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If you put two experienced business operators together, you’d be able to trigger a useful conversation just by talking about the time when you made this bet that sapped some sizeable % of company resources for a number of years, with nothing to show for it.

“Focus means saying no to good ideas” means nothing to you unless you’ve also had the experience of “I spent 4 bloody years and burnt millions going after this business goal when there was actually enough evidence to stop by year 2.”

It strikes me that every business operator eventually comes to realise that “opportunities have costs”. This sounds very trite, but I guarantee you you will make this mistake at least once, because it’s so hard to internalise.

Like, ‘oh, just do this thing because you need the money’ is sometimes a good idea, but it is guaranteed to eventually screw you up. The problem is when you’re faced with this scenario:

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Jun 20

And “I run a small business and I need to make payroll so I’m going to say yes to this product opportunity that has questionable returns and is going to lock up 40% of my engineering resources for the next 8 months and 20% forever (yay maintenance + support costs!)

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Anyway I’m aware I’m barely making sense, but there are certain business experiences and business realities you can really only have in a conversation between operators, with some shared experience base, preferably over drinks, and I can’t really write about those.

Another example that is slightly easier to describe: If you operate in the West, you’re used to contracts being a thing and regulations being quite legible. That is, if you want to do something, you can probably call someone and have them explain to you some legible process.

In many Asian countries, this is NOT TRUE. There is a legible process, which is what you read on government websites, and then there’s the REAL way things get done. Being an operator in developing Asian countries is partially figuring out how to figure out the real process.

Ok so that’s actually the 101 level skill. In a conversation, I can tell, usually within minutes, if the person I’m talking to gets this deeply.

But the 201 level skill is this: how do you *CONTEXT SWITCH*? Singapore is a high legibility good rule of law country. Many companies have HQs here. But they run ops in adjacent countries. How do you manage the tension between these two regimes?