The tens of thousands of new military recruits and junior officers who come through the training pipeline each year quickly develop an appreciation for formality and precision in dress. Shirts and pants are pressed, shoes polished, and salute crisp. These young men and women abide by a strict code of conduct that can penalize a number of things that are not illegal in civilian life: slovenly appearance, tardiness, or disregarding a superior’s orders.

This regimentation can be misconstrued those who have not served in the military as excessive attention to detail or a quaint adherence to dated ethical standards. What does it matter, one might ask, if a button is undone, or a rifle isn’t held the exact way it should be, as long as you know when and how to use it? Why should anyone care what a soldier wears in combat?

Well, there are good reasons why the US military places a premium on ceremony, standards of conduct, discipline, precision, and punctuality. For one thing, uniforms help members of the armed forces identify each other, which can become difficult in the confusion of battle. Attention to detail in small things, such as keeping pants pressed, means that you’re more likely to pay attention to detail in larger things, such as keeping the barrel of a rifle clean, or a pilot carefully reviewing the landing checklist.

It is also essential that troops be able to talk to each other and be quickly understood by using the same precise language and frames of reference. An ambiguous order and a vague wave in the direction of the enemy are what reportedly led to the deaths of more than two hundred British soldiers in the infamous 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade. Precision can be lifesaving. One digit off in a latitude or longitude coordinate can result in a bomb dropped on the wrong target, even on friendly forces. A rendezvous does not succeed if a pilot shows up five minutes after the set time. In boot camp or officer training school, you quickly learn the phrase “No excuse, sir.” Punctuality isn’t simply a courtesy; it’s a necessity when lives can depend on you and others being in exactly the right place at the right time. Military recruits practice the same maneuvers and drills until they are near perfect. They learn to operate as a single body. Recruits learn to march in formation - something they almost certainly will never be asked to do in battle - but the tradition and practice teach them to obey commands and to be part of a broader whole.


A messy room equals a messy mind.

Visible mess helps distract us from the true source of the disorder. The act of cluttering is really an instinctive reflex that draws our attention away from the heart of an issue.

When your room is clean and uncluttered, you have no choice but to examine your inner state. You can see any issues you have been avoiding and are forced to deal with them. From the moment you start tidying, you will be compelled to reset your life.

Tidying is just a tool, not the final destination. The true goal should be establish the lifestyle you want most once your house has been put in order.


My idea was to copy the sentences that inspired me into a notebook. Over time, I thought, this would become a personal collection of my favourite words of wisdom.


Your real life begins after putting your house in order.

Human beings can only truly cherish a limited number of things at one time.


If you want to make long-term impact, build the roads.

Stewart Brand points out that if you compare two maps of downtown Boston - from 1860 and 1960, for example - virtually every single building has been replaced. Gone.

But the roads? They haven’t changed a bit.

That’s because systems built around communication, transportation and connection need near-unanimous approval to change. Buildings, on the other hand, begin to morph as soon as the owner or tenant decides they need to.

When creating an organization, a technology of any kind of culture, the roads are worth far more than the buildings.


How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from clutter? The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other. it’s impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English. He may get away with it for a paragraph or two, but soon the reader will be lost, and there’s no sin so grave, for the reader will not easily be lured back.


Four metaphors in particular have proven their worth helping people to form images of organization: the machine, the organism (or living system), culture, and psychic prison.


When they finished, she told me she was amazed by how much faster the work progressed than it would have if workers had assembled entire windows individually. But she also confessed that nobody had as much fun doing the work or as great a sense of accomplishment at its conclusion.

Organizations pay a human price for treating people like machines.


Almost every organization develops bureaucracy as it grows. Bureaucracy is characteristic of most governments, nearly every university, established religious orders, and large corporations the world over.


Bureaucracy emerges when systems are large, rely upon recognized technical expertise, or continue indefinitely, as government agencies and large businesses often do. It is characterized by a fixed division of labor, a hierarchy of bureaus with their own well-defined spheres of governance, and a set of rules governing performance. Those appointed to work for a bureaucracy are selected on the basis of their technical qualifications and promotions are based on seniority or achievement as determined by superiors operating within the rules of their office. Strict discipline and control is expected throughout.

Ideally, bureaucracy is a system for turning employees of quite average ability into rational decision-makers able to serve their constituencies, clients, or customers with impartiality and efficiency. The bureaucratic form promises reliable decision-making, merit-based selection and promotion, and the impersonal and, therefore, fair application of rules. When organizations are large and operate routine technologies in fairly stable environments, bureaucracy will generally produce these benefits, though not without some negative consequences.


Churchill once observed: “We shape our buildings and afterward our buildings shape us.”


The term “organization” is most often opposed to chaos: organizations create order, whereas chaos brings disorder. The order organizing brought to humankind produced welcome stability and, thanks in large measure to the widely emulated examples of Rome’s army and the Roman Catholic Church, bureaucracy became one of modern society’s most prevalent features. While leadership was seen as essential to bringing order to these early times, its alter ego, management, as both a profession and an institution, evolved much later, tracing back to the 18th-century England and its industrialization textile factories, both products of the Enlightenment.


Eventually, I came to realize that in graphic design grids are the most powerful method of creating an orderly foundation for creativity. I had been trying to use them for years with mixed results, without proper training and usually without proper preparation. It’s been said that graphic design amounts to little more than “lining stuff up,” and for many years, that’s more or less all I did. Most of my designs employed ad hoc grids, poorly planned columns that would arise spontaneously as I tried to “line things up.” Of course, they rarely provided a stable base on which to build well-considered designs. This was especially true when I would haphazardly revise them as I went along, having almost always skipped the necessary stage of planning out the units and columns.

It took me a long time to learn how to use grids, but I learned, through trial and error, reading, poring over work from more talented designers, more reading, lots of experimentation, and finally even more reading. Grids, I came to understand, are a much more deeper subject than superficial appearances suggest.


Even in this rudimentary and skeletal form, the implication of structure was there. Indeed, the lesson was this: any time more than one element is present, there is the suggestion of a human agenda at work, a pattern of order being imposed. Design is nothing if not order applied to disorder.


On the other hand, a user of an interactive system can sense that the features of that system — its content, its tools, its navigation — are constructed according to some overarching design. If he encounters some evidence that there is order in place, his confidence in and sense of ease with the system increases dramatically. An ordering system need not announce itself, and it may never be consciously understood, but its presence is nevertheless significant.


I always tried to tell myself that it wasn’t the end of the world if we failed in a particular negotiation and that our success was not going to hinge on the arrival of one player. If you need one person to change your destiny, then you have not built a very solid organization.


Consequently the progress of technology begins to have the opposite of its intended effects. Instead of simplifying human tasks, it makes them more complicated. No one dares move without consulting an expert. The expert in turn cannot hope to have mastered more than a small section of the ceaselessly expanding volume of information. But whereas formal scientific knowledge is departmentalized, the world is not, so that the mastery of a single department of knowledge is often as frustrating as a closetful of left shoes. In a society whose means of production and communication are highly technological, the most ordinary matters of politics, economics, and law become so involved that the individual citizen feels paralyzed. The growth of bureaucracy and totalitarianism has, then, far less to do with sinister influences than with the mere mechanics of control in an impossibly complex system of interrelations.

Yet if this were the whole story scientific knowledge would already have reached the point of total self-strangulation. That it has done so only in some degree is because the scientist actually understands interrelations by other means than analysis and step-by-step thinking. In practice he relies heavily upon intuition — upon a process of intelligence whose steps are unconscious, which does not appear to work in the painfully linear, one-thing-at-a-time fashion of thought, and which can therefore grasp whole fields of related detail simultaneously.


Understanding nature by means of thought is like trying to make out the contours of an enormous cave with the aid of a small flashlight casting a bright but very thin beam. The path of the light and the series of “spots” over which it has passed must be retained in memory, and from this record the general appearance of the cave must laboriously be reconstructed.

In practice, then, the scientist must perforce use his intuition for grasping the wholes of nature, though he does not trust it. He must always stop to check intuitive insight with the thin bright beam of analytic thought.


Quickly dump everything you’re keeping in your head.

And I mean everything. Not just tasks but thoughts, concerns, questions, and ideas too.

Get it all out. Don’t worry about sorting them, you can do that later. Just get them out of your head so that they can stop spinning around, using up precious brainpower and space.


Fighting against non-European peoples, du Picq had witnessed the power of military organization at first hand. Had not Napoleon said that, whereas one Mamluk was the equal of three Frenchman, a hundred Frenchmen could confidently take on five times their number in Mamluk? Individual men were often cowards; however, having trained together and standing together in formation, they were transformed. A new social force, known as cohesion, made its appearance as comrade sustained comrade and mutual shame prevented each other from running away.


As with Rousseau, every “savage” was supposedly equal to every other and did not have any authority over him. Thus the communities in which they lived were understood as mere “hordes.” They lacked the organization needed for taking large-scale collective action, let alone building and maintaining a sophisticated civilization.


Work from a clean desk. When you have a neat desk and an orderly office, you look like a successful person. On the other hand, when your desk is cluttered with all sorts of things, you look confused, disorderly, and incompetent. People conclude that it would be unsafe to do business with you.

When you work from a clean desk, you can focus and concentrate on one thing at a time.

Single focus is the key to high productivity, and a clean desk is the key to single focus.


Limitations, constraints, arbitrary boundaries — rules, dread rules, themselves — therefore not only ensure social harmony and psychological stability, they make the creativity that renews order possible. What lurks, therefore, under the explicitly stated desire for complete freedom — as expressed, say, by the anarchist, or the nihilist — is not a positive desire, striving for enhanced creative expression, as in the romanticized caricature of the artist. It is instead a negative desire — a desire for the complete absence of responsibility, which is simply not commensurate with genuine freedom. This is the lie of objections to the rules.


Constraints simplify memory.


The multidivisional structure made such a mixture possible. Amongst its other virtues, the new structure in effect turned a large company into groups of smaller-scale entities. It provided incentives for numerous managers to work together in a spirit of cooperation as they moved up the corporate ladder. Sloan fostered this behavior when he established cross-divisional committees, and made sure that executives served on several of them at once time. This ensured that important decision makers communicated with one another and helped reconcile the goals of “decentralization with coordinated control.”

Coordinated control came primarily through financial reporting and capital allocations. Sloan worked hard on these issues, and GM soon became one of the most sophisticated of all American companies in its use of budget targets and financial ratios such as inventory turnover, fixed versus variable costs, and profit as a percentage of sales. This was difficult to pull off, and GM did not always do it well. Managers made continual adjustments along the production lines based on what the number were telling top executives at headquarters. Sloan summed it up: “From decentralization we get initiative, responsibility, development of personnel, decisions closest to the facts, flexibility… From co-ordination we get efficiencies and economies. It must be apparent that co-ordinated decentralization is not an easy concept to apply.”


Rather than trying to shape human nature, the Enlightenment hope for progress was concentrated on human institutions. Human-made systems like governments, laws, schools, markets, and international bodies are a natural target for the application of reason to human betterment.

In this way of thinking, government is not a divine fiat to reign, a synonym for “society,” or an avatar of the national, religious, or racial soul. It is a human intervention, tacitly agreed to in a social contract, designed to enhance the welfare of citizens, by coordinating their behavior and discouraging selfish acts that may be tempting to every individual but leave everyone worse off. As the most famous product of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, put it, in order to secure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.


Apple’s value crucially depended on the singular vision of a particular person. This hints at the strange way in which the companies that create new technology often resemble feudal monarchies rather than organizations that are supposedly more “modern.” A unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades. Paradoxically, impersonal bureaucracies staffed by trained professionals can last longer than any lifetime, but they usually act with short time horizons.


Because of the many hospitals, doctors, care facilities, and public and private agencies involved, the amount of paperwork was enormous. Consider the number of people this paperwork represented. For every doctor and nurse who treated Mrs. Jones, there must have been a dozen billing people in several different organizations. It was like an old-fashioned military operation. For every soldier in the field, you had twenty people behind the lines handling administration.


Bureaucratization is a penalty paid for success. The original purpose of any administrative mechanism is that the division of labor it makes possible produces a superior overall performance. It permits specialization of functions. In its early stages it even spurs creativity. By establishing a routine response for the most frequent occurrences, it frees energies for exploring new frontiers. The difficulty arises when routine becomes an end in itself, when the internal problems of the bureaucracy become more complicated than the external problems with which it is supposed to deal.


On the other hand the more insecure the top executives the greater becomes their demands on the administrative machine. The committee system of which so much has been written is not only an organizational device; it reflects also spiritual uncertainty. It grows out of the notion that difficulties of policy making reflect above all the unavailability of fact; that by consulting all interested parties all significant viewpoints emerge. Any failure of policy is ascribed to an administrative breakdown and calls ever more committees into being. The multiplication of committees causes coordination to replace judgment as a virtue or at least to become identified with it. Because any point of view to be accepted must be “cleared” by an ever increasing circle of officials or departments, a psychological distortion takes place: the process of arriving at decisions is so arduous that it leads to the confusions of an agreement between the participants with a substantive achievement. Agreement is often attainable precisely because it is formulated so vaguely that it amounts to a truism.

Another quality of the committee system is that it puts a premium on safety and not on great conception. A policy dilemma is produce because every course of action seems to involve drawbacks — else there would be no need for discussion. But in assessing the merits of alternative measures, the risks seem always more certain than the opportunities. No one can prove that an opportunity in fact existed, but failure to foresee a danger involves swift retribution.


It is also important to understand that innovation cannot become an end in itself. A society cannot dispense with a standard of average performance, else it loses its cohesiveness and the impetus provided by a specialization of functions. Its challenge is to strike a balance between the requirements of organization and inspiration. Routine is useful as long as it is confined to ordinary problems. But for its purpose must be that it frees energies for tasks of adaptation and the creation of new goals.


These highly successful person (HSPs) have many of their daily distractions of life handled for them, allowing them to devote all of their attention to whatever is immediately before them. They seem to live completely in the moment. Their staff handle correspondence, make appointments, interrupt those appointments when a more important one is waiting, and help to plan their days for maximum efficiency. Their bills are paid on time, their car is serviced when required, they’re given reminders of projects due, and their assistants send suitable gifts to the HSP’s loved ones on birthdays and anniversaries. Their ultimate prize if it all works? A Zen-like focus.


The most fundamental principle of the organized mind is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.


And that brings the focus back to the difference between the elusive promise of big-picture, blue-sky thinking and the true value that a consultant can almost always provide. Real consulting isn’t about change or leadership or vision. It’s about helping people manage what one might call Industrial Prussianism — organizing activities through highly rational bureaucratic routines that promote effectiveness, efficiency, and honesty. The Prussians beat the French in 1871, but not because they had inspired leadership. They won because their system was based on rules, orders, and norms that allowed their army to run efficiently and without the need for heroes. Likewise, Industrial Prussianism skips the heroes and focuses on efficiency and frugality, with training and accountability. The only point of strategic planning is to think through all contingencies in advance so as to make fewer tactical execution errors; he who makes the fewest and has the best-organized and best-trained troops wins. The companies that survive, like the best armies, can recover from unexpected blows of fate and competitor breakthroughs.


As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols. That way, when you return to something you’ve done, you can make it routine. Instinctualize conscious control.


Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.


Like most other forms of automatic responding, it offers a shortcut through the density of modern life. Once we have made up our minds about an issue, stubborn consistency allows us a very appealing luxury: We really don’t have to think hard about the issue anymore. We don’t have to sift through the blizzard of information we encounter every day to identify relevant facts; we don’t have to expend the mental energy to weigh the pros and cons; we don’t have to make any further tough decisions.


The compact tribes win, and the compact tribes are the tamest. Civilization begins, because the beginning of civilization is a military advantage.


The SS were well organized. They chose to make their arrests when their victims were helpless. Prisoners being transported into concentration camps were given no opportunities to organize balances of force in their favor. They had no chance to fight back in a way that would give them advantage. Collaborative planning enables murders to be conducted with cold efficiency.


He noted that political outcomes seldom correspond with popular preferences, that there is a very low level of participation and political awareness, and that real decisions are taken by much smaller groups of organized interests. Not all groups are equally capable of organizing for collective action. It is much more difficult to organize large group as opposed to small groups, since large groups that provide benefits to all their members invite free riding.


Simply being known as a collector was prestigious, according to this humanist formula. To collect was not simply to accumulate but to generate knowledge and inter-connection between things.


A deeply conflicted person can therefore be stopped, metaphorically, with the pressure of a single finger exerted on his chest (even though he may lash out against such an obstacle). To move forward with resolve, it is necessary to be organized — to be directed toward something singular and identifiable.


The Apollo missions embody the power of clear communication and interlocking systems. Systems are processes and interactions that have been formalized into rules or standards. Once those standards have been adopted, they mobilize incredible power. The most iconic manifestation of the system is the countdown checklist operation. A representative for each mechanical and electric component of a space-bound rocket is required to give a positive word before the thrilling proclamation of “All systems go — proceed with operation” that precedes a countdown and launch. It is a system that formalizes and simplifies the thinking of the thousands of people working on the rockets. In optimized systems, all the people involved contribute to their fullest, knowing that their individual work is essential to the whole — and that the do not have to understand the whole in order for it to work.


If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that nature does not know it!


The separation of concerns. This is what I mean by “focusing one’s attention upon some aspect”: it does not mean ignoring the other aspects, it is just doing justice to the fact that from this aspect’s point of view, the other is irrelevant. It is being one - and multiple-track minded simultaneously.


In order to obtain a statistically sound and reliable result, the amount of data needed to support the result often grows exponentially with the dimensionality. Also, organizing and searching data often relies on detecting areas where objects form groups with similar properties; in high-dimensional data, however, all objects appear to be sparse and dissimilar in many ways.


I started out 28 years ago with a total disdain for organizational matters. I just thought everyone who comes to this should be mission-driven, and we’re not going to have any hierarchy, and we’re going to pay everyone the same thing. About 5 years into this, I realized if I didn’t become obsessed with the very mundane matter of how to manage effectively, we’d never get there.


Our minds are quick to convert new optical experiences into familiar stories, favored viewpoints, comforting metaphors. No wonder, for how else can we manage optical data flows of 20MB/s without a million predetermined categories for filing, without the rage for wanting to conclude?


By a “genuine” bureaucracy, we refer to an organized hierarchy of skills and authorities, within which each office and rank is restricted to its specialized tasks. Those who occupy these offices do not own the equipment required for their duties, and they, personally, have no authority: the authority they wield is vested in the offices they occupy. Their salary, along with the honor due each rank, is the sole renumeration offered.

The bureaucrat or civil servant, accordingly, is above all an expert whose knowledge and skill have been attested to by qualifying examination, and later in his career, qualifying experience. As a specially qualified man, his access to his office and his advancement to higher offices are regulated by more or less formal tests of competence. By aspiration and by achievement, he is set for a career, regulated according to merit and seniority, within the prearranged hierarchy of the bureaucracy. He is, moreover, a disciplined man, whose conduct can be readily calculated, and who will carry out policies even if they go against his grain, for his “merely personal opinions” are strictly segregated from his official life, outlook, and duties. Socially, the bureaucrat is likely to be rather formal with his colleagues, as the smooth functioning of a bureaucratic hierarchy requires a proper balance between personal good will and adequate social distance according to rank.

Even if its members only approximate the principled image of such a man, the bureaucracy is a most efficient form of human organization. But such an organized corps is quite difficult to develop, and the attempt can easily result in an apparatus that is obstreperous and clumsy, hide-bound and snarled with procedure, rather than an instrument of policy.

The integrity of a bureaucracy as a unit of a government depends upon whether or not, as a corps of officials, it survives changes of political administration. The integrity of a professional bureaucrat depends upon whether or not his official conduct, and even his person, embodies the status codes of the official, foremost among them political neutrality.


In the post-Civil-War era, that economy was the dynamic; the “trusts” — as policies and events make amply clear — could readily use the relatively weak governmental apparatus for their own ends. That both state and federal governments were decisively limited in their power to regulate, in fact meant that they were themselves regulatable by the larger moneyed interests. Their powers were scattered and unorganized; the powers of the industrial and financial corporations concentrated and interlocked.


The stability threshold in any political system, from your local community to the emerging global system, turns on whether the majority of key players within that system — those with the power to make the system work or to disrupt it — believe that working within the system is more likely to produce a better future for themselves, their families, or the unit of society they represent than working outside the system. Even if there are some stragglers or those who resist the system, if the majority are thus invested in it, it will work, and it will resist attempts to upset it — provided the system also has effective mechanisms for dealing with such attempts and for avoiding the pitfalls of “tyranny of the majority.”


Rationalist decision makers simply need to know much more than ever before. Of course, with computers our capacity to collect and to semi-process information has grown, but information is not the same as knowledge. The production of knowledge is analogous to the manufacture of any other product. We begin with the raw material of facts (of which we often have a more than adequate supply). We pretreat these by means of classification, tabulation, summary, and so on, and then proceed to the assembly of correlations and comparisons. But the final product, conclusions, does not simply roll off the production line. Indeed, without powerful overarching explanatory schemes (or theories), whatever knowledge there is in the mountain of data we daily amass is often invisible.


Software architecture is about making fundamental structural choices that are costly to change once implemented.


Enterprise capabilities stem from senior management, and include culture, tight governance mechanisms, and strategic vision. Enablers, however, are the task of middle management. They include design, infrastructure, process, protocol, responsibilities, and performance management. The enablers turn vision into reality.


At the lower levels of an organization, the need is for adaptability and skill in operation within a framework which must be treated as given. But the top executives must possess the inspiration and creativity to establish the framework itself.


Despite appearances to the contrary, most creative people are highly organized. It’s just that the organization doesn’t necessarily take the form of neatly labeled files and calendars that record meetings and commitments — the standard trappings of structure. Those “seat of the pants” presentations often reflect not lack of preparation but instead a deeply assimilated knowledge of the topic acquired through intense and often extended research or observation — sometimes with a dash of intuition thrown in.


Việc này cũng có thể ví như 1 đất nước mà không có ngân hàng, và người dân ai cũng phải cất giữ tiền của mình ở nhà. Dòng tiền không lưu hành bên ngoài mà bị đình trệ, nên quốc gia không có nguồn lực để thực hiện những kế hoạch lớn. Nhìn vào từng hộ dân thì cũng thấy cả đống tiền, nhưng tất thảy đều nằm chết cứng ở đó và không mang lại lợi lộc gì cho quốc gia hết. Quan điểm của nhân dân cũng thế. Hỏi riêng từng người thì ai cũng sẽ có ý kiến, nhưng các ý kiến đều bị chia nhỏ manh mún thành hàng chục triệu thứ khác nhau. Không có cách đúc kết, tập trung lại thì rốt cuộc chúng chẳng có tác dụng gì cho toàn bộ đất nước.


Hiện nay, Việt Nam có hệ thống pháp luật phức tạp bậc nhất thế giới. Hệ thống này được đặc trưng bởi sự đồ sộ, rắc rối do có quá nhiều loại văn bản pháp luật được ban hành, nhưng lại có quá nhiều kẽ hở và lỗ hổng, các quy định chồng chéo, mâu thuẫn, thiếu đồng bộ với nhau, gây cản trở và đè nặng lên người dân, doanh nghiệp. Hệ thống pháp luật bị coi là thiếu tính thực tiễn và tính khả thi, thiếu sự minh bạch và không đi vào cuộc sống do quá trình xây dựng pháp luật thiếu tư duy, tầm nhìn, đầy cục bộ, thiếu công bằng và thể hiện lợi ích nhóm.


Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity.


Log all your key thoughts, realizations, decisions and taken steps on paper. It shouldn’t be long or long-term clear, only clear to today’s you. Gibberish to a bystander.

It’s your L2 cache. L1 is fast but short and prone to distraction. If you log everything into L2, then returning to the task becomes much easier, because the whole context is right there.

The downside is you have to spend time drawing. The unintuitive upside is that by writing you may make it clear to yourself what maybe wasn’t clear.

IDE may be good at where you were, but it doesn’t know what you thought.


The gist is to treat your brain, during a deep work session, as a stage. As a session starts, you slowly introduce essential actors (objects, tasks, and pieces of information) into a scene (short-term memory aka cache). To properly light up a scene, you need to use some energy — mental energy.

When you get distracted, the entire stage collapses, and it takes effort to rebuild it from the ground up.


The increasing veneration fo the state, the admiration of power, and of bigness for bigness’ sake, the enthusiasm for “organization” of everything (we now call it “planning”), and that “inability to leave anything to the simple power of organic growth.”


And that brings the focus back to the difference between the elusive promise of big-picture, blue-sky thinking and the true value that a consultant can almost always provide. Real consulting isn’t about change or leadership or vision. It’s about helping people manage what one might call Industrial Prussianism — organizing activities through highly rational bureaucratic routines that promote effectiveness, efficiency, and honesty. The Prussians beat the French in 1871, but not because they had inspired leadership. They won because their system was based on rules, orders, and norms that allowed their army to run efficiently and without the need for heroes. Likewise, Industrial Prussianism skips the heroes and focuses on efficiency and frugality, with training and accountability. The only point of strategic planning is to think through all contingencies in advance so as to make fewer tactical execution errors; he who makes the fewest and has the best-organized and best-trained troops wins. The companies that survive, like the best armies, can recover from unexpected blows of fate and competitor breakthroughs.


He found that we can hold only around seven items in our working memories at once. Trying to handle more than sevenish things in our minds simultaneously requires us to start making chunks, or to create groups of items that go together. If we can’t free up slots in our mind by making chunks when a lot of information is coming at us, we become overloaded, and once our working memory is filled, we begin to make more errors and less accurate judgments. Our ability to function falls off fast.


Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.


Yet, if Sloanism was built on decentralization, it was controlled decentralization. The divisions were marshaled together to use their joint-buying clout to secure cheaper prices for everything from steel to stationery. And Sloan and Du Point created a powerful general office, packed full of numbers men, to oversee this elaborate structure, making sure, for example, that the divisions treated franchised salesmen correctly. Divisional managers looked after market share; the general executives monitored their performance, allocating more resources to the highest achievers. At the top, a 10-man executive committee, headed by Du Poet and Sloan, set a centralized corporate strategy.

The beauty of Sloanism was that the structure of a company could be expanded easily: if research came up with a new product, a new division could be set up. “I do not regard size as a barrier,” Sloan wrote. “To me it is only a problem of management.” Above all, the multidivisional firm was designed “as an objective organization, as distinguished from the type that get lost in the subjectivity of personalities.” In other words, it was not Henry Ford.


There was an irony in the inventor of the assembly line being himself out-organized. What Ford did for physical machines, Sloan did for human beings.


However, a detail can only be omitted from an abstraction if it is unimportant. An abstraction can go wrong in 2 ways. First, it can include details that are not really important. The second is when an abstraction omits details that are really important. Then it is a false abstraction: it might appear simple, but in reality it isn’t.


What interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power position - that driving the train is the way to shape the companies’s futures. The truth is, it’s not. Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.


Our minds are basically organized like human computers. They function to a great extent in much the same way. So, if we want to improve our daily productivity, we need to empty the cache of temporary “files” and reboot for our brains to allow us perform at our peak levels.


Log all your key thoughts, realizations, decisions and taken steps on paper. It shouldn’t be long or long-term clear, only clear to today’s you. Gibberish to a bystander.

It’s your L2 cache. L1 is fast but short and prone to distraction. If you log everything into L2, then returning to the task becomes much easier, because the whole context is right there.

The downside is you have to spend time drawing. The unintuitive upside is that by writing you may make it clear to yourself what maybe wasn’t clear.

IDE may be good at where you were, but it doesn’t know what you thought.


The gist is to treat your brain, during a deep work session, as a stage. As a session starts, you slowly introduce essential actors (objects, tasks, and pieces of information) into a scene (short-term memory aka cache). To properly light up a scene, you need to use some energy — mental energy.

When you get distracted, the entire stage collapses, and it takes effort to rebuild it from the ground up.