Sublime

The world is dynamic. Knowledge gets updated, and so too must your circle. There are three key practices needed in order to build and maintain a circle of competence: curiosity and a desire to learn, monitoring, and feedback.

the danger almost settled me. I credit this to the training I got from the Air Force on how to control risk. That training taught me to do four things: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. Specifically, I would observe the target area, figure out the best path into the hot zone and the best path out, orient myself in the face of unexpected events, and

So remember one of the first principles of management: You need to look at the feedback you’re getting on your machine and either fix your problems or escalate them, if need be, over and over again. There is no easier alternative than bringing problems to the surface and putting them in the hands of good problem solvers.

The idea that coordination, by itself, can be a source of advantage is a very deep principle. It is often underappreciated because people tend to think of coordination in terms of continuing mutual adjustments among agents. Strategic coordination, or coherence, is not ad hoc mutual adjustment. It is coherence imposed on a system by policy and desig

This question eventually led O’Brien to Chris Argyris, whose writings resonated with Hanover’s managers’ experience. Argyris’s “action science,” offered theory and method for examining “the reasoning that underlies our actions.”9 Teams and organizations trap themselves, he says, in “defensive routines” that insulate our mental models from examinati

Illustrated on this page is an ideal model of decision-making in a know-how business.

It is extremely difficult to maintain a circle of competence without an outside perspective. We usually have too many biases to solely rely on our own observations. It takes courage to solicit external feedback, so if defensiveness starts to manifest, focus on the result you hope to achieve.