IBM

Ad Strength Hole-in-the-Ship Diagnostic

Use Google's brand vs non-brand ad-strength report to find the one fix that lifts the whole account

Productivity3 steps

Bad vs Sad Quality Tiers

Classify every failure as bad (irrecoverable) or sad (recoverable pain) so teams triage quality across many surfaces.

Finance3 steps

Belsky's Founder Bet Checklist

Back mission-driven, pragmatically pessimistic founders building products with a clear object model.

Builder vs. Information Mover

Diagnose which half of your role AI kills and which half it supercharges.

Capacity-Red Headcount Justification

Add headcount only when a days-committed-vs-days-in-quarter calculator stays red after cutting low-value work

Marketing6 steps

Company-Generated, Company-Distributed Content Loops

Build loops where your product creates branded content and distributes it into other people's workflows.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Conjecture-Driven Learning (Collecting and Connecting Dots)

Don't consume content — generate a conjecture, then hunt across every field for proof of it.

Consistent, Distinctive, Famous

The three-word brand brief for founders — and why fame is the nonlinear one nobody names.

Mindset4 steps

Crossing the Chasm from Fear to Joy

Reinvent yourself by manufacturing one small moment of building joy, not by studying harder.

De-Risk the Deal (The Safety Net Playbook)

Reset the business case downward and build a safety net so signing stops feeling like a solo skydive

Design for Humanity, Not the Organogram

Small teams plus human briefs beat large teams plus metrics — reciprocity does not scale.

Distribution Beats a Commodity Product

When products in a category are basically interchangeable, an adequate product with superior distribution wins

Self-Mastery4 steps

Dive-In Career Strategy for a Platform Shift

Facing a disruptive technology, submerge yourself in it and aim to hold at least two of three career pillars

Productivity3 steps

Do Half, Then Go on a Killing Spree

Build half the features, then remove things until the one core action runs at 10x velocity.

Communication6 steps

Energy-Aligned Writing

Write only what energises you, only what overlaps your job, and publish nearly all of it.

Self-Mastery3 steps

Equally Disappoint Everyone

In your power years, prioritize by spreading disappointment evenly to protect time for reinvention.

Mindset4 steps

Fear-to-Agency Reframe

When AI change triggers fear, lean in and ask what's within your control — turn it happening to you into happening for you.

First-Principles Framework Method

Decompose every initiative into goal, mechanism, and value questions to build joined-up strategy — and mini-CEO operators.

Strategy3 steps

Focusing Power on an Addressable Target

Strategy works only when you concentrate a genuine source of power on a target that can actually be moved.

Influence4 steps

FOMU Over FOMO (The Omission-Bias Diagnostic)

Buyers fear messing up more than missing out — diagnose which fear you're actually fighting

Sales6 steps

Freemium Plan Design by Motivations for Motion

Design plans by mapping what drives someone to move up a tier — and measure product-driven revenue.

High Agency, High Accountability

Pair the freedom to solve problems your own way with clear ownership of the hypothesis and the outcome.

Idiosyncrasy Preservation (The Stand-Up Comedian Test)

Protect the odd, inconsistent details of your product — idiosyncrasies count double.

Productivity5 steps

Imperfect Metrics as Education

Report an imperfect engineering metric on purpose, then use every question about it to educate upward.

Incrementality via Conversion Lift & Geo Tests

Prove paid actually caused growth by withholding ads from a control group and measuring the lift

Just-in-Time Planning

Shrink long roadmaps to a lightweight monthly priority list and grant explicit permission to kill dead processes.

Innovation4 steps

Latent Demand Mining

Watch for people jumping through hoops to make your product do something, then make that the smooth path.

Leader Dogfooding for Product Pulse

Live and breathe your product as a real user (or meet customers) and trust the anecdote over the dashboard.

Sales3 steps

Limit the Exploration (Trust Then Expertise)

Stop the endless-research spiral by getting the buyer to stop being the expert and start trusting yours

Leadership3 steps

Manager-as-IC Onboarding

New managers ship as individual contributors first — and keep doing it — before and while they manage people.

Manager Visibility via an Always-On Agent

Enlist a standing AI session across all repos and channels to stay on top of 8x throughput and drive conversations.

MAYA: The Right Amount of Weird

Ship the most novelty a market will swallow — one notch past familiar, never past comprehensible.

Leadership3 steps

Merchandise Progress Through the Messy Middle

Short-circuit the human reward system with agreed micro-goals and a narrated sense of progress.

Productivity4 steps

Obsolete Yourself

Treat every repeatable thing you do as something to replace with software or an agent.

Strategy3 steps

Optimize for the Problems You Want to Have

Only build features that stop people from reaching the point where they'd ask you for more.

Output-Toward-Outcome Measurement

Don't forsake motion for progress — keep asking whether the metric you climb still serves the outcome.

Paid Channel Sequencing Ladder

The order to adopt paid platforms: user-driven search first, disruptive media next, expensive targeting last

Communication5 steps

Pings and Echoes

Surface a buyer's hidden fear by voicing your hypothesis and listening for the reflection

Mindset4 steps

Presume Radical Uncertainty (The 1997 Lens)

Treat an emerging platform as if it were 1997 for the internet: assume most of it doesn't work and you can't yet name the winners

Innovation4 steps

Price-Elasticity Three-Response Model

When a technology makes something cheaper, work out which of three demand responses your market will take

Reading a Market Through ARPU and Profit Pools

ARPU is capped by per-capita income; a country's profit pools reveal what it actually values.

Marketing3 steps

Signal vs Noise Metric Selection

Let the campaign's single goal decide which metric is signal — everything else is noise

Simpler-Fairer Pricing Reset

Deliberately give away revenue to simplify pricing — it lifts retention and restores a customer-obsessed culture.

Productivity4 steps

Spec-as-What-Good-Looks-Like Verification

Check your definition of good into the repo so AI code review can automatically validate work against it.

Spotting Bad Strategy

Four tells that a 'strategy' is actually empty: no diagnosis, goals-as-strategy, fluff, and incoherent actions.

Stocks-and-Flows Pipeline Diagnosis

Model any org process as stocks and flows, then find where reality disagrees with the model.

Task vs. Job Automation Test

Before predicting a role's automation, ask whether the automatable task IS the job or just one piece of it

The Absurd-Scenario Interview (Screening for Second-Order Thinking)

Pose an impossible hypothetical and grade the chain of consequences, not the answer.

The Action Agenda (Ambition-Filter Method)

Stop writing a 'strategy.' Filter your ambitions down to one important, addressable challenge and act.

Peak Performance5 steps

The Apex Survivor Model (Metabolism, Conversion, Adaptation)

Species that lasted 100M years share three traits — run your company on the same three.

The Boring Engineering Strategy

Write the strategy down, get the diagnosis honest, then constrain options so energy goes to what matters.

The Challenger Sale (Commercial Teaching)

Don't ask what keeps the customer up at night — show them what should be, then own the only cure

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Conviction Test for Whether to Quit

Compare your conviction now versus at the start to decide whether to persevere or pivot.

Innovation3 steps

The Crux: Insight Through Immersion

Find the single hardest solvable part of the problem, immerse in it, and let insight emerge.

Influence4 steps

The Delegation Effect (Recommend, Don't Diagnose)

Prune the options and name your pick so the buyer no longer carries the blame alone

The Delta 4 Framework

Score old vs new solution out of 10; if the efficiency gap isn't 4+, the product won't stick.

Productivity4 steps

The DORA Four Keys

Measure software delivery with two speed and two stability metrics that move in tandem.

The Double Lock (Sober and Drunk)

Debate every big decision twice — once rationally, once psychologically — and only act if both agree.

Innovation3 steps

The First Mile: Lazy, Vain, and Selfish

Design onboarding for the first 30 seconds, when every new user is lazy, vain, and selfish.

The Foundry: Facilitating a Group to One Action Agenda

Put the leader plus 7-8 people in a room, surface 25 problems, then focus on the one or two addressable ones.

The Four-Box Framework

Write your hypothesis in words before you touch data, so you can debug the idea and the measurement separately.

Leadership7 steps

The Growth Org Triad: People & Process, Strategy, Data

A growth org only works when all three of people/process, strategy and data are healthy at once.

The Honest-Applicable-Reversible Values Test

Three tests that separate values which drive decisions from values that just describe your self-image.

Communication5 steps

The Impacts & Learnings Review

The one meeting a growth team can't skip: discuss learnings and implications, never status.

The JOLT Method

Four moves that convert an indecisive buyer into a signed deal without adding pressure

Strategy3 steps

The Kernel of Good Strategy

Every real strategy has three parts: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.

Strategy6 steps

The Loop-Based Growth Strategy Model

Document how you actually grow as connected loops, then let the biggest constraint pick your quarter.

The Low-Trust Market Playbook

In low-trust markets, trust concentrates — so focus becomes a curse and the super app wins.

The Measurement Journey

Start measuring from words and people, then scale into system data — don't wait for perfect.

The Narrow-and-Deep Community Wedge

Win one persona, one context, one use case in a community you can meaningfully influence — then widen.

The Nirvana Vision / Relentless Mission Framework

Vision = the customer's Nirvana state, with your company deleted from it. Mission = how you'll get them there.

Innovation3 steps

The Object Model: Three Questions Every Screen Must Answer

On every screen, a user should know how they got here, what to do now, and what to do next.

The Ops Cadence Spreadsheet

A rocks-and-pebbles spreadsheet that assigns every account task a defined weekly/biweekly/monthly rhythm

The Parallel Sweet Spot: Psychological, Technological, Economic

Solve all three constraints at once — running them in series is how great products die.

The Shared-Fate EM/PM Pair

Give the eng manager and PM the same performance rating, and make them understand before they argue.

The Signs of Life Test

Spend a tiny budget on a new platform to detect a positive signal before committing to a full campaign

The Single Affordance Rule

One product, one job. Added functionality can subtract value by destroying clarity of purpose.

Self-Mastery3 steps

The Skip — Plan the Move After Next

Optimize career decisions for the job two moves out, not the next job.

Strategy6 steps

The Team-Based Activation Ladder (Setup → Aha → Habit)

Find the habit moment that predicts retention, then work backwards to the aha and setup moments.

Leadership3 steps

The Three-Hire Performance Team Sequence

Build a paid team in order: data-driven generalist, then creative, then a dedicated data scientist

Marketing3 steps

The True Competition Metric

Use auction-insights math to tell a genuine competitive threat from a harmless close-variant accident

The User Imagery Adoption Test

Adoption stalls on who owns the product, not what it does — audit your user imagery before you scale.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Value Deny: Finding Opportunity in What You Can't Buy

List what you should be able to buy but can't, or how a familiar product ought to work but doesn't.

The Values-Obedience 2x2 (Krishna, Rama, and Founder Dharma)

Plot leaders on values x obedience to see who creates, who sustains, and who must never be hired.

Self-Mastery5 steps

The Weighted Decision Spreadsheet

List your options, weight your criteria to 100%, score and multiply — then let the reaction tell you the answer.

Mindset5 steps

The Why School (Training Second-Order Thinking)

One 'why' question per meal, answered the next day — how second-order thinking gets built.

Finance4 steps

Value-Anchored Outcome Pricing

Price the outcome, not the seat; set the number from customer value and let cost be your problem.

Values as a Sharp Knife

Rewrite company values as deliberate filters, then hardcode a scoring formula that removes people who don't fit.

Value-Up-The-Stack Test

To find where the money accrues in a platform shift, test the infrastructure layer for network effects, differentiation, and pricing power

Wartime Company Reset

When a platform shift threatens your core business, declare wartime and go all-in rather than hedge.