This is the divide between the Positioning and People schools of consulting. The essential difference between the two schools is that the Positioning school takes its intellectual cues from economics and uses formal models and numbers as the ultimate foundation for everything, while the People school takes its intellectual cues from sociology and p

Bootstrapping with beefs doesn’t have to be done with writing. You could do a book, or a talk, or a show-over-tell artifact that falsifies a commonly held belief via counterexample. Or even just a Twitter rant. If you’re not a creator type, you could develop a sales pitch for use in 1:1 conversational selling that’s based on a beefy take. There are

The idea that “fortune favors the bold” is not an observation about the nature of divine agency, it is an observation about the interaction of active human agency, luck, and unintended consequences. Fortune appears to favor the bold because the bold are making their own luck by acting in obvious ways in response to obvious imperatives. Failure of n

The work of the knowledge worker is never done. You can always do an infinite amount of work for a finite piece of output. There are always more plans you could make, more background research you could do, more skills you could develop, more trends you could stay updated on, more refinements you could add to the slide deck, more Q&A you could p

Niels Bohr defined a Great Truth as one whose negation is also a Great Truth.

Discovering and developing a genuine beef into an artful calling card that lands you gigs is hard work. That’s why it’s a costly signal. You can’t fake it with simple bullshitting. You have to put in the work of: spotting a widespread pattern of disillusionment in the margins identifying the prevailing orthodoxy driving the disillusionment analyzin

The Explorer is a client who wants to build capacity for systematic doubt at an outer-world locus. They do this by constantly considering possibilities, alternative perspectives, and refactorings of worldviews. They tend to hire a sparring partner type of consultant who can constantly stress test their thinking and actions, and undermine their assu

These two loops—both of which are metacognitive OODA loops with the sparring serving as an orientation activity for both parties—are at the heart of sparring. Where this beautiful symmetry breaks down is in the relative value of the two loops. The client’s loop passes through the real world. The sparring partner’s loop passes through the adjacent-p

Way back in 2009, Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void called this the “Sex and Cash” theory.1 The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the assignment covers both bases, but not often.