RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

mental models

  • The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them. For me, paying close attention to customer complaints constitutes a high-leverage activity.

    Aside from making a customer happy, the pursuit tends to produce important insights into the workings of my own operation. Such complaints may be numerous, and though all of them need to be followed up by someone, they don’t all require or wouldn’t all benefit from my personal attention. Which one out of ten or twenty complaints to dig into, analyze, and follow up is where art comes into the work of a manager. The basis of that art is an intuition that behind this complaint and not the other lurk many deeper problems.

    — High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • The only defense a person has in our overcommunicated society is an oversimplified mind. Not unless they repeal the law of nature that gives us only 24 hours in a day will they find a way to stuff more into the mind. The average mind is already a dripping sponge that can only soak up more information at the expense of what’s already there. Yet we continue to pour more information into that supersaturated sponge and are disappointed when our messages fail to get through.

    Advertising, of course, is only the tip of the communication iceberg. We communicate with each other in a wide variety of bewildering ways. And in a geometrically increasing volume. The medium may not be the message, but it does seriously affect the message. Instead of a transmission system, the medium acts like a filter. Only a tiny fraction of the original material ends up in the mind of the receiver.

    — Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries, Jack Trout

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • As anyone who’s launched a product or business under conditions of extreme uncertainty knows, it’s very difficult to make accurate forecasts about markets you’ve never played in before — or that may not even exist yet. Innovation accounting gives entrepreneurs and leaders a language for talking about progress in the years before revenue kicks in. And not only that — it allows you to actually translate your learning into numbers your finance colleagues and investors can understand.

    Having that shared language, and a shared system for showing progress, helps concretize the trust between leaders and entrepreneurial teams. Entrepreneurs and leaders agree to a set of metrics they believe are important to the success of a project. Entrepreneurs must show progress to be able to secure their next round of funding, and leaders agree to continue supporting the project as long as entrepreneurs can demonstrate that their strategy is working — or that they’re making the proper adjustments to their strategy based on their discoveries.

    — The Leader’s Guide by Eric Ries

    Source: Amazon
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  • Great organizations become great because the people inside the organization feel protected. The strong sense of culture creates a sense of belonging and acts like a net. People come to work knowing that their bosses, colleagues and the organization as a whole will look out for them. This results in reciprocal behavior. Individual decisions, efforts and behaviors that support, benefit and protect the long-term interest of the organization as a whole.

    — Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • A process can be the equivalent of a mountain climber’s harness and rope, allowing you the freedom to explore without constant worry. A process, far from being a drag or a constraint, can actually give you the comfort to be bolder. And bolder is often the right direction.

    Short-run emotion, as we’ve seen, makes the status quo seductive. But when researchers ask the elderly what they regret about their lives, they don’t often regret something they did; they regret things they didn’t do. They regret not seizing opportunities. They regret hesitating. They regret being indecisive. Being decisive is itself a choice. Decisiveness is a way of behaving, not an inherited trait. It allows us to make brave and confident choices, not because we know we’ll be right but because it’s better to try and fail than to delay and regret.

    Our decisions will never be perfect, but they can be better. Bolder. Wiser. The right process can steer us toward the right choice. And the right choice, at the right moment, can make all the difference.

    — Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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