Concepts

Domain: Leadership (20) · Product (24) · Systems (9)

Leadership

3 Speeds of Communication — Communication happens at three different speeds. Choosing the right speed matters.
Asynchronous Communication — Communication where participants don't need to be present at the same time.
Authoritarian Antiauthoritarians — The paradox of people who reject authority but become authoritarian themselves.
Coaching as a Leadership Style — Leading by developing people rather than directing them.
Conways Law — "Any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation's communication structure." - Melvin Conway, 1967
Focusing Illusion — Nothing is as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.
Framing — How you present information shapes how people respond to it.
Fundamental Attribution Bias — You judge others by their character and yourself by your circumstances.
Group Mind — A team is a tool until it isn't. At some point it becomes a mind of its own — and once it starts thinking back, you can't unthink it.
Holacracy — A system of self-organisation where authority is distributed through roles, not job titles.
Holistic Leadership — Leading the whole system, not just the parts you're directly responsible for.
Just For Fun — Linus Torvalds' three stages of motivation: survival, social order, entertainment. The goal is to reach the third.
Law of Triviality — People spend disproportionate time on trivial issues while neglecting important ones.
Mirror Neuron System — People mirror the behaviour they see, especially from leaders.
Push and Pull Methods of Aligning Team — Two ways to get a team moving in the same direction.
Servant Leadership — The leader's job is to serve the team, not the other way around.
Tetris Effect — What you practise seeing, you start seeing everywhere.
The Flow State — Peak performance happens when challenge meets skill with zero distraction.
Writing Driven Communications — Using written documents as the primary tool for thinking, alignment, and decisions.
Zero-Based Budgeting — Every budget cycle starts from zero. Nothing is carried forward automatically.

Product

Affordances — An object's design should signal how it is used.
Brand Association — The ideas a customer links to your name before they've even used the product.
Collectors Fallacy — Saving something is not the same as learning it.
Commodity Products — Products where buyers can't tell one supplier from another, so price wins.
Content-Driven Products — Products whose value comes from the content inside them, not the container.
Crowd Wisdom — Aggregated judgement from many independent people often beats any single expert.
Data Structure-Driven Products — Products whose power comes from the shape of the data they store.
Economy of Scale — Unit costs fall as volume rises — bigger players win on price.
Hammock Driven Development — Hard problems need time lying in a hammock, not more time at the keyboard.
Horseless Carriage — When a new technology arrives, we first use it to copy the old thing.
Jobs to Be Done — People don't buy products; they hire them to do a job.
Methodology-Driven Products — Products whose value is the way of working they impose.
Mimetic Theory — People don't want things independently. They want what others want.
Minimum Viable Audience — Don't try to reach everyone. Find the smallest audience that could sustain you.
Minimum Viable Product — The smallest thing you can build to learn whether the idea is worth pursuing.
Network Effects — A product that gets more valuable as more people use it.
Opportunity Cost — Every yes is a no to something else.
Product-Founder Fit — The best products come from founders whose life and interests match the problem.
Product-Market Fit — The moment your product is what a real market actually wants.
Products Beyond Real World Objects — Digital products don't have to imitate physical things.
Self-Service Model — The customer gets value without talking to you.
Shape Up — Basecamp's product development method: six-week cycles, shaped work, no backlog.
Solutionism — Treating every situation as a problem that technology can solve.
The Toyota Way — A production philosophy built on continuous improvement and respect for people.

Systems

Boundaries — Every system is defined by where you draw its edge. Move the edge, and the system changes.
Cognitive Grammar — The structure of a language shapes the thoughts its speakers can easily think.
Ergodicity — The average across many people is not the average across one person's life.
Infinite Hotel Paradox — Hilbert's hotel: a full infinite hotel can still take more guests.
Paradigm Blindness — The paradigm you think with is the one thing it won't let you see.
Power of a Loop — A loop repeats. Repetition is how small things become big.
Predictable Surprises — Disasters we should have seen coming — and didn't act on.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy — A prediction that causes itself to come true.
Universality — Very different systems can obey the same underlying laws.

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