Category Archives: Mental Models

Leading by Fitness Functions

November 1, 2025
Amazon Way, Business, Customer & Product, Leadership, Mental Models, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
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Fitness Funcitons

You don’t scale excellence by inspecting outcomes—you scale it by designing systems that send the right signals. These are called Fitness Functions.Continue reading →

How We Scaled Alexa: One Problem, One Leader

April 14, 2025
Amazon Way, Leadership, Mental Models, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
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The Single-Threaded Leader (STL) model was born inside Amazon and became foundational to how we scaled and delivered customer-obsessed innovation—especially in the early years of Alexa. I wrote the original doc that helped crystalize the model, and it’s been gratifying to see how the idea has since echoed through other orgs, blog posts, and companies trying to scale impact without scaling chaos “The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s …Continue reading →

How to be a Secret Agent (of Change)

February 3, 2021
Amazon Way, Business, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Mental Models, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
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Seal of the United States Secret Service

Great leaders don’t let changes happen to them. Instead, they become skilled at driving change. Leaders effective in driving change are known as agents of change or change agents. This post documents a tool called D x V x F > R that will enable you to become a great agent of change.Continue reading →

Taxonomy and Lexicon

July 3, 2019
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Mental Models, Organization & People
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How many times have you been in a heated discussion only to find out that the two sides were talking past each other because they were reading from two different dictionaries? I bet you can also remember situations where just a little more structure got everyone aligned quicker. Creating, explaining, and re-enforcing a strong Taxonomy and Lexicon is a critical skill for all leaders (reminder: everyone in our business is a leader, not just managers). Taxonomy …Continue reading →

One-Way and Two-Way Doors

June 27, 2019
Amazon Way, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Mental Models, Technology & Execution
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Effective decision-making starts with understanding; in the long-term, very, very few things actually matter. The vast majority of the decisions made day-to-day are either minutia or easily reversible and can be made quickly. However, a small number of things (about 1 in 10) matter a lot (in the long term) and are worthy of serious pondering, discussion, investigation, investment, and decision making. A mentor (Chris Jones) introduced me to the pithy phrase 90% of the decisions you make don’t …Continue reading →

Mental Models

June 22, 2019
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Mental Models
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A secret to clear thinking and decision-making is to learn, invent, and adopt mental models. You’ve probably noticed effective leaders can frame complex ideas simply. They’ll lead conversations like this: “Well, I think there are three things we should focus on and they are…” “Folks, I think there’s another way of looking at this problem. What if we viewed the problem through these four lenses…” The key to simplifying the complex is to be intentional …Continue reading →

Tools to Achieve Clarity of Thought

July 8, 2018
Amazon Way, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Mental Models, Writing
3 Comments

This post is an inventory of tools I use to drive clear thinking. I update it regularly as I learn new tools, or gain new insights about existing tools as I use them. I am available to do 1:1 or group coaching on all of these topics. See Advising, Coaching, and Consulting | Kindel Tig’s Clarity of Thought Toolbox Embrace Mental Models. A mental model is an explanation of how something works. It is a …Continue reading →

Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO)

April 21, 2018
Business, Career, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Mental Models, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
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CBTO = Customer + Business + Technology + OrganizationContinue reading →

Merit Badges – A Mental Model for Success

April 1, 2018
Career, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Mental Models, Organization & People
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The concept of a Merit Badge comes from the Boy Scouts. The idea is that a scout can only earn a particular merit badge (actually a patch that gets sewn onto a vest) by demonstrating mastery of the skill or ability defined by the badge. For example, a scout would only receive the “Firemanship” badge by clearly demonstrating, repeatedly, the ability to start fires without matches. Merit Badges can come in all sizes. A small …Continue reading →

Attention is the Currency of Leadership

January 24, 2015
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Mental Models
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Great leaders optimize how they spend their attention. They are skilled at turning up the heat to get others to focus their attention on the right things at the right times. Attention is the currency of leadership, and each person has a fixed amount of attention to spend. “Leaders have a fixed amount of attention units they can spend in a day, week, or year. Are you spending yours on the right things?” (A mentor …Continue reading →

The Job Decision Matrix

April 26, 2012
Career, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Mental Models, Organization & People
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A Job Decision Matrix will help identify what is actually important to you in your career (and life). Gaining clarity on what is important to you, right now, will help you identify new job opportunities, avoid wasting time on job opportunities that are not right for you, and make a job decision with conviction. This blog post is one of my oldest on leadership and by far the one I’ve gotten the most positive feedback …Continue reading →

You are Thinking of Your Career Trajectory Wrong

April 8, 2012
Career, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Mental Models, Organization & People, Startups
15 Comments

Most people think about their career trajectory as being like a bell-curve or that of a cannon ball fired from a cannon. Something like this: For 99% of all successful people, this is completely the wrong way to think about it. For that other 1% (the Bill Gates & Mark Zuckerbergs of the world) it might work. For the rest of us, there’s a mental model that will help keep you sane, help you appreciate …Continue reading →

Experience = Stuff / Time

April 2, 2012
Branding, Customer & Product, Leadership, Mental Models, Mobile, Startups
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The real value in creating new businesses is in delivering customer experiences. The ubiquitous nature of the web, devices, and social networks means successful companies in the future will understand this. The question is “what do people mean when they say ‘experience’”? This post provides an answer. Over the years, I’ve developed a mental model that helps me and my teams think about new businesses from a very customer focused perspective. I refer to it …Continue reading →