1/ I recently finished digging into a body of work around extracted tacit mental models of business expertise, and it is wild.
It turns out that business experts all share a common mental model of business, and you can do all sorts of interesting things if you have that model.
Conversation
Looks like I need to read a lot of academic stuff to catch up with this, but I spend a lot of time thinking about how we call ourselves "professionals" but that in some endeavours (e.g. sports, chess, etc) those at the very top are preternaturally removed from the rest.
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what is the business equivalent of the chess grandmaster who can play a dozen simultaneous games blindfolded? Maybe this work answers that q. Is that Elon? Bezos? It's less obvious exactly what their preternatural talent is, I think.
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I think if we take DiBello’s triad model seriously, we can be more concrete about this.
e.g. John Malone was preternaturally gifted at the capital leg of things (he was the first in cable to see a shift in the capital env -> used debt+tax cover to expand in the cable business)
Others show their expertise by skating to where the puck is; they ‘read environmental cues faster than novices and then work out the necessary changes in the other two legs of the triad affected by a change in one’.
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(At least, that’s how DiBello characterises it).