The Curious Engineer

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Commoncog

commoncog.com

Commoncog publishes ideas & business cases to help you get good at business faster. Read by 9k+ investors & execs each week.

Essays / personalGeneral

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
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374 from 23 Jun 2020 to 19 Oct 2026
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weekly (39 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 32

  1. Roger Williams on Organisational Transformation and the use of The Thinking Tools
  2. You May Now Listen to Commoncog Cases
  3. Dealing with Recessions
  4. How to Handle Disruptive Change
  5. Why Tactical Decision Games Work
  6. Members Area
  7. 1st Sept 2026: An Increase in Membership Prices
  8. Terms & Conditions
  9. What Does It Look Like When You Handle Disruption Well?
  10. Tactical Decision Game with John Schmitt
  11. How Moats are Built
  12. Using the Quartz Crisis to Make Sense of Technological Disruption
  13. A Retrospective on Goldratt’s Thinking Tools
  14. Did Quartz Really Kill the Swiss Watch Industry in the 70s?
  15. Cate Hall Q&A on Agency
  16. Sensemaking as the Heart of Expertise
  17. Reflections on the Software Dark Factory Q&A
  18. Software Dark Factory Q&A
  19. There are Many Configurations of Business That Work
  20. Live Goldratt Thinking Tools Workshop with Roger Williams
  21. How to Improve at Sensemaking AI?
  22. How Experts Sensemake
  23. Actually Effective Corporate Leadership Training
  24. How to Make Sense of AI
  25. How to Find Demand: All the Ideas from The Heart of Innovation, Simply Stated
  26. Our First Accelerated Expertise Course
  27. A Few Notes on Moats
  28. David Bessis Q&A on Mathematics & Intuition
  29. “This One Can Make Money Or Not?”
  30. Tycoon Skill: Holding on to Political Influence
  31. What We Learnt From Speedrunning the Idea Maze
  32. Announcing Cohort Two of Speedrunning the Idea Maze

2025 41

  1. ‘The Ultimate Business-Cycle Bottom Fisher’
  2. Stop Worrying About Survivorship Bias With This One Weird Trick
  3. The Creation of a Skilled Tycoon
  4. The Shape of The Game We Play
  5. What is a Tech Bubble Anyway?
  6. Jerry Neumann Q&A on AI Will Not Make You Rich
  7. The Only Thing That Matters
  8. What Members Say
  9. Letter to a Young Person Worrying About AI
  10. Completing Commoncog’s Repositioning (and Going On Paternity Leave)
  11. How to Use AI Without Becoming Stupid
  12. The Joy of Small Markets
  13. Chaos and Coherence in Business
  14. How to Run Smart Experiments When You Just Don’t Know
  15. A Vaccine for Anthropomorphism of AI
  16. The Tatas: When Virtue Works
  17. Announcing Speedrunning the Idea Maze
  18. Putting the Jobs to be Done Interview to Practice
  19. Tycoon Succession
  20. The Art of the Asian Joint Venture
  21. You’re Always Selling to a Situation, Not an ICP
  22. The Origin of the Tatas
  23. Cases from The Heart of Innovation
  24. The Heart of Innovation: Why Most Startups Fail
  25. Business with Tariffs; Business as Usual
  26. Vanguard as a Demand-Side Mystery
  27. Calibration Case Method
  28. The Jobs to be Done Framework as a Method to Understand Demand
  29. The Sugar King of The East
  30. How to Become an Asian Tycoon
  31. How Reliance Won
  32. Speedrunning the Skill of Demand
  33. Activist Investing in Asian Conglomerates
  34. Let’s Talk Corruption
  35. Outcome Orientation as a Cure for Information Overload
  36. The Story of Samsung
  37. The Study of Asian Tycoons
  38. The Asian Conglomerate series
  39. The Gambling King
  40. Lia DiBello and Neil Sahota on Human-AI Symbiosis
  41. The 2024 Commoncog Recap

2024 29

  1. Power and Asian Business
  2. How to Use Power
  3. What is Power?
  4. Stan Slap on the Art of Building Effective Employee Cultures
  5. Under The Hood
  6. Business Reality Without Frameworks
  7. What Process Improvement in Education Looks Like
  8. Businesses as Ecosystem Organisms
  9. The Hospitality Solution in Your Business
  10. The Idea Maze is a Useless Idea
  11. Getting Burnt by Business Expansion
  12. Data is Just an Added Sense
  13. Danny Meyer’s Business Expertise
  14. Running a Fine Dining Restaurant in a Recession
  15. A Big Part of Being Data Driven is Will Not Skill
  16. The Amazon Weekly Business Review (WBR)
  17. Business Ecosystem Change Takes Time
  18. Learning About Moats the Hard Way
  19. Setting Up For The Second Half of 2024
  20. The Limits of Operational Excellence
  21. The Secret at the Heart of Continuous Improvement
  22. Introducing Xmrit
  23. Making Sense of Deming
  24. Members Preview: An Easier Way to Create XmR Charts
  25. Tacit Expertise Extraction, Software Engineering Edition
  26. One Definition of Wisdom
  27. Becoming Data Driven, From First Principles
  28. A Most Unlikely Master of Capital Allocation
  29. The 2023 Commoncog Recap

2023 39

  1. Data and the Capital Cycle: How Koch Became an Empire
  2. Marvel Studios’s Origin Story
  3. Commoncog's Next Phase
  4. Strong at Capital, Bad at Everything Else
  5. Colin Bryar on the practice of Amazon's Weekly Business Review
  6. High Roller: Lessons from America's Richest Banker
  7. Two Types of Data Analysis
  8. Capital Allocation as an Antidote to Business Luck
  9. Building a Valuable Business? It's How You Spend It That Matters
  10. Expertise Acceleration
  11. Beck’s Measurement Model, or Why It’s So Damn Hard to Measure Software Development
  12. What’s an Operational Definition Anyway?
  13. Charlie Munger’s Supply Demand Curve Puzzle
  14. The Capital Cycle
  15. Understand the Shape of the Game You're Playing
  16. Lee Walker and the Dell Growth Plateau
  17. Fundraising Without Investors
  18. An Increase in Membership Prices
  19. Renaming the Business Expertise Triad
  20. Eric Nehrlich on the Art of Executive Coaching and Forecasting
  21. The Skill of Capital
  22. Executing on Becoming Data Driven: The Technicals
  23. Dell's Capital Expertise
  24. Executing on Becoming Data Driven: The Politics
  25. Setting the Business Expertise Series Free
  26. Business Expertise
  27. When Action Beats Prediction
  28. What To Think When Looking at a Chart
  29. Lesley Sim on Skill Acceleration in Ultimate
  30. Process Behaviour Charts: More Than You Need To Know
  31. Mental Strength in Judo, Mental Strength in Life
  32. The Deming Paradox: Operationally Rigorous Companies Aren't Very Nice Places to Work
  33. Becoming Data Driven in Business
  34. Creating New Drills for Deliberate Practice
  35. There Is No Truth in Business, Only Knowledge
  36. Operational Excellence is the Pursuit of ‘Knowledge’
  37. An Expertise Acceleration Experiment in Judo
  38. How to Become Data Driven
  39. Goodhart's Law Isn't as Useful as You Might Think

2022 21

  1. The 2022 Commoncog Recap
  2. The Shape of a Technological Window
  3. Is This a Moat: Mailchimp and PayPal’s Algorithmic Advantage
  4. The Disaffected PhD Skunkworks: A Story About Process Improvement
  5. Process Improvement is Trickier Than You Think
  6. You Aren't Learning If You Don't Close the Loops
  7. Focus Doesn't Mean Doing One Thing at a Time
  8. Focus Is Saying No To Good Ideas
  9. Focus on the Cases
  10. Dancing Landscapes in Business
  11. Cultural Advantage is Counter Positioning
  12. Putting Amazon’s PR/FAQ to Practice
  13. Announcing the Commoncog Case Library Public Beta
  14. The Most Useful Question to Ask About Expertise
  15. How to Hunt for Concept Instantiations
  16. Don't Read History for Lessons
  17. Notes from an Alpha Test of a CFT Business Case Library
  18. Verifying Believability
  19. Inverting the Cash Strapped Hiring Process
  20. What Good, Cash-Strapped Hiring Looks Like
  21. What Danny Meyer Did

2020 1

  1. The Tacit Knowledge series

Undated 211

  1. Membership
  2. Start Here
  3. Case Library
  4. Guides
  5. Account Management
  6. Cognitive Flexibility Theory: The Rules
  7. The Best Incentives Are Hard To Copy
  8. Pay Attention to Deviations from Mainstream Incentives
  9. Lousy Incentives In The Restaurant Business
  10. Ability to See Expertise is a Milestone Worth Aiming For
  11. Operating On The Spectrum Of The Rule of Law
  12. Be Good To Your Mentors
  13. How To Hunt For Useful Self Improvement Research
  14. Ill-Structured Domains Aren't Necessarily Wicked
  15. The Principles are Useless On Their Own
  16. How Note Taking Can Help You Become an Expert
  17. The Best Way to Learn From Other People's Experiences
  18. The Dangers of Treating Life as a Game
  19. Take a Simple Idea and Take It Seriously
  20. Graham Duncan on Evaluating Expertise
  21. Believability in Practice
  22. Against Single Narratives in Crypto
  23. What I Learnt From Complexity
  24. A Narrative About Crypto
  25. Org Structure Isn’t Everything in Org Design
  26. The Expertise of Evaluating Expertise
  27. The Skill of Org Design
  28. A Map of Expertise Research for the Career-Minded
  29. Are You Playing to Play, or Playing to Win?
  30. Changing My Mind on Capital
  31. David MacIver on Life Skills for Programmers
  32. Accelerated Expertise
  33. Change Your Business: A Library of Strategic Rehearsals
  34. The Hard Thing About Learning From Experience
  35. Lia DiBello on The Mental Model of Business Expertise
  36. Business Expertise: Using the Triad as a North Star
  37. John Cutler’s Product Org Expertise
  38. Business Expertise: The Importance of Cognitive Agility
  39. An Extracted Tacit Mental Model of Business Expertise
  40. Exec Development is a Different Game
  41. This is What Product Taste Looks Like
  42. Product Validation Frameworks are Mostly Useless Without Taste
  43. An MBA for Business Operators
  44. 7 Powers in Practice
  45. 7 Powers
  46. Business, The Octopus Game
  47. What a Career Moat Can't Buy
  48. The Tricky Thing About Creating Training Programs
  49. A Land & Expand Reading Program for B2B Sales
  50. An Easier Method for Extracting Tacit Knowledge
  51. Work is Like a Hill (Members Newsletter)
  52. An Update to the Commonplace Membership Program
  53. Prioritise The Highest Order Bit
  54. Working Backwards
  55. Hold the Lessons of History Loosely (Members Newsletter)
  56. Product Development as Iterated Taste
  57. Follow Your Nose
  58. A Loose Feedback Loop (Members Newsletter)
  59. Career Networking and Power
  60. The Base Rate Is A Hell of A Thing
  61. Tacit Skill in Wicked Domains (Members Newsletter)
  62. All That is Rare and Valuable
  63. What's Your Time Preference?
  64. Create Your Own Rituals
  65. How To Reduce Decision Noise
  66. Reduce Noise, Not Cognitive Biases
  67. The Gap Between Reputation and Personal Brand
  68. What Bill Gurley Saw
  69. Enthusiasm Half-Life
  70. The Games People Play With Cash Flow
  71. Competitive Arbitrage
  72. How First Principles Thinking Fails
  73. An Update on ‘Consume What You Can Do’
  74. Reading Quickly is Reading a Lot
  75. Seek Ideas At The Right Level of Abstraction
  76. A Fourth Career Moat Pattern
  77. Neuroplasticity is a Pretty Useless Idea for Practice
  78. Knowing The Dip Exists is a Heck of an Advantage
  79. How I Do Personal Experiments
  80. Announcing the Commonplace Membership Program
  81. Using Inversion
  82. Consume What You Can Do
  83. The Four Theories of Truth As a Method for Critical Thinking
  84. In Defence of Reading Goals
  85. Decisiveness is Just as Important as Deliberation
  86. Action Produces Information
  87. Range book summary
  88. Do a Job Market Audit
  89. Practice As The Bar For Truth
  90. ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
  91. There Is No Normal
  92. Heuristics Are OK
  93. How to Use YouTube to Learn Tacit Knowledge
  94. The Three Kinds of Tacit Knowledge
  95. Copying Better: How To Acquire The Tacit Knowledge of Experts
  96. Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice
  97. Every Actionable Book is Actually Two Books Inside
  98. Good Synthesis is the Start of Good Sensemaking
  99. Much Ado About The OODA Loop
  100. This Is What Uncertainty Feels Like
  101. The Limits of Applied Superforecasting
  102. Exploiting Productivity Momentum
  103. Seek Failures Early
  104. Watch The Cash Flow
  105. Career Moats in a Recession
  106. The Parable of the Promotion Ladder and The Market
  107. Reality Without Frameworks
  108. Prediction in the Time of the Coronavirus
  109. Get Numb Before You Get Good
  110. To Get Good, Go After The Metagame
  111. What The CEO Wants You To Know
  112. Expertise is ‘Just’ Pattern Matching
  113. Five Takeaways on Predictions (For The New Decade)
  114. How The Superforecasters Do It
  115. How Do You Evaluate Your Own Predictions?
  116. Forecasting Under Uncertainty
  117. Desire for Mission is a Career Limiting Belief
  118. Personal Brand as Moat, Personal Brand as Soft Landing
  119. Using Business Models to Evaluate Employers
  120. The Difference Between Experience and Expertise
  121. The Mental Model FAQ
  122. Don't Beat Yourself Up Over Self-Directed Work
  123. Munger's Two Track Analysis
  124. (Book Excerpt) Compensation: How does money affect retention?
  125. Chinese Businessmen: Cash Flow Is King
  126. Beware What Sounds Insightful
  127. The Land and Expand Strategy for Reading
  128. Contra ‘Passion is Overrated’
  129. The Consulting Business Model
  130. A Personal History of the Career Moat
  131. You Can’t Ignore Business Models In Your Career
  132. How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World
  133. A User Review of the Procrastination Equation
  134. The Five Sources of Uncertainty
  135. The Three Tiers of Personal Review
  136. Everything You Need to Know About Human Memory Retention
  137. In an Age of Knowledge Work, Emotion Regulation is a Superpower
  138. Tiago Forte’s Portfolio Thinking as Time Management Tool
  139. A Small Update to Commonplace's Principles
  140. Obviously Awesome
  141. The Dangers of Treating Ideas from Finance as Generalised Self Help
  142. A Better Way To Allocate Your Career Time
  143. Time Allocation as Capital Allocation
  144. Career Moat Patterns: Tie a Good Thing to a Better Thing
  145. How to Ask Questions (So Your Boss Doesn't Hate You)
  146. Paying Attention to Stories for Skill Extraction
  147. Organisational Politics: Beware the Simple Story
  148. An Update on Perceptual Exposure as Learning Technique
  149. Peak book summary
  150. Lessons Learnt From Reading 51 Books in 2018
  151. Putting Mental Models to Practice Part 6: A Personal Epistemology of Practice
  152. The Problems with Deliberate Practice
  153. Putting Mental Models to Practice Part 5: Skill Extraction
  154. Putting Mental Models to Practice Part 4: Expert Decision Making
  155. Putting Mental Models to Practice Part 3: Better Trial and Error
  156. Putting Mental Models to Practice, Part 2: An Introduction to Rationality
  157. A Framework for Putting Mental Models to Practice, Part 1: Munger's Speech
  158. Putting Perceptual Exposure to Practice
  159. Chicken Sexing and Perceptual Learning as a Path to Expertise
  160. Creative Selection
  161. Career Moats 101
  162. Reducing Commonplace's Posting Frequency
  163. The Tension Between Optimising Outcomes vs Minimising Regret
  164. The Mental Model Fallacy
  165. You Can't Teach What They Aren't Ready to Know
  166. Teaching Tech Together
  167. What I've Learned From Applying Amy Hoy's Just F*cking Ship
  168. A Review of BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits
  169. The Power of Habit
  170. A Self Help Audit (May—Oct 2018)
  171. Just F**cking Ship
  172. Using Head Fake Questions To Achieve Your Career Goals
  173. Don't Take Generic Business Advice From VCs
  174. Breaking Out of the SME Loop, A Story
  175. Chinese Businessmen: Maybe Strategy Matters
  176. Is the FIRE Movement a Good Idea?
  177. Chinese Businessmen: Superstition Doesn't Count
  178. All Marketers Are Liars
  179. Chinese Businessmen: Let Reality Be The Teacher
  180. Radical Candor
  181. The Chinese Businessman Paradox
  182. Surprising Implications of Treating Self-Help as Art
  183. Deep Work
  184. How to Read Self Help
  185. If You Want a Great Career, Go After Rare & Valuable Skills
  186. So Good They Can't Ignore You
  187. Writing Doesn’t Make You A Genius
  188. A Nuanced Take on Preventing Burnout
  189. Robin Hanson on Ray Dalio
  190. Announcing the Commonplace Mailing List
  191. Optimise for Usefulness
  192. Dismissively Stubborn
  193. The Superiority of ‘Trial & Error’
  194. The End of the Principles Sequence
  195. Being an Effective Decision Maker
  196. Understand that People are Wired Very Differently
  197. On Lying To Yourself
  198. The Two Ways You Can Increase Your Rationality
  199. How To Optimise for Success, A Theory
  200. Ray Dalio's 5 Step Process (To Getting What You Want Out Of Life)
  201. Applying Derek Siver’s Over-Compensate to Compensate to Software Development
  202. Ray Dalio's Hyperrealism
  203. Principles
  204. Building Career Moats: A Confession
  205. Cryptocurrency: fad or disruptive finance industry change?
  206. The New Geography of Jobs
  207. The ultimate guide to reading a book a week for your career
  208. Only the Paranoid Survive
  209. Average is Over
  210. Reading as the root of career planning
  211. The three kinds of non-fiction books