation (e.g., a faster OODA loop)
Organizations and individuals that control working moats create lock-in when customers are locked in to their services because perceived switching costs are so high.
There are many ways to create switching costs, such as cancellation fees, trusted relationships, new equipment costs, learning curves, network effects (see Chapter 4), brand affinity, etc.
crossing the chasm in a book by the same name. The chasm here refers to the fact that many ideas, companies, and technologies fail to make it from one side to the other.
That’s because there is a huge gulf in expectations between early adopters and the early majority, which most things fail to meet.
