Reading Guide
Everything here connects to four disciplines: strategic thinking, number sense, action orientation, and predictive judgment.
These aren’t rigid categories — some pieces span multiple disciplines. But the pattern recurs: form a belief, measure the result, execute with discipline, update when wrong.
Synthesis Essays
Four essays that show how the disciplines connect:
Decision Architecture — Strategy as hypothesis, measurement as decision design, speed through codified logic. The full integration from belief to execution.
Capacity and Flow — Why WIP discipline is the master lever. Flow as system property, not individual heroics.
Vertical Market Playbook — Strategic framework for vertical software. From positioning through go-to-market to choice testing.
Harvest to Growth — Rebuilding a growth engine in a neglected software business. The Numbers discipline for turnaround.
Strategy
Creating enduring value and advantage.
Real Choices — Real strategic choices have rational opposites. If the opposite sounds absurd, you haven’t chosen anything.
Context Beats Category — In vertical markets, positioning on consideration vs retention attributes wins.
Depth Before Breadth — ICP focus first. Sequence expansion around the halo.
Third Lever — Pricing as strategic choice beyond cost and volume.
The First Hundred Days — Integration value gets created or destroyed early. What to protect, what to change.
Synergies That Deliver — The gap between forecast synergies and realised synergies. Specific, measured, owned.
Numbers
Measuring, interpreting, and acting on information.
Harvest to Growth (synthesis) — Rebuilding a growth engine in a neglected software business. The integrated Numbers discipline for turnaround.
From Data to Information — Data doesn’t become information until it passes through a decision process.
The Unit Economics Test — How to diagnose whether growth creates value or consumes capital.
Profitable and Broke — Why profitable companies run out of cash. Working capital constrains growth.
Payback Over Ratios — CAC payback period matters more than LTV:CAC for understanding growth capacity.
The Retention Threshold — Why 95% retention is fundamentally different from 90%.
Action
Turning decisions into results.
Hidden Bottleneck — Decision speed, not execution speed, is the constraint. Codify the logic.
Expensive Yes — Every yes adds to an invisible queue. Little’s Law makes this visible.
Stop Starting, Start Finishing — Leaders optimise for starting. The bottleneck is finishing.
Variety Kills Flow — Hidden cost of variety. Context switching, different monitoring points.
Two Halves Of Trust — Trust requires both honesty and structure. They feed each other.
When Someone Leaves — Knowledge vs knowhow. Preserve knowhow as capital.
The Identity Constraint — Team performance limited by self-image. Five touchpoints shape identity.
What Looks Like Instinct — Pattern recognition is rehearsed intuition. Build the library deliberately.
When Speed Stops Working — The skills that made you effective as a manager start working against you as a leader.
Knowledge To Caring — Logic gets agreement. Caring gets action.
Prediction
Learning and updating beliefs.
Applied Scientific Thinking — Strategy as hypothesis, numbers as discipline, action as test, prediction as learning. The posture that connects everything.
Fresh Eyes — The advantage of walking in isn’t seeing what others miss. It’s not being clouded by your own problem of the moment.
When Numbers Twitch — Most decisions are reactions to noise. Weight the evidence before you move.
Just Dribble — Plans create understanding, not prediction. Adapt when reality diverges.
Reading Paths
New to the site: Start with Applied Scientific Thinking — it explains the lens. Then the three synthesis essays.
Strategic operators: Strategy and Numbers first, then Action for execution mechanics.
Execution focus: Start with Action, especially Hidden Bottleneck and Capacity and Flow.
Learning to learn: The Prediction section, plus Decision Architecture for how it integrates.