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Strategy
Position, advantage, and why some businesses stay ahead.
- Amara's lawWe tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.ConceptsBusiness
- AntifragilityThe property of gaining from disorder rather than merely surviving it.ConceptsBusiness
- Barriers to entryAnything that makes it costly, slow or impossible for a new competitor to start doing what an existing business does.ConceptsBusiness
- Black swansA rare event that was not in anyone's model, has very large consequences, and is explained confidently afterwards as though it had been foreseeable.ConceptsBusiness
- Built to SellA service business only has value apart from its owner when it does one repeatable thing through a documented process that other people can run.BooksBusiness2011
- Career CapitalThe stock of rare and valuable skills, relationships and proof you have accumulated.ConceptsTransitions
- Category creationBuilding a market for a kind of thing that did not previously exist as a kind of thing, rather than competing within an existing one.ConceptsBusiness
- Clayton ChristensenThe theory of disruptive innovation and the jobs-to-be-done framing of customer demand.FiguresBusiness1952–2020
- CommoditizationThe process by which a product or service stops being distinguishable, so buyers choose on price alone and margins fall toward cost.ConceptsBusiness
- Competency confusionAssuming that excellence at the thing you deliver transfers to running the business that delivers it.ConceptsBusiness
- Competitive moatA structural reason a business stays profitable after competitors have noticed it is profitable.ConceptsBusiness
- Competitive StrategyIndustry structure, described by five forces, sets available profitability — and a defensible position requires choosing cost leadership or differentiation rather than both.BooksBusiness1980
- CompoundingGrowth applied to a base that already includes previous growth.ConceptsBusiness
- Creative destructionJoseph Schumpeter's term for the process by which innovation destroys existing arrangements while creating new ones.ConceptsBusiness
- DifferentiationOffering something buyers can tell apart from the alternatives and will pay more for.ConceptsBusiness
- Diminishing returnsAdding more of one input while others stay fixed yields progressively less extra output, and eventually less in total.ConceptsBusiness
- Disruptive innovationClayton Christensen's specific mechanism: a product that is worse on the dimension incumbents compete on, better on one they do not price, and cheap enough to serve customers the incumbent does not want — which then improves until it is good enough for everyone.ConceptsBusiness
- Economies of scaleCost per unit falling as volume rises, because fixed costs spread and processes specialize.ConceptsBusiness
- Edmund BurkeAnglo-Irish statesman, orator, and political thinker (1729–1797) whose Reflections on the Revolution in France founded modern conservative political thought, whose decades in Parliament addressed American, Indian, and Irish questions with sustained moral seriousness, and whose theory of the political tradition shaped Anglo-American conservatism from the nineteenth century to the present.FiguresPhilosophyEnlightenment
- First PrinciplesFirst-principles reasoning derives a conclusion from premises held true independently of that conclusion, rather than from precedent or analogy.ConceptsBusiness
- First-mover advantageThe benefit of entering a market before competitors.ConceptsBusiness
- Gresham's lawBad money drives out good, when both must be accepted at the same official value.ConceptsBusiness
- Ideal customer profileA description of the customers a business serves best — derived from the ones it already serves well and profitably, rather than from who it would like to sell to.ConceptsBusiness
- InversionSolving a problem by asking what would guarantee failure, then avoiding that.ConceptsBusiness
- LeverageLeverage is any arrangement in which output stops being proportional to the hours you put in.ConceptsBusiness
- Michael E. PorterThe five forces framework, generic strategies, the value chain, and strategy as trade-off.FiguresBusinessb. 1947
- Moral hazardTaking more risk because someone else carries the consequences.ConceptsBusiness
- Network effectsWhen a product gets more valuable to each user as more people use it.ConceptsBusiness
- Origen of AlexandriaAlexandrian Christian scholar (c. 185–254) whose Hexapla, On First Principles, biblical commentaries, and Contra Celsum constituted the first systematic Christian intellectual project, integrating Platonist metaphysics with biblical theology and producing a controversial speculative system later condemned in part but never displaced as a foundational reference.FiguresPhilosophyLate Antiquity
- Owner dependencyThe degree to which a business needs one specific person to keep working.ConceptsBusiness
- Path dependenceWhen how you got here constrains where you can go, so that an outcome persists because of its history rather than its merits.ConceptsBusiness
- PeakExpertise comes from practice with specific conditions — targeting weakness at the edge of ability with feedback — rather than from experience or talent.BooksBusiness2016
- Performance TheaterActivity performed to be seen working rather than to move a result.ConceptsBusiness
- Peter DruckerFounding management as a discipline; management by objectives; naming and analysing knowledge work.FiguresBusiness1909–2005
- Pipeline, not runwayThe unit that actually governs whether you can leave a job.ConceptsBusiness
- Porter's five forcesMichael Porter's 1979 framework for why some industries are more profitable than others: rivalry among competitors, the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitutes, and the bargaining power of buyers and of suppliers.ConceptsBusiness
- PositioningThe place a business occupies in a buyer's mind relative to the alternatives, including doing nothing.ConceptsBusiness
- ProductizationTurning bespoke work into a defined offering with a fixed scope, price and delivery process.ConceptsBusiness
- Recurring revenueRevenue contracted to repeat without being re-sold.ConceptsBusiness
- Revealed preferenceThe inference of what someone values from what they chose, rather than from what they said.ConceptsBusiness
- SegmentationDividing a market into groups that differ in what they want, what they will pay, or how they buy — so that an offer can be built for one group rather than averaged across all of them.ConceptsBusiness
- Switching costsWhat a customer pays to leave you, counting money, time, risk and disruption.ConceptsBusiness
- The Effective ExecutiveEffectiveness is a set of learnable habits — managing time, focusing on contribution, building on strengths, and deciding at the right level of generality.BooksBusiness1967
- The efficient market hypothesisThat asset prices already reflect available information, so consistently beating the market on public information is not possible.ConceptsBusiness
- The Innovator's DilemmaIncumbents lose to inferior entrants because serving their best customers and protecting margins makes ignoring the low end the rational choice.BooksBusiness1997
- The Lindy effectFor things that do not age biologically, life expectancy rises with age — a book in print for fifty years is likelier to last another fifty than one published this year.ConceptsBusiness
- The OODA loopJohn Boyd's model of competitive decision-making: observe, orient, decide, act, repeatedly.ConceptsBusiness
- The Ownership LedgerEvery hour you spend produces something and somebody ends up owning it.FrameworksBusinessWhether the thing in front of you builds something you hold, or something somebody else does.
- The Pareto principleThe observation that outcomes are distributed very unevenly — a small share of inputs produces most of the output.ConceptsBusiness
- The Red Queen effectHaving to improve continuously merely to keep the position you have, because everyone else is improving too.ConceptsBusiness