The Three Confidences of a Volunteer
A volunteer is a leader who does the work only because it is Right (for the customer, for the team, and for the world) and who could walk away tomorrow without fear.
Category: Mental Models
Program: You Keep Using that Word, I Don’t Think You Know What it Means
I’ve heard “program” used to mean everything from a team to a project plan to a portfolio to lines of code. At some point, someone has to stop and say: you keep using that word—I don’t … Read more
Mechanisms In Action: How Tech Giants Scale “Good Intentions”
Mechanisms are complete processes—owned by a leader, built around a tool or ritual, broadly adopted, and continually inspected and improved—that make the right behavior the default. Rather than hoping people do the right thing, great leaders engineer processes that guarantee it.
Leading by Fitness Functions
You don’t scale excellence by inspecting outcomes—you scale it by designing systems that send the right signals. These are called Fitness Functions.
How We Scaled Alexa: One Problem, One Leader
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, … Read more
How to be a Secret Agent (of Change)
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.
Taxonomy and Lexicon
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 … Read more
One-Way and Two-Way Doors
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 … Read more
Mental Models
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 … Read more
Tools to Achieve Clarity of Thought
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. Tig’s Clarity of … Read more
Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO)
CBTO = Customer + Business + Technology + Organization
Merit Badges – A Mental Model for Success
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 … Read more
Attention is the Currency of Leadership
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 … Read more
The Job Decision Matrix
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 … Read more
You are Thinking of Your Career Trajectory Wrong
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 … Read more
Experience = Stuff / Time
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 … Read more