I have been writing about principles for a long time. Tenets. Calibration. Just right, over, and under. The 5Ps.
I recently built the BIQ and Porridge apps that use those ideas, and for a while each app carried its own copy of “the principles”, which were actually just Amazon’s Leadership Principles.
It worked until the second company showed up. A leader I respect deeply at Arm wanted the BIQ app to work for her hiring managers at Arm. She pointed me at Arm’s version of Amazon’s LPs: The 10x Mindset.
Amazon’s Ownership and Arm’s Own It are the same but different. How could BIQ ensure it served the right questions, and provided relevant examples without a full bespoke stack specifically for Arm? Same for Porridge and “just right, under, and over”. I also started noodling on what would happen if the tools worked for dozens of companies.
The fix: I pulled the model out of the apps and built LLM-based generators that are app-specific. I found the journey interesting and figured you might as well…
Behavior is the unit
Getting clear on the lexicon almost always helps. I have never been able to distinguish tenet from principle. They were 100% synonyms for me. No longer.
A tenet is a guiding principle for one endeavor. It takes a stand and settles the calls data cannot. A leadership principle is a tenet whose endeavor is an organization and whose subject is human behavior. That is the whole difference.
A principle is only worth having when it decomposes into behavior: something a person can observe, teach, practice, and live with the appropriate balance. Calibration makes that visible. Each behavior can be written in a real situation as under, just right, or over. The two ends are what make a principle teachable instead of inspirational.
Companies carve the same behavior into different names, so two sets rarely line up one to one. A facet is the slice that does. Dawn Aerospace’s Better Than Yesterday shares only the “better every day” slice of Amazon’s Insist on the Highest Standards.
The core owns the model. The apps own the experience.
That model lives in a public repo, kindel/principles. It holds the lexicon, the taxonomy, and the checks. It holds no user interface. Company is a parameter. dive-deep is three different principles if you forget which set you are in.
The sets today are Amazon’s Leadership Principles, Toyota’s The Toyota Way, Arm’s 10x Mindset, Coupang’s and Delivery Hero’s Leadership Principles, GitLab’s CREDIT values, and Dawn Aerospace’s Company Tenets. I have a backlog of a dozen more. A new set starts as an issue. The validator fails if the model is lying.
kindel.com mounts the apps. The pages you click are the experience. The model underneath is one set of files.
The Apps
I built these to accelerate the skills I teach. If we have worked together, you have already used some of them. If we have not, each one links the posts that explain the idea. They live at kindel.com/apps.
BIQ
There is an app for this. BIQ lets you pick a principle, get example questions, and compare hire and no-hire answers.
Porridge
There is an app for this. Porridge walks a principle as Just Right, Over, or Under.
Tenets
There is an app for this. Tenets takes the endeavor you type and opens an agent already briefed to write the stands.
5Ps
There is an app for this. 5Ps walks Purpose, Principles, Priorities, People, and Plan so an agent can write the first draft.
D × V × F > R
There is an app for this. D × V × F > R scores Dissatisfaction, Vision, First steps, and Resistance for a change you name.
SBI
Later. Situation, Behavior, Impact. Feedback about what happened, not who they are.
CBTO
Later. Customer, Business, Technology, Organization: a stack rank of the four lenses.
If you just want to use the tools, start at kindel.com/apps/.
As usual, I would be interested in hearing where this is wrong.