I’ve been collecting articles and essays on business topics for many years. I’ve decided to list some of the best here. Enjoy.
Strategy
Porter’s classic essay on strategy. From the summary,
Porter argues that operational effectiveness, although necessary to superior performance, is not sufficient, because its techniques are easy to imitate. In contrast, the essence of strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in systems of activities that are much more difficult to match.
That said, I do wonder… for a long time I took this message to heart, and looked at various companies and said ‘they won’t have a strategy’, yet such companies have done phenomenally well (what’s OpenAI’s unique position, that’s distinct from Antrhopic’s?). And yes, true, OpenAI may not be viable in the long term exactly because of this; but can anyone argue that OpenAI shouldn’t have been founded or funded because it lacked a distinctive strategy? Or look at all those GPT wrappers that are popping up — sometimes it pays to do something well first, even if it’s easy to replicate. You can always find a sustainable competitive advantage later.
(Also, c.f. the article on competent management further down.)
Bringing science to the art of strategy. A lot of discourse on strategy and management is too academic. In contrast, this essay outlines an elegant approach for devising strategy that’s easy to understand and implement:
The authors outline a strategy-making process that combines rigor and creativity. A team begins by formulating options, or possibilities, and asks what must be true for each to succeed. Once it has listed all the conditions, it assesses their likelihood and thereby identifies the barriers to each choice. The team then tests the key barrier conditions to see which hold true.
What is disruptive innovation? It’s not cool new technology! ‘Disruption’ is one of the most abused terms in business.
Culture
Netflix’s culture slides. One of the most important lessons:
The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.
Few companies actually practice this: too many focus on values they think sound good, but do not base any decisions on their proclaimed values: they don’t hire by screening for them, they don’t reward those who exhibit them, nor do they penalise those who do not embrace them. I was once part of an org that decided to define its own values (on top of the wider company values); one of them was ‘fun’. I recall challenging my team lead: ‘does this mean that people who are not ‘fun’ will not be promoted? I mean, the director in charge of this org is definitely not fun…’. Crickets1.
P&G CEO John Pepper’s Characteristics of Successful Managers. One of the most important ones in my view, and sadly often overlooked, is
They have uncompromising intellectual integrity. They speak their mind on an issue, whether their view is popular or unpopular. They try to follow a set of facts to the logical indicated action, even though that action may be punishing, controversial and unexpected.
On the flipside, a tale of intellectual laziness.
A personal bugbear: MBTI. Magic The Gathering’s colour system is a much better way to assess people!
SSP2 :
Corporate Power Plays. How to beat enemies and dominate people.
Managerial effectiveness & measurement
How Amazon Measures Itself: based on Working Backwards, which is itself one of the best business books I’ve read (see below).
How Duolingo reignited user growth. I’m a big geek for cool frameworks and models, and this is a great example:
Why do we undervalue competent management? TL;DR there are long-lasting differences in the adoption of solid management practices, which lead to large differences in performance. There are many reasons preventing the adoption of good management, including politics.
Business models
The Other Moviepass Economy: brilliant overview of how subscriptions pricing works. And my own post on subscriptions theory.
From 1904-1921, Gillette could have played razors-and-blades - low-price or free handles and expensive blades - but it did not do so. Gillette set a high price for its handle - high as measured by the price of competing razors and the prices of other contemporaneous goods - and fought to maintain those high prices during the life of the patents. For whatever it is worth, the firm understood to have invented razors-and-blades as a business strategy did not play that strategy at the point that it was best situated to do so.
Pricing
Purple pricing: a very cool idea for pricing stuff, which I’ve never seen implemented in real life!
SSP:
How pricing works. It’s staggering how most people misunderstand pricing! Look at the discourse on housing — so many NIMBYs argue ‘builders will never lower prices, why would they?’. But obviously businesses care about absolute profit, not high prices! Everyone would rather sell two widgets for £51 profit each than one widget for £100 .
Everything else
Fast: Patrick Collison’s list of projects that were completed incredibly quickly.
Visual design rules: practical advice, very useful if you want to build your own app or website.
Small tweaks to boost conversion.
Should you listen to customers? I’ve written about this before: too many pundits these days emphasise ‘data’ and ‘research’ over judgement.
Bits about money and Money Stuff: hard to pick one article, but follow these newsletters for in-depth finance commentary.
Vernacular economics: how building codes and taxes shape regional architecture
Books
Disclaimer: affiliate links
Management practices & culture
Working Backwards, as mentioned above
How brands grow — the best book on marketing I’ve ever read
The power of experiments — good primer, but careful not to dedicate too much time over-optimising things that are ultimately not very important
History & corporate tales
Liar’s poker, duh.
A piece of the action — very good overview of the advent of the modern retail finance system
Probability
Thinking in bets — good book, though the most important message can be summarised in one sentence: do not evaluate decisions based on the outcome
Fooled by Randomness — yes Taleb is insufferable, and yes he’s written the same book like ten times, but it’s still a great read
Economics
The undercover economist — it’s a classic for a reason
Capitalism and Freedom — very few people match Friedman for clarity of thought
Literature
I’m just going to shoehorn this in here: there’s a misconception perpetuated by right-wing Twitter that there is a dearth of pro-business novels. Business doesn’t feature prominently in literature, it’s true, but off the top of my head there are several books where merchants, bankers, or business managers are, if not the protagonists, at least secondary characters seen in a positive light:
Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead: the most commonly cited pro-business books, these are wildly misunderstood by its critics. Some have described them as ‘rich people porn’, but this overlooks the fact that the antagonists in these novels are also rich people. Ayn Rand doesn’t pit the rich against the poor: she pits the creators against the idle. You can dislike these books for all sorts of reasons (they are too long, repetitive, and lack any semblance of subtlety), but I’d be concerned if you can’t empathise with the frustration of people eager to build new things when they’re thwarted by bureaucracy or illogical regulation.
Middlemarch: Caleb Garth, who’s a farm manager and advocate of progress, is easily one of the most sympathetic characters in the novel.
East of Eden: Samuel Hamilton is praised for his inventiveness and industriousness.
Noble House: the protagonist is the head of a Hong Kong conglomerate modelled after Jardines.
Kane and Abel and many other novels by Jeffrey Archer feature bankers and industrialists as the (impossibly good) protagonists. (Ditto for novels by Ludlum.)
Foundation: Foundation is saved by traders and merchant princes
And what’s become one of my son’s favourites, the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck: the extolment of making one’s fortune through honest, hard work and grit.
To be clear, it’s totally valid to want a fun workplace culture. But listing ‘fun’ as a value without doing anything to ensure it is meaningless.
Shameless Self-Promotion