Guides

Business thinkers' principles, explained

Each page explains the methods one business thinker has described in public, in our own words, with the letters, essays and talks they come from. Each one ends with a free AI skill that runs those principles against your own plan, numbers or decision, and lists the source for every principle it uses.

The skills review your work against cited principles; none of them imitates the person or speaks for them. The people named here are not affiliated with AI Skill Pod and have not endorsed it. All skills: the skill library.

• Kazuo Inamori: Amoeba Management and philosophyKazuo Inamori's Amoeba Management (small units with their own profit, hourly efficiency, management by all) and the Kyocera Philosophy's root question, what is right as a human being, with sources.
• Konosuke Matsushita: dam management and collective wisdomKonosuke Matsushita's dam management (keep a planned reserve in cash, equipment, people, stock, technology and products) and management by everyone with collective wisdom, explained from Panasonic and PHP sources.
• Taiichi Ohno: 5 whys and the seven wastesTaiichi Ohno's 5 whys (keep asking why until the root cause is removed) and his seven wastes, from overproduction to correction, explained from Toyota and Lean Enterprise Institute sources, with office examples.
• Warren Buffett: moat, circle of competence, margin of safetyWarren Buffett's moat, circle of competence and margin of safety, explained letter by letter from the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters, with steps to apply them to your own business. Not investment advice.
• Charlie Munger: inversion and mental modelsCharlie Munger's inversion (invert, always invert), his latticework of mental models and his advice to buy wonderful businesses at fair prices, from Poor Charlie's Almanack and the Berkshire letters, with a pre-mortem you can run.
• Jeff Bezos: working backwards and one-way doorsJeff Bezos's working backwards from the customer, one-way and two-way door decisions and Day 1, from his shareholder letters, plus the PR/FAQ written before building, as Amazon describes it.
• Elon Musk: first principles and the 5-step algorithmElon Musk's first-principles reasoning (price a product from its raw materials) and his five-step order for processes: question requirements, delete, simplify, speed up, automate last. From his interviews.
• Peter Thiel: the contrarian question and monopolyPeter Thiel's contrarian question from Zero to One, and the monopoly ideas from his lecture Competition is for Losers: start small, the four characteristics, be the last mover. Explained with examples.
• Andy Grove: OKRs and managerial leverageAndy Grove's OKRs as he ran them at Intel, his one-on-ones, task-relevant maturity and the manager's output equation from High Output Management, explained from accessible sources.
• Henry Ford: flow and wasteHenry Ford's principles of flow (bring the work to the worker, the moving line, an even flow of materials) and waste of materials and human effort, from his 1922 book My Life and Work, with office examples.
• Ray Dalio: principles and believabilityRay Dalio's decision principles: treat each case as "another one of those", write your criteria down, weigh views by believability, and use transparency, from principles.com and his 2017 TED talk.
• Paul Graham: do things that don't scalePaul Graham's essay Do Things that Don't Scale (July 2013): recruit users by hand, start with a narrow market, delight early users, do things manually first, skip the big launch. With a plan for your first users.
• Sam Altman: the Startup PlaybookSam Altman's Startup Playbook for Y Combinator founders and his essay How To Be Successful: users who love the product, focus and intensity, momentum, the CEO's jobs.
• Jensen Huang: first principles and new marketsJensen Huang's ideas from his 2024 Stanford GSB conversation: redo things from first principles, create technology and markets together, show people how you reason.