Maxims

Goals

• Clarity drives velocity
• Clear goals make fast organizations
• If you can't recall the goal, you don't have one

Execution

• Action produces information
• No strategy is better than its execution
• Great companies are built by great execution

Prioritization

• Priority should ideally only be used as a singular word
• The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none
• Most companies don’t die from starvation; they die from indigestion

Management

• You can't manage what you can't measure
• What a company measures becomes what it can see
• Every organization eventually optimizes for internal legibility rather than external reality
• Alignment is expensive; autonomy is risky; good leaders know where to pay which cost
• Culture is what you tolerate
• The scarcest resource in companies is attention, not capital
• Markets reward coherence more than intelligence

Thinking

• Uncertainty is the friend of the status quo
• Think probabilistically about the world
• Don’t take refuge in complexity
• Don’t be limited by the options you have in front of you
• Information is only valuable if it can change your decision
• Good decisions sometimes have poor outcomes
• Some decisions have a high probability of a bad outcome
• Errors of commission should be weighted the same as errors of omission
• When you are having trouble getting your thinking straight, go to a simple case and got to an extreme case
• Heterogeneity in the population explains many phenomena