People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
3,456 entries
Draws every possible region whether or not anything falls in it. Two circles make four regions, three circles make eight, and each one gets a place on the page before you know what is in it. That is the point. An empty region shows up as an absence you can see, rather than as something that was never drawn.
The verification protocol is journalism's systematic approach to confirming information before publishing
Ask who actually checks whether the work is correct before it counts as done. Not who approves access or who produces the output, but who catches the errors, and whether anyone re-checks that person.
A product-planning maxim: make the current release useful for its stated purpose without depending on future improvements that may not arrive
Owning multiple stages of the production or distribution chain rather than outsourcing them
A leadership-development distinction between adding knowledge or skills and proposed changes in the organization of meaning-making
Name who can stop the plan outright and over exactly what. A veto is a binding no that overrides a majority, so write down its narrow scope and legitimate grounds instead of leaving it as unlimited objection power.
Taleb's risk-specific application of subtraction: in domains of uncertainty, avoiding harm is more reliable than pursuing benefit
A comparison between improving a system by adding something and improving it by removing something
Checks reachability three ways: some slice of the outcome must move when you act, the target must be shaped right for the uncertainty (a band or floor or direction, not false precision), and likely futures must leave slack or a way back.
A single-item auction where the highest bidder wins and pays the highest competing bid, with truthful bidding weakly dominant under standard private-value assumptions.
When legitimate suffering calcifies into a permanent identity that, paradoxically, prevents healing and growth
External representations like tables, maps, and boards let you see structure your head can't hold.
Vim is Dennett's invented term for a currency's supposedly intrinsic economic value apart from all exchange relations
Virtual machines are computational organizations implemented by underlying systems
Rather than asking 'What should I do?' (as utilitarianism and deontology do), virtue ethics asks 'What kind of person should I be?' Aristotle argued that moral excellence comes from developing virtues—stable character tr…
This professional services model describes the three-stage pipeline converting expertise to income
List everyone the goal touches, including the quiet, future, and low-power people not in the room.
Borrows a familiar object as the container for your structure, so its shape does the explaining and carries claims of its own.
Information that is vivid (emotionally striking, sensory-rich, personally experienced) or recent (happened recently) receives disproportionate weight in our judgments compared to information that is pallid (abstract, sta…
Albert Hirschman identifies two fundamental responses to organizational decline: Exit (leaving—switching products, quitting, emigrating) and Voice (speaking up—complaining, organizing, protesting)
Brené Brown's vulnerability research, applied to sexuality, reveals that genuine vulnerability—emotional exposure, risk of rejection, authentic self-disclosure—is paradoxically both the scariest and most erotically power…