Blog Posts

A quick thought experiment to spot your biggest vulnerabilities and identify simple steps you can take today to reduce them.

Organizational culture is not a set of concepts but a track record of actions and reactions.

You don’t win at politics when your party gets elected; you win when your party loses, and the government is still good.

How to give feedback and suggestions that are well-received

The difference between decision-making and action-taking

The 3 properties for long-term Success

How to develop competence fast

A visual framework to understand antifragility

Proven techniques to make your team more proactive.

Number one – ask your people to do things, then do not check whether they did them.

How to drive long-lasting change within your organization

In mimetic societies, hierarchies are defined by one's ability to perform rituals. Because of the above, mimetic societies label themselves as meritocracies.

How misleading responses distort decisions and why managers get clearer answers from direct observation.

Habits are a stronger driver of behavior

They focus on nice-to-haves while ignoring bigger problems. People read that misprioritization as proof leadership is detached and nothing will improve.

The key to success is to spend more time on important-yet-not-urgent activities than most of your peers.

in 10 simple steps

A framework for managing underperformance

With concrete use cases and applications

Soft metrics often beat hard ones for skill growth. How to set, evaluate, and discuss qualitative metrics using the bad/good/great framework.

The role of a manager is often defined from a business point of view only. But what about the role of a manager from the employee's point of view?

Good managers dig deep, they front-load clarity…

A thought experiment to resolve the debate about whether the world has gotten worse.

Careers, communities, and activities that eventually became a competition for who’s willing to sacrifice more.

Managers who give their teams mixed messages get mixed results.

Traditionally, ergodicity is defined as a binary property, but it can be better understood as a spectrum.

Learn practical coaching techniques to improve your team's email writing. Save workdays, reduce back-and-forth, and increase closing rates with specific exercises.

Basics and generalization across space and other dimensions.

The more the free parameters, the less you know what is being measured.

The magic of obsessive consistency.

Pain is not a signal of damage but of possible future damage regardless of present damage. This explains psychosomatic/psychogenic pain.

The importance of collecting Quality Information

If you want your quality of life to grow beyond a certain level, you cannot do without society predominantly using positive-sum tactics.

How to ensure your change initiative won't fizzle out

How to prevent complancency in maintenance projects?

Cars are inefficient, but people are willing to pay a premium for them.

Education costs expand to fill the size of the box we assume to be the default

Low disposable income can mean that someone is genuinely deprived, but also that someone has deliberately traded away savings for other priorities.

Not all financial struggle is a sign of poverty; sometimes, it’s simply a sign of deliberately choosing to live at the edge of one’s means

The top skill to learn for transitioning managers

Seatbelt laws, mandates, and rigor discussing them

We have learned the wrong lesson from Semmelweis’s horror story

And how to make them more transferable

Best practices to transmit concepts that are hard to put into writing

A framework for providing suggestions to your manager

Some great tactics make for very poor strategies. They are okay as one-offs but are problematic as the go-to solution.

Have you noticed, when studying history, how exceptional it is that the good guys always win in the end?

Three principles and three action points

Precisely because culture should be a common good, it is paramount to keep theaters and museums' costs low and cut unnecessary expenses.

We often think we should wait to commit until we find something worth committing to. But sometimes, it's the commitment itself that creates the worth.

The importance of choosing games where there can be multiple winners

How to surface cultural problems and opportunities within one's organization

Tips for project managers and infrastructure risk managers

62% of the patients reporting that the operation created persistent eye pain still rated the operation as satisfactory

in 10 simple steps

It's not enough to give your workers tools; you must also ensure they use them and use them well. Here is how.

Videos, podcasts, posts, and more

Forgetting about dollars and instead reasoning in terms of goods and services would produce much smarter policy-making

Whenever there is imperfect information, there is a luck element, even in fully deterministic contexts.

Maintenance never makes sense in the short term, yet it is indispensable in the long term.

A fantastic framework for communication

1) People perform up to your clarity.

Not all the time we dedicate to work is work time. Sometimes, we are in hobby mode. The key is to correctly label it as such and be deliberate about it.

Are attractive people less funny? And other stereotypes

What do pre-autocracies look like, and how can we prevent our democracies from devolving into them?

Three simple steps to get more helpful feedback

Luca's thoughts on coaching

Values require long time horizons; how to create them?

Being an adult is about taking responsibility and learning how to commit.

A simple story explaining a fundamental concept.

Why it backfires and what to do instead

The real culture war is between people who want to win (a more prosperous country) vs people who want to win the argument (more status even if it means less prosperity).

Studying losers helps you avoid mistakes

Trying to achieve long-term goals through short-term tactics is a dead end.

Most mentorship meetings are a waste of time because they are not structured. Here’s how to make the most of them.

How I went from 0 to 24,000+ Twitter followers without prior contacts, in an isolated city, and without cold outreach.

Practice your practice

It's about building a track record of being helpful

The longer a problem has been around, the longer it is expected to stick around in the future.

The more free parameters a metric has, the less you know what it measures. Pair unreliable metrics with direct qualitative observations.

A collection of tips on how to improve your presentation skills.

Do not be so clear that you can be understood. Instead, be so clear that you cannot be misunderstood.

Short term bias and negativity bias are actually first-order-thinking biases.

If you avoid extreme risks, you will be outperformed by those who take them; but take extreme risks, and your average outcomes get worse.

Micromanagement might be bad, but not doing enough management for fear of micromanaging is also bad.

Unspoken rules to get promoted faster, earn trust, and get recognized.

How to get its productivity gains without also making your organization more fragile

Long-lasting progress is always bottom-up, because the bottom-up becomes adopted after having being proven to work.

How the antifragile breaks

If you’re reading the same percentage of pages for each book, you’re doing it wrong. Etc.

Regretful choices arise from using a widely-accepted metric for success instead of a personally defined one.