Organizational Design: Choosing What Will Be Easy to Build
An org chart looks like a diagram of authority. It works as a map of which conversations are cheap — and that is what ends up shaping the product.
Concept
Goodhart's Law
Behavioral Economics: The Errors Point the Same Way
If people departed randomly from rational choice, the departures would cancel out. They lean consistently in the same directions — which is what makes them worth studying, and worth worrying about.
The Medium Is the Message: The Form Does More Than the Content
Writing's real consequence was not that people could record things — it was that law could outlive its author. Every medium does work that no individual message controls.
The Observer Effect: Measuring Something Touches It
Checking a tyre's pressure lets out a little air, so the reading is never quite what was there before. With objects that hardly matters. With people it can be larger than what you were trying to measure.
The Principal-Agent Problem: Your Agent Earns ₹2,000 From Your ₹5,00,000
Holding out two weeks for a better house price is worth a fortune to you and pocket change to your agent. No dishonesty required — just a small gap between what you want and what they're paid for.
The Tragedy of the Commons: When Restraint Is Punished
Every herder who adds a cow to the shared pasture captures the whole benefit and pays a twentieth of the cost. Nobody is greedy, everyone is correct, and the pasture dies anyway.
Goodhart's Law: What Happens the Moment You Attach Money to a Number
Colonial Hanoi paid a bounty per rat tail and got a rat-farming industry. The failure needs no dishonesty — only a proxy, a consequence, and someone rational enough to notice the shortcut.
The Innovator's Dilemma: How Doing Everything Right Ends Companies
Incumbents rarely lose because they were careless. They lose because listening to their best customers, protecting margins, and ceding the unprofitable low end are each individually correct — and collectively fatal.
The Map Is Not the Territory: Every Model Earns Its Keep by Lying
A map showing everything would be the size of the city and useless. Models work by discarding detail — the error is forgetting which detail, and when you left the range where it didn't matter.
Consumer Apps: Everything Is Decided at the Second Use
The graveyard is full of competent products people opened once. Downloads measure marketing; the second visit measures whether anything was actually solved.
Business Models: What Would You Give Up to Earn More?
How the money arrives is the least interesting part. Every model has a lever for growing revenue and a cost attached to pulling it — and where that cost falls predicts behaviour under pressure.
Social Media: A Feed Is a Decision, Not a Pipe
Early networks showed you what your contacts posted, in order. A modern feed is a ranked selection made on your behalf — and what it optimises for explains most of the arguments about it.
Regulation: Rules Can Only Describe What Already Happened
A rule needs a harm that is noticed, documented, understood, and politically salient. All four take years, while products change in months — and that gap explains most of the field.
Antitrust: The Test Was Built for Prices That Never Rose
A century of competition law detects monopoly by watching consumer prices. When the service is free, the test finds nothing — and the power sits somewhere it was never designed to look.