Thinking in Systems

Alpha-Beta People and Process Design

Borrow finance's alpha/beta to decide where you want upside and where you want boring reliability.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Binding-Receptor Theory of Product-Market Fit

Your market's demand is a fixed fact like a drug receptor — you find it, you can't market it into existence.

Communication5 steps

Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)

Test framings live across unconnected audiences; the ones that land in distant subgraphs will travel.

Deliberate Understaffing

You can't size a project right, so err toward too few people on purpose.

Communication3 steps

Feedback and Escalations Are a Gift

Withholding feedback is the most selfish thing you can do — and escalations are a gift you chase to true root cause.

Strategy5 steps

Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)

Plant many cheap compounding seeds instead of manufacturing outcomes with brute effort.

Communication4 steps

Job Seeker Signal Playbook

Win a recruiter's search by broadcasting two signals: proven skills and clear intent

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Know When to Quit (Anti-VC-Persistence)

Winners hit big fast; if year 4-5 isn't screaming growth after a pivot or two, reset the clock.

Mirror the Founder's Intensity (Fight Entropy)

Every management layer leaks intensity; your job is to mirror the CEO's, not buffer it.

Innovation4 steps

New-Idea Validation Bar

Prove real demand with 'duct tape', then prioritize ideas by pain-point sharpness and reach

Productivity3 steps

Orange and Red Priorities Planning

Leaders name the non-negotiable 'big rocks' up front, then teams plan around them

Leadership5 steps

Organizational Kayfabe

Diagnose the shared fiction everyone knows is false — then route around it without detonating it.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Play Yourself Like a Fiddle (Activation Energy + Always-Rules)

Beat activation energy with tight time boxes and an escalating task ladder; hold habits with always-rules.

RAPID + Five-Day Escalation

Name one decision-maker and put a clock on every unresolved decision

Innovation3 steps

Second- and Third-Order Effect Mapping

In connected systems, trace a change's ripple effects before you ship it

Strategy3 steps

Skills-First Hiring

Rebalance a stuck labor market by matching people on transferable skills, not job titles

Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)

Coordination cost grows with the square of headcount — drive the vehicle you actually have.

SPOTAK: Decoding Hiring Intuition

Trust your gut on candidates, then use six traits to translate that gut into words others can act on.

Innovation6 steps

Strategy Salons (Nerd Clubs)

Seed a small, opt-in, yes-and idea group that spins off strategy insights as a side effect.

Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)

Name someone's superpower early, then frame every nudge as 'be more' rather than 'be different'.

The 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation

Spend 70% earning the right to exist so the other 30% can plant seeds nobody will kill.

Strategy5 steps

The Adjacent Possible + Low-Resolution North Star

Take only safe next steps — but always the one with the steepest gradient toward a 3-5 year North Star.

Productivity5 steps

The Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop

Capture everything, filter weekly by resonance, distil, publish — a compounding personal insight engine.

Communication3 steps

The De-Buzzword Test

Ask people to explain their idea without using the buzzword — if they can't, they haven't thought it through.

The Impossible Shared Case Study

Give every candidate the same unsolvable problem and grade how far they drill and how they react.

Innovation4 steps

The Pickle: Iterated Product Quality List

A lightweight, memorably-named ship checklist you grow one line at a time from every miss.

The PM Skills Triangle

Great PMs live on the edges of the creator / data-science / GM triangle, not the center