Some ideas recur across these essays. Each term below is defined in the sense I use it, with links to the essays where it does the work. Terms used in a single essay are explained there.
Accountability. One owner for every outcome. When two managers are responsible, no manager is responsible, and advice without accountability is just a recommendation. See The mortal sin; Traditional consulting will die by PowerPoint.
Chaos. The property of non-linear systems in which a small change in the starting conditions leads to exponentially diverging results: you cannot predict the path. See The Planning Fallacy; More is different.
Determinism. The inherited cause-and-effect view that action A causes outcome B, and that knowing where a system starts lets you plan it in any detail. It does not hold for systems that people are part of. See The Planning Fallacy; You either win or you lose.
Industrial-age management. Assumptions from an era of self-contained firms: squeezing partners for shareholder value, fixed working hours, mandatory office presence and rigid structures. Obsolete and ineffective now. See The Lost Art of Business Symbiosis; The People manifesto.
Judgement. What is left to sell once machines make output cheap: knowing which output matters, and understanding what sits behind it. See Traditional consulting will die by PowerPoint; From punch cards to tell-n-code.
Non-linear systems. Systems where effects are not proportional to causes, many causes interact through feedback, and the future cannot be forecast in detail or failures traced to a single root cause. Almost every organisation and market is one. See The Lost Art of Business Symbiosis; The Planning Fallacy; More is different; You either win or you lose.
People, not human resources. Staff are not static company assets to be managed; they are people who deserve a graceful workplace. See The People manifesto; The Lost Art of Business Symbiosis.
Planning fallacy. The deterministic belief that plans can be made at any level of detail and for any time horizon. In non-linear systems they cannot, so plan with humility. (Not quite Kahneman’s sense of the term, which is about optimism.) See The Planning Fallacy; More is different.
Project distress. A project that has drifted materially on schedule or budget, missing milestones, with unhappy sponsors or low morale, and that has to be recovered while it keeps running. See How to fix a Ferrari engine on the run; More is different.
Sunk cost. Carrying on, or over-correcting, because of what has already been spent: throwing good money after bad. See How to fix a Ferrari engine on the run; You either win or you lose.
Transparency. Share everything with everyone by default, and hold back only for legal or contractual reasons, to protect intellectual property, or where sharing could harm someone. Nothing signals trust more, and it is the basis of good team decisions. See The surprising road to better decisions; The People manifesto; for pay, The pay transparency directive nobody seems to be reading.