Principles

Domain: Leadership (22) · Product (15) · Systems (18)

Leadership

Alignment Is Strategy Structure Systems Skills — For an organisation to be aligned, four things must work together.
Be Honest and Confident at the Same Time — Honesty without confidence sounds like doubt. Confidence without honesty sounds like arrogance.
Big Projects Grow Great Professionals — People grow when they're stretched, not when they're comfortable.
Brainstorming Doesnt Work — Traditional group brainstorming produces fewer and worse ideas than individuals working alone.
Clarity of Purpose — If people don't know why they're doing something, they'll do the wrong thing.
Clear Communication Is Hard Work — Clarity doesn't come naturally. It requires effort.
Clear Writing Means Clear Thinking — If you can't write it clearly, you haven't thought it through.
Company Culture Is Organic — Culture isn't what you write on the wall. It's what people actually do.
Depth When Consuming Information Matters — Skimming everything teaches you nothing. Depth is where understanding lives.
Excessive Positivity Leads to Self-Exploitation — Relentless optimism can become a tool for ignoring your own limits.
Focus Is Saying No — Focus is not deciding what to work on — it's deciding what to abandon.
Irrational Becomes Rational with Context — Behaviour that looks irrational usually makes perfect sense once you understand the constraints.
Listening Is a Skill — Most people listen to respond. Leaders must listen to understand.
Masterplans Are Inflexible — Grand plans look great on paper but fail in reality.
Mastery Over Success — You either strive for success or mastery.
Multitasking Is a Regression — Doing two things at once means doing neither well.
Rest Is a Skill — If you don't know how to rest, you don't know how to sustain performance.
Seeking Explanations — Don't stop at knowing what happened. Ask why until you understand the mechanism.
Take What You Need Policy — Trust people to take what they need and give what they can.
Targets Corrupt Their Metrics — The moment a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.
The Less You Know The Surer You Feel — Confidence is loudest where competence is thinnest.
You Cannot Outsource Understanding — You can hand off the work of thinking. You cannot hand off the work of understanding.

Product

10x Rule — To unseat the incumbent, be ten times better — not marginally better.
Build Measure Learn Repeat — The core loop of lean product development.
Bundling and Unbundling of Products — Every product is either being bundled together or torn apart.
Code Is Data — Treat your code, configs, and content as data that can be inspected and transformed.
Customer Experience Success Effort Emotion — A good experience is judged on three things: did it work, how hard was it, and how did it feel?
Doing Everything In-House — Build what's core. Buy the rest. Owning everything isn't a virtue.
Dont Make Me Think — Steve Krug's law of usability: the product should be obvious.
Less but Better — Dieter Rams' design principle: fewer things, done exceptionally.
Less Is More — Constraint breeds clarity. Abundance breeds clutter.
Make It Work Make It Fast Make It Pretty — Three phases, in order: correctness, performance, polish.
Products Lower Cost or Increase Revenue — Every product ultimately sells one of two things to its buyer: save money or make money.
Responding to Change Over Following a Plan — Plans are useful until reality arrives. Then adaptation beats sticking to the plan.
Single Responsibility Principle — One thing, done well. From Unix — do one thing and do it right.
Stop Starting Start Finishing — Limit work in progress. Finish what you start before starting more.
Ways to Dominate Market — Peter Thiel's Zero to One: monopoly comes from one of four moats.

Systems

Bottom-Up Systems — The most resilient systems aren't designed from above. They grow from below.
Complexity at the Edge of Chaos — Interesting behaviour lives between order and chaos.
Different Systems Require Different Modes of Operations — What works in one system breaks another. Match the mode to the system.
Everything We Think Is a Model — You don't see reality. You see a compressed, filtered model of it.
Hierarchy Is Where the Top Serves the Bottom — Good hierarchies exist to serve the parts, not command them.
Information Exchange in Systems — A system's behaviour depends on how information flows through it.
Less Rules More Probability They Work — Every rule has a compliance cost. Fewer rules, higher compliance.
More Is Different — At sufficient scale, new properties emerge that don't exist in the parts.
Nature of Infinity Is Not Intuitive — Infinity breaks the rules you learned from finite things.
No System Can Grow Forever — Every growth curve ends. The question is when and how.
Reductionism Works Only for Non-Complex Systems — Take it apart to understand it — only when the parts don't interact strongly.
Resilience of a System Matters — A system's ability to absorb shocks matters more than its peak performance.
Self-Organisation in Systems — Order can arise without a designer if the right conditions are in place.
Simple Rules Create Complex Behaviour — A handful of rules, applied repeatedly, can generate endlessly rich behaviour.
System Dynamics What-If Scenarios — Simulating a system forward reveals behaviours that static analysis misses.
The Most Limiting Input Is the Most Important — The system is only as strong as its bottleneck.
The World Is a Continuum — There are no separate systems. Every boundary we draw is a choice.
What You Notice You See Everywhere — Once a pattern enters your awareness, it appears to be everywhere.

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