Over the next few months, Commoncog will begin publishing cases of people and businesses who’ve had to deal with disruption. Some folks handled disruption well, others badly. What may we learn from them?

I’m pleased to announce that we’re hosting a Tactical Decision Game with John Schmitt for Commoncog members. (A TDG is an accelerated expertise training approach developed for the US Marines.) Why this is notable: Schmitt invented TDG when he was a Colonel in the corps!

A week or so ago I said that one trick to accelerate expertise is to help novices see like experts. This seems almost like it's cheating, and in a way it is. Now here's one method to do it. (Note that there are others!)

Commoncog's most recent case on Patagonia seems to have struck a chord. I think mostly because folks want an alternative vision of company building. It's a pretty inspiring case. Dude builds billion dollar company and spends months each year climbing mountains? Yes please!

A couple of years ago, I wrote a short (but incomplete) summary of David Maister's Managing The Professional Services Firm. The book is a masterclass in how to approach, run, evaluate, and grow a services business.

Richemont's Johann Rupert on the luxury business: (Yes, this is a hint that Commoncog will cover a bunch of luxury businesses in the future).

I absolutely love the title of this paper, and I believe it gestures at something pretty profound. (Alas, this is mostly about teaching, not so much about pursuing wisdom — that's a different body of work!). A short thread.

So one thing I never understood was how Swatch, a plasticky, cheap, quartz watch brand, managed to save the entire Swiss watch industry. It just never made sense to me. Well, a couple of weeks ago I commissioned a new case about how Swatch saved the Swiss watch industry.

So it seems that Commoncog has a live events arm, purely by accident! All of this started when I was on paternity leave late last year. Jerry Neumann reached out based on some comments I'd made on an essay of his called AI Will Not Make You Rich.

A good reminder for the weekend.

I've had 4 conversations in the past year where someone said: "I have young kids / I have an existing life I'm happy with. I don't know if starting a company is compatible with that." And each time I say: "You don't have to start a startup!" Which is a little bizarre.

Two weeks ago I finished what I think will be Commoncog's most significant contribution to the AI discourse, at least for this year. (God forbid!) This was the Sensemaking Series — which is a short, 3-essay series about how to make sense of AI. Some of its ideas are surprising.

Whenever I want a prototypical example of “here's what an effective B2B startup salesperson looks like”, I think of Chris Degnan. Degnan was the first sales hire when Snowflake was a 16-person stealth startup. 7 years later, he was CRO of an $81B company. Pretty good prototype!

Two weeks ago I wrote an essay titled "How to Make Sense of AI." It struck a chord. Folks shared it with their friends. One friend printed it out to give copies away. That essay laid out a method of making sense of AI developments without losing your head. But it was not enough.

I don’t say this enough, but I find @DellAnnaLuca’s writing incredibly clear, pragmatic, and useful. I recommend everyone who is interested in operational excellence to buy his books.

Surprise, surprise: Steve Jobs understood process control. I didn't realise that he learnt quality from Joseph Juran, a Deming contemporary. This is, incidentally, where “blameless post-mortems” and “fix the system, don’t blame the person” comes from.

There’s a weird divide in the world of demand frameworks that most people don’t notice. Some frameworks help you understand demand AFTER you have customers. Other frameworks claim to help you FIND demand when you have zero customers. These are very different problems.

I think more people should build private communities (with their friends, colleagues) to share detailed AI field reports of use. Instead of sharing takes, or predictions, or getting all hyped up (or doomer) about AI. Here's what I mean.

People saying ‘moats don’t matter in AI’ are partially right. But they’re right for the wrong reasons. It’s not true that AI has changed the fundamental dynamics of competitive advantage. It’s that we’re in a gold rush — and gold rushes have very specific properties.

Legendary investor Howard Marks once had a 1984 BusinessWeek article written about him where he said “Real men don’t buy converts, so chicken like me can buy cheap.” Makes one think.

It took me 5 years to figure out how to apply Cognitive Transformation Theory — a theory of accelerated expertise. This is what made it finally click. In January this year, we ran Speedrunning the Idea Maze — a live course about searching for product market fit (PMF).

Most corporate leadership training is worthless. You know this. I know this. Offsite workshops, case study seminars, executive education programs — they produce few actual leaders. And so it’s very surprising when you encounter an exception.

If you reacted in fear as a result of a viral essay recently, your attention has probably been compromised. You don’t have to be scared of AI. You don’t have to read hype takes, or doomer takes. You just need to sensemake aggressively: commoncog.com/how-to-make-...

How to Make Sense of AI

Keeping up with a fast changing, revolutionary technology can seem scary. Here are some ruthless guidelines to make sense of it effectively.

commoncog.com

Too many correlational studies, not enough causal arguments.

There is a super power in ignoring things. You should probably ignore that AI doomer take. Unless you consumed every Internet doomer take in the late 90s. In which case, you've learnt nothing, go right ahead.

This was lovely. And as a fellow writer who still writes the old fashioned way, it hits home.

Dave Nadig@nadig.com · 6mo ago

New from me: Quark's Replicator ... on the death of the reader's contract, the rise of AI;DR and how ubiquitous superpowers can exist alongside human craft. www.nadig.com/p/quarks-rep...

Also, this Brian Eno quote has been really stuck in my head for weeks: "The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement. ... the question then is, "Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?""

Was a pleasant surprise when I heard Michael Helbling call out Commoncog as a really great place to build business acumen: "If you're in a role where you're trying to ramp up on your business acumen, Commoncog might be a great resource to leverage."

I was asked recently how I find and keep business mentors. I realise that my essay on this topic is now four (!!!) years old. At this point I know more than a handful of senior folks who have shared this repeatedly with junior people. And it's a REALLY simple protocol.

A week ago I subjected 9000+ subscribers to the most Singlish that I've ever put into a Commoncog essay. 🤪 This piece talks about an under-examined trait: 'being commercial'. You know how some folks are very good at making money? Yeah, that.