Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg

When you talk to customers, beware of their focus on a specific solution instead of on the problem they’re trying to solve.

Tìm ra bằng được vấn đề chứ không phải ngồi nghe giải pháp

Telling a client or colleague that they are proposing to solve a problem in completely the wrong way can at times be difficult.

To approach these situations, Lauren tries to get the client to take a step back and define their ultimate objective, using layman’s terms.

Outside of business, you can ask yourself the same questions in the context of any personal connection (“What does this person really want out of this relationship?”)

(“What did they really hire m...

Another clarifying model is what type of customer are you hunting?

This model was created by venture capitalist Christoph Janz, in a November 4, 2016, post on his Angel VC blog, to illustrate that you can build large businesses by hunting different size customers, from the really small (flies) to the really big (elephants).

What Type of Customer Are Y...

Janz notes that to get to $100 million in revenue, a business would need 10 million “flies” paying $10 per year, or 1,000 “elephants” paying $100,000 per year. Believe it or not, there are successful $100 million revenue businesses across the entire spectrum, from those seeking “amoebas” (at $1 per year) to those seeking “whales” (at $10 million per year).

Janz’s framing steers you toward a particular quantitative evaluation: How many “customers” will it take to achieve success? And what exactly do you need them to “pay” (or do)? Once you answer these questions, you can then ask whether there are enough of these types of customers out there. If not, you might consider pivoting toward bigger or smaller types of customers.

A key reason why this model matters is because how you interact with your customers depends on the type of customer you are hunting.

In the business context, hunting different customers means deciding to put out a free or minimally priced service to millions of people (like Spotify or Snap) versus selling a high-priced product to large enterprises (like Oracle or Salesforce).

A quantitative evaluation like this one is an example of a back-of-the-envelope calculation, a quick numerical assessment that you can calculate literally on the back of an envelope. A simple spreadsheet is the modern-day equivalent. This type of exercise forces you to quantify your assumptions and can quickly result in clarifying insights.

Thinking this way can also help you develop personas, fictional characters that personify your ideal customers, which will help you better reason through a realistic assessment of your idea.

Thinking in terms of actual people, fictional or otherwise, can really ground you in the customer perspective and help you apply these assessment models more effectively.

However, be careful not to allow availability bias (see Chapter 1) to limit the factors you consider for creating these personas. The most easily collected or available data might not lead to the most useful personas.

Do you have any bright spots, positive signs in a sea of negative ones? In a business context, this would be a small subset of customers who really like what you’re doing and are highly engaged with your product.

If you have no bright spots after some time, it is likely you do need to pivot.

If you do have some bright spots, you can try to figure out why things are working there and focus on growing out from that base.

drawing on the military concept of the beachhead. That’s where a military offense takes and defends a beach so that more of their force can move throug...

In other words, a beachhead is getting a foothold and using it as a launching point. Amazon’s beachhead was b...

These were positions they could stake out in the market, and then use to expand into adjacent markets. For your career, your beachhead might be your current skills and position, which you could use to lau...

who can successfully navigate the perils of finding product/market fit with heat-seeking missiles

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.

Successfully navigating the idea maze means understanding how best to interact with the people in your life through understanding what you want and need from them and what they want and need from you. It’s recognizing when you are on the wrong path in the maze, deciding when and how to pivot, and having the resilience to find a way to navigate obstacles put in your path.

ACTIVATE YOUR FORCE FIELD

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Warren Buffett popularized the term moat, making an analogy to 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)

“Moats are lame,” and “If your only defense against invading armies is a moat, you will not last long.” He was pointing out that, in his opinion, the most important sustainable competitive advantage is creating a culture that supports a higher pace of innovation, because that higher pace of innovation can overcome traditional moats.

In our opinion, though, a higher pace of innovation is really just another type of moat, and the metaphor of the moat shouldn’t be taken too literally.

Any single advantage could serve as the basis for your moat, but, as you can see from the Kodak example, several advantages can also work together, amplify one another, and produce an even bigger moat (force field). As we will see in a bit, though, even the biggest moats don’t last forever.

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.

A related pair of concepts resulting from moats are barriers to entry and barriers to exit, which prevent people or companies from either entering or exiting a situation or market.

A specific model centered on barriers to entry due to regulation is called regulatory capture, in which regulatory agencies or lawmakers get captured by the special interest groups they are supposed to be regulating, ultimately protecting these entities from competition.

Federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation’s aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them. . . .

Regulatory capture can happen outside the government as well, such as in occupational licensing, where certain occupations restrict the supply of professionals through control of their licensing boards and processes.

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” meaning that allowing people to see and understand regulation and its effects—increasing transparency—can lead to less regulatory capture by special interests.

When people are held accountable and made to explain their actions, change can more easily occur.

Strong moats, including those built upon regulatory capture and especially those built on network effects, can also ...

Just because you won the market, however, doesn’t mean you will win in perpetuity.

“Only the paranoid survive.”

As a result, it pivoted the focus of the company into microprocessors and reestablished a long-lasting moat (“Intel Inside”).

Once it crossed the tipping point (see Chapter 4) of being attractive to most consumers, the digital camera market exploded.

Kodak simply wasn’t fast enough to adapt. It didn’t use its flywheel from the film business to fuel its path to domination in digital,

It is an interesting question in counterfactual thinking (see Chapter 6) to ask what would have happened if Kodak had tried to develop the digital photography market earlier.

In Clayton Christensen’s seminal work The Innovator’s Dilemma, he lays out the framework for how such disruptive innovations ripple through industries, ushering new industry entrants into power while leaving dead incumbents in their wake.

If you see disruption on the horizon in your field, you ought to prepare to respond sooner rather than later.

you have to be paranoid to perceive the threat of something so small or far off in the future when you are in such good shape. When you embrace this model, you must therefore pay attention to a lot of small threats, most of which will turn out to be harmless.

How do you distinguish the signal from the noise?

One approach is to closely monitor the progression of new threats as they progress from being used just by early adopters to being taken up by the mainstream, along the curve of the techno...