Strategy as Simple Rules

A good rule does not argue with you. Strategy as Simple Rules simply waits for you to break it, and then presents the bill.

The rule protects you from your future self — the fellow who will be tired, hungry, and full of reasons to make an exception. Rules exist for the days when reasons are cheap.

Strip it to the floor and you find an old instruction: look carefully, judge slowly, act decently. The new name exists because the old instruction keeps being forgotten.

In any Indian office there is one person who knows where everything is, whom to call, and how things actually get done. The organisation chart does not show this person. Reality does.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. You will meet this idea again this week, wearing different clothes. Now you will recognise it.