The Reality Check: Testing Business Ideas Against the Real World with Cedric Chin

Nigel Rawlins: Cedric, welcome to the Wisepreneurs podcast. Could you tell us something about yourself and where you're from?

Cedric Chin: Hi, I'm talking to you from Singapore, and I came from, Malaysia, an island that you may or may not have heard of called Borneo. I was born there, and I think we're talking because I write a website, it's basically a media company, but, you know, if I want to be absolutely honest, it's a blog.

If I want to sound fancy, I say it's a media company, and it's a blog about, accelerating business expertise. It's basically a twin pronged, uh, publication about how do you get good at business and how do you get good at business faster. And I think we're gonna talk a lot about the ideas in that blog, um, because you are a member and we've talked before about the audience for this podcast and the topics that you cover.

And I think they, it should be quite interesting, .

Nigel Rawlins: Well, I think you're being very humble about Commoncog. It's way more than a blog, this is my second year of membership. When I read it, it just blows my mind about how you think about things and how you write about things. And you go very deep into stuff that, you know, in some cases I'd never heard of.

And then when I read it, I go, this is fantastic. So So, tell us how Commoncog came about, because it's way more than a blog.

Cedric Chin: Right. Yeah. So the, origin for Commoncog was that I ran a business in Vietnam for a boss, and we basically built the business up from nothing to 4. 5 million in annual revenue, uh, completely bootstrapped, didn't raise funding and when I left that company, uh, so it was a point of sale company, which made, you know, point of sale systems. Most of the customers were in Singapore, um, but the engineering team which I ran and basically, uh, uh, much of the actual product building happened out of Vietnam.

Because we were an outsourcing company, and he actually hired me to change from an outsourcing company, uh, which is not great in terms of, uh, you know, as far as businesses go, outsourcing companies are not that great. You're basically trading time for money, and try to transform it into a product company.

But anyway, I helped him build that, and, you know, now the company's doing a lot bet I mean, even better than when I left it, and he's basically retired, or he can retire anytime. Um, and then I, I left to start my own company. You know, he, he told me, do you want to stay for another year or another couple of years?

And I was like, no, I want, I want what you have. I've helped you build it for three years. Um, and I, and it's a wonderful journey. I want what you've experienced for myself. And when I left, I, I had all these experiences dealing with counterparties from the region who were, I call them traditional Chinese businessmen, but every culture has their own terms for people like this, right?

These are people who are not very educated. Maybe most of the time they don't learn anything about business from school. They learn from the school of hard knocks. They learn from operating businesses in the real world and failing, right?

And taking the lessons from very painful trial and error. Um, and these were our counterparties and in many cases they ran circles around us. Um, of course, in some cases we, we did this defeat them. I mean, we were, we had, we were operating in a very fierce, competitive space, and we did, we did do better than our competitors.

But when I started writing, so I, I, I left and I took stock of my skills. And one of the things that quickly became clear to me was that. I may know how to run a company operationally. I may know how to do software engineering and run an engineering team and deal with all the mess and the corruption that is Vietnam.

Um, but, uh, I didn't know how to do marketing and I didn't, and I knew I was bad at sales. And the reason I knew I was bad at sales was because my boss, uh, put me on some deals and that didn't go too well. So I told myself that I needed to get good at either sales or marketing. And I decided to get good at marketing, and I started a blog to sort of make sense of the business experiences that I had.

And also to sort of reflect and have an outlet for some of the ideas that I had around careers. And, was how Commoncog got started. It was really a, an avenue to exercise and to learn content marketing. But over time, I need to credit like a business mentor.

So sometime during the pandemic in 2020, this business mentor sort of said, you know, you should just turn on paid memberships. Because I didn't realize that the entire Substack newsletter boom had been going on due to the pandemic. And I turned on memberships, and at the time I was helping another company with their content marketing because I was starting to get good.

Um, I wasn't sure if I was good enough, right, so I was sort of practicing in Commoncog and practicing in this SaaS company. SaaS means Software as a Service. And, um, uh, and whatever I learned in one area, I would apply to another area. And, at that point in time, right, I turn on subscriptions and very quickly it turns out that there were people reading who liked it and they started paying.

And so now Commoncog is basically, um, this paid membership site. There are free articles, but many of the articles are paid. And increasingly over the past year or so, Commoncog now comes with a case library of business cases. So many of the concepts that I find are incredibly theoretical, you need to have some grounding in real world stories, real, real world events to have an understanding of how to actually put to practice these concepts in your business.

And I think the big thing that I did correctly from the beginning was that I had this very strong notion of, uh, Everything that Commoncog publishes has to be tested against reality. Uh, and if it's not tested against reality, I will say that it's not tested against reality. Because as a business operator myself, um, I only really want ideas that work.

And there are lots of people out there who will sell you a shiny, nice, articulate narrative, right? Or, or framework that hasn't actually been put to the test. And the people that are talking or like writing these very nice essays or, uh, sounding very intelligent on podcasts, right, like what I am doing now, um, I When you go take a look at their work, right?

They actually haven't done very much. And so Commoncog has always had a focus on testing the ideas against reality. And as a result, uh, I think the quality sort of speaks for itself. Now a lot of the membership are business operators, uh, but also hedge fund managers and investors of various stripes. I think that's a very long-winded answer to sort of explain what Commoncog

Nigel Rawlins: I think it's a perfect one. So basically Commoncog is a business now.

And, I guess you could call it a media, uh, empire, I suppose, because it is selling some interesting information. Well, let's talk about expertise in business and your focus, which is about accelerating expertise. Where would you like to start there? I mean, we could talk with, uh, how you came across Leo DiBello's triad, which I think is very interesting. Where did it start where you started getting into some of the deeper topics that I find fascinating? Now, interestingly, you're half my age. And I've been running a business, a marketing services business for 25 years and I've worked with a former very strategic business mentor who taught me a lot about business and then when I read your stuff, unfortunately he's passed away and if he was alive today I think you would have a fascinating conversation with him. So let's talk about how do you gain more expertise in business.

Cedric Chin: This is, uh, I can go on and on about this.

So, I was interested in expertise acceleration, because I wanted to get good at business quickly, right?

And there had to be better answers than what I was coming up by myself out there, watching these people, these incredible traditional Chinese businessmen, you know, the phrase that I use for them. Watching them in action, they're incredible. They're really, really good. But they took a lifetime to get good, and they took some hard, I'm sure they had some hard knocks on the way to their expertise, right?

So I, I think the best place to sort of start is just sort of to talk about my quest for, um, expertise research. So I started digging into the literature with the belief that, hey, there's probably people who have figured this out faster than I have, better than I have. How do you accelerate expertise? And expertise of all kinds, right?

And if you Google, um, about, uh, how do you speed up or accelerate expertise, it's very likely that you come across. Uh, something called deliberate practice. Now, deliberate practice is a real thing. It's a technical term. It doesn't, it does not mean practicing deliberately. It is a technical term, uh, describing a specific type of practice with a specific number of properties.

Alright? And the problem with deliberate practice, if you've looked into the research, right, and not just sort of like gone off of pop psychology books, uh, like Malcolm Gladwell's like 10, 000 hour rule, uh, if you actually dig into like what the expertise research says, uh, and this is, deliberate practice was discovered by a researcher named K. Anders Ericsson, who sadly passed away, I think, last year or the year before, quite recently. You will find, by the way, that deliberate practice, as good as it is, as much as it's still considered the gold standard for accelerated skill acquisition, um, it's impossible to apply to business. And the reason it's impossible to apply to business is because it requires you to have a coach, first of all.

Secondly, it requires you to have, um, it requires that domain to have a history of pedagogical development. And pedagogical development is a highfalutin word for, um, there has to be a known set of practices, exercises, uh, for skills. And you basically, all the skills that you have in business, or in tennis, or in chess, right, or in, you know, violin, um, can be broke down into subskills.

And pedagogical development means that there is a history of practitioners, instructors, coaches who have worked out what the optimal drill is for that subskill and then have worked out how to combine the practice for those subskills into the overall skills. And that's the only way you can do deliberate practice, right?

Don't, don't believe any of these blogs that you read online saying that you can apply deliberate practice to investing or businesses. It's not possible, because nobody has done the hard work of figuring out the pedagogical work, you know, practice for the sub skills to combine into the top level skills.

That isn't to say that you can't use some ideas from deliberate practice, but this is a lot harder than you might think. And we can talk about that if you want, because I've also investigated that. Now, if you want to get good at expertise, it turns out that the US military figured this out three decades ago, so around 1987, in 1989, they started realizing that it was not possible to use deliberate practice to accelerate skills for their soldiers, right, because they wanted to make sure that their soldiers were good enough to not die when they are sent to the battlefield. And so they funded this alternative approach to expertise called Naturalistic Decision Making. And it's a terrible name for a very interesting field of study that is still relatively unknown. And the reason it's relatively unknown is because it's it's not highly regarded amongst the elite psychology departments, which tend to be a bit more data driven.

They only take research seriously if you can provide a randomized controlled trial, something with proper statistical testing. Naturalistic Decision Making takes an ethnographical approach, like observing experts in the real world, which is very messy, and you can't really isolate things, uh, you know, you can't really isolate things like in a controlled experiment.

But anyway, um, Naturalistic Decision Making gave me the answers I was looking for, because the approach that NDM uses, right, is that they've developed a method to extract tacit mental models of expertise from the heads of experts. And tacit here means that it cannot be Uh, explain through words, right?

Think of riding a bicycle. Uh, as much as you want to explain how to ride a bicycle to a kid, uh, you can't communicate how to ride a bicycle, right? There's something else going on that cannot be captured by words. And a lot of expertise is like this, right? A lot of expertise is, uh, you ask an expert, how do you know what to do?

And they'll say, it just felt right. And that's the most you can do. Well, NDM experts, NDM practitioners have figured out a way to extract this invisible decision making process that happens in the heads of experts and turn that into training programs, right? So this is a very long winded answer for like, how do you accelerate expertise in business?

And maybe I should pause here before I explain how NDM ties into business.

Nigel Rawlins: I think you're on the roll there because, um, you've already grabbed two of, two of my things, the Naturalistic Decision Making and tacit knowledge and expertise. You're on the right path there because the interesting thing for business is, as you said, you were observing the Chinese businessmen who, um, I guess through trial and error, got good or failure, and don't forget, um, a lot of people would have failed and they disappeared. Or maybe they're working for somebody else. So, do you think you were able to observe what they were good at, these Chinese businessmen?

Cedric Chin: I wasn't able to observe then, I think. So I knew that there were certain cues, there were certain things that were happening that I didn't understand. But now, now, with, um more knowledge with, uh, the work of Lia DiBello, which I should talk about next, I suppose.

It's actually possible to take a look at their expertise and identify aspects of their expertise, right, and also identify bits of their expertise that are not so good.

Um, so, Uh, to sort of tie this together, and if anybody listening to this is a big reader and you want to dig into this yourself, um, there are two huge, very big, very expensive books. I think it's like a thousand pages, uh, each. Um, the deliberate practice approach is typified by the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise, and the NDM approach, the more interesting approach, the more, practical if you're investing or business, right, and you can't rely on an established syllabus to improve, is the Oxford Handbook of Expertise.

So I highly recommend both. I recommend if you're a practical sort of person who, you know, doesn't read that much, I recommend the Oxford Handbook of Expertise more. But it's a very academic book, and it's basically each chapter is a contribution from a different researcher summarizing their life's work.

And in this book, there is a chapter by Lia DiBello called Expertise in Business, and that's how I found her, right? It was like you open the table of contents, there's like Expertise in Intelligence, Intelligence Services, meaning like the CIA, right? There's Expertise in, um, whatchamacallit, in all kinds of vocations.

Expertise in the military, Expertise in strategy, right, in a military context, and then sort of tucked away in one of the chapters is Expertise in Business, and I was like, oh, what is this? And it turns out that Lia DiBello comes from a business family, and she's well trained in these methods of extracting, you know, tacit, uh, mental models for expertise.

And she decided, in the late 2000s, with the help of a grant from the National Science Foundation, to do a project extracting, uh, the expertise of business from the heads of experts, of expert business people. And she discovered that every great business person has the exact same model of business in their heads, right?

And I found that mind blowing. And then I, you know, I then went on to read every single thing she'd ever published. Um, and then I went and reached out to her and I interviewed her. And then I proceeded to organize all of Commoncog according to this extracted mental model of expertise that she'd found, right?

Um, so, uh, Where do I begin? I guess I should describe what the extracted mental model of expertise is instead of teasing it. So she discovered that business expertise are, uh, two, two things. They consist of two things. And we'll talk about the first thing, which is actually not, I mean, it's quite obvious, I believe.

Um, good business people are, uh, they have a property that she calls, um, uh, cognitive agility, which means they're able to change their minds when new data, new, uh, evidence presents itself. And I'm sure anybody who has run a business for any amount of time will know that that's very necessary in business.

You cannot lie to yourself. When things change, the market changes, you hear things from customers, you have to decide like, hey, um, is this something that I have to take seriously? Or, you know, do I have to change my beliefs about the world, about the market that I operate in? This happens a lot, right? And business is particularly harsh to people who cannot do something like that, and in practice, when I've worked with business people like that, my response has been to fire them.

I can't work with people like this, and it's especially true, I think, in smaller companies. I think it's more acceptable in larger companies. Anyway, so cognitive agility, I think that's quite obvious. The second piece is the more interesting thing that's not that obvious. She points out that business is a domain that consists of three legs, right? So she calls this three legs of a triad, right? And her names for it was Supply, Demand, and Capital. And I used to use her terminology, but then my readers complained that they didn't understand what this meant. So I changed it to Operations, Market, and Capital.

And that basically describes the three legs of the triad, regardless of which industry you're in, if you're running a business you need to know how to run your business, right? Operations. So for me, it was software. It was like, how do you run a software engineering team? How do you build product for your market?

Um, if you're running a factory, then obviously you need to be somewhat versed, well versed, in the runnings of your factory. Like, how do you make yogurt or handbags or whatever? And Market is basically an understanding of your market, understanding of who your customers are, what they want from you, what service do you actually provide for them, who your competitors are in providing this service, and where the impact is.

Areas of new opportunity are and where the areas of risks are in your market meaning like there, you know It could be new entrants to come in and threaten you And finally Capital, capital is the least obvious, I think to business novices. It was certainly the least obvious to me starting out, right?

In fact, if you grab a random person off the street and ask them to describe business They'll probably be able to talk about the market, uh, which is you know, your customers and competitors And they'll probably also going, your mind is going to go to operations because obviously you need to know how to run a business and manage people and do whatever it is that your business does.

But it takes a while before people notice that there's actually a capital component to business. And capital is an accelerant to market and operations. Um, there are things you can do if you are good on the capital side of the triad. Uh, and it's a bit hard to describe in a podcast, but I wrote an entire series, many of the pieces are free, called the Capital Expertise in Business.

And I recommend that you go take a look at that on commoncog. com. Uh, the job of that series is to sort of lay out how do you recognize capital expertise when you're dealing with business people. And very good business people are have are they're decent at all three legs of the triad, right? And if they're not great at one leg of the triad, they know to hire people to augment them in the leadership of their company, um, on the other legs of the triad.

And the most important thing that Lia DiBello points out is that good business people are good at one or two legs of the triad, right? Um, but great business people are able to predict, uh, how changes in one leg of the triad affect the other two legs. So for example, if you're in a cyclical industry, and the capital cycle turns, right, uh, suddenly capital is more or less, uh, uh, available.

They immediately know what to do on the operation side, and they immediately know what to expect on the market side, and they will start making changes, right, in preparation for, ah, maybe now the capital cycle has turned, capital is less available, weaker, less well run competitors will go out of business, and now is my time to snatch away their market share, or to buy them up for pennies on the dollar, right?

So that's like a trite example, but there are more sophisticated examples if you know how to look. So, uh, that's a very long winded explanation of what the, uh, mental model of expertise is, and yes, I guess I should stop there.

Nigel Rawlins (3): Oh, no, no, I was going to say that we should, for some people, capital is probably not a word they use. It's really money, isn't

Cedric Chin: Yes, yes.

Nigel Rawlins (3): money is becoming scarce because there's less people buying or the economy is going down. In the most simple terms for small businesses, it's cashflow. There's some money coming

Cedric Chin: Oh, yes.

Nigel Rawlins (3): and for anyone working for themselves is, you know, you, you want to earn some money to, to run your business. Otherwise, you can't afford to do stuff. Okay, so you spoke to Lia DiBello and she mentioned that the way she teaches people about that is she plays, she creates simulations.

Is that how she teaches? I was going to say that the mentor I worked with used to create simulations as well and that's how I learnt a lot about business. A simulation's probably a better way to learn about business than to actually muck the business up yourself.

Cedric Chin: How, how did he, uh, do simulations with you?

Nigel Rawlins (3): The way he viewed business is he had a framework to think about business and a very simple framework which he called it the five line model. Every business has to have revenue, there's a cost of goods sold, so it costs money to make or buy or provide the service, then there's a cost of selling, so there's the marketing costs. There's the, and I'll come back to your restaurant article that you wrote about in a moment. There's the cost of running the business.

So that's four. And then the final part's profit. So there's five things that every business shares. Every business is the same. They do those five things. Now for the smaller business, when I talk to people, is they're the five things that you've got to, well, you don't do five things. You've got to get revenue and you've got to be profitable.

But there's three things where you actually have to work in the business. And that's where your operational and your financial comes into it. So that's, that's a muddled way of describing it. But he was able to scenarios of companies where things would happen, as you know

in business, nothing is really predictable. So he might have several people competing, but unfortunately he was trying, before he died, he was trying to get it online, but unfortunately he died before it finished.

Cedric Chin: So, it's five things. It's revenue, cost of goods sold, cost of sales.

Nigel Rawlins (3): When they say the cost of goods sold, it's sort of like the profit and loss statement,

Cedric Chin: hm.

Nigel Rawlins (3): So, with the 5 line model, you actually start dividing up more accurately, where does the cost come from. So, in terms of making a product, you've got machinery, for example, if you make a physical product, you've got electricity, you've got parts of the factory, you've got people. So that's your cost of goods sold there. Cost of selling, uh, is maybe you have an office, you have a computer, so in other words, you're trying to allocate the funds to the actual area. And then you work on the percentages.

So, revenue is 100%. Ideally, cost of goods sold to make or buy or produce your service is 50%. If you can get it lower, even better. And then you can spend so much on your cost of selling. Now, in the ideal model, it's 25%. So if you're turning over 100, 000, cost of goods sold 50, 000, uh, 25 percent for cost of selling, which is 25, 000. Running your business, your, admin cost, you're trying to keep that as small as possible. And then you've got your profit. So the ideal is, is managing all of that,

Cedric Chin: Mm.

Nigel Rawlins: To ensure your profit. And the thing is, the clear statement about profit is, and, and in Australia we've had this thing where people prefer to get cash in their business because they're trying to avoid paying tax. In Australia, if you've got a company, you only pay less than 30 percent tax on the profit, which is what's left over after all those costs. So, people muck up their businesses by being silly and hiding money and all that. So they have no idea what's really going on, but the ideal business, has got a clear idea. And that's a business model because once you put money in there, it's a model, but that was a framework to think about it.

And so when I talk to people about small business, I say, well, there's three things you've really got to be doing. When I read about your triad, I thought, wow, this is a fantastic way because those two sort of work together. So one, you've got to be smart about your money. Now, when you talk about capital, you're really talking about fairly big businesses who really, really smart with what to do with money.

For a little business, one person business, well, it's cash flow mainly.

Cedric Chin: Mm. That's true. No, this is a good model.

Nigel Rawlins: That was a, a long winded one too.

Cedric Chin: That's great. I'm very curious about the way people teach and talk about businesses. And that's, uh, I like that. I mean, it's simple enough. it's good enough.

Nigel Rawlins (3): That's where you've got to spend your time, I keep telling people, because I work with, say, independent professionals who work for themselves, is you can't always be doing work because you do have to allocate some of your time and your money to the marketing, and you do have to allocate your time and some money to running the business.

And then obviously if you're making something or you're providing a service, you have a choice. You can do it yourself or you do some outsourcing. So, there's cost involved. So, that's that's how I sort of look at it. But I love the fact that you brought up the triad model from Lia DiBello.

Cedric Chin: I think the other sort of thing is that, uh, the five line model is sort of the basic principles of running a business and making sure you don't die. And, you know, lots of tech startups that are never profitable, they just raise money from venture capitalists, would do well to learn the five

line model a

Nigel Rawlins (3): business.

It's simple. isn't

Cedric Chin: It is, it is simple. It is, no, it's simple in the right way, you know what I mean? Like, because it tells you where to focus your attention on.

But the other sort of bit that I think is interesting here is that, um, once you know, once you've got the five line model under your belt, right, you start looking at other business people and then you realize that they're able to do things with that five line model that you don't expect, right?

And so the example that I give, like, the essay that I've heard has been eye opening for a lot of people, who think that they know business, right? Is an article that I wrote called The Games People Play with Cashflow And I was just trying to point out that Cashflow is not profit. You can be cashflow positive and have no profit and your business is perfectly fine.

And if that's, if you're listening to this podcast and you're sort of going like, wait, wait, what does that mean? I recommend that you go read the essay. Um, because there are games that you can play with cashflow, right? Um, one example of this, and maybe I'll give two examples because this tends to be a bit like catnip for the right kind of people.

Costco, for example, pays its suppliers net 30. I think it's net 30. Could be net 60. Um, but, uh, if it buys its products, right, most of its products are sold out before 30 days, right, and then they ask for the next shipment, which means that Costco has cash on hand before they have to pay their suppliers.

And that's a remarkable position to be in, because you can use that cash to fund other things, to pay for salaries, to pay for facilities management, or whatever. That's a remarkable business model to be in, and it's a very deliberate move by the people who run Costco to run Costco in that way. Another example would be, we all know that margins are incredibly low in the restaurant business, right?

But there's this remarkable restauranteur, which I profile in an excerpt in the essay, the Cashflow essay, where he discovered that because he runs a fine dining restaurant, he asked for cash up front for bookings in the fine dining restaurant. And people said he was crazy. But as a result, he had cash on hand before the diners come in, which means that he has a float of cash in the business.

And then he could go to his suppliers and say that instead of paying you net 60, If I prepay you, how much of a discount will you give me? And, uh, the first person he called up, I think, was a, was a, uh, beef vendor. His beef supplier. And he would be like, Hmm, nobody has ever asked me this question before, let me get back to you.

And he called up the next day and said, I'll give you 50, a 50 percent discount. I was like, what? I said, why? I'll pay you, like, an additional, like, 100 just to tell me why. He said, well, if you think about it, right, I, when the beef comes in, I only have a certain number of days, uh, where I can sell the beef.

And then plus another three days, maybe it's pet food. And then after that I had to throw it away. So it's actually, really good for me if I know up front exactly how much beef I have to sell. That's a predictability in my business that I don't have, and I paid net 60, right? And so as a result, this restauranteur was like, oh my god, just asking for cash up front for bookings for this restaurant allows me to go to all my suppliers and increase my profit margins by, in some cases, 50 percent in some case, well profit margins, the cost, reduce the cost by 50 percent and increase the margins overall in the restaurant business by a crazy amount.

I think he got it up to 30 percent at one point, I'm not sure. I have, because I went off and researched like where else did he talk, what other podcasts did he go on, right? But he took the margins in the business to a level, you know, that other people couldn't believe was possible in the restaurant business.

And there's an example of a game. Yes, you're working with the same five line item, right? But this is an example of expertise, right? People making moves that that you can't imagine as a novice, right? That's a marker of expertise right there, right? So I think that's a good, nice, concrete story for your listeners to chew

Nigel Rawlins (3): Oh yes. Now, I think it's fabulous. And that's the issue with a business. It does revolve around money. So let's go back to Lia, how does she teach about the triad?

Cedric Chin: Right, she didn't teach the triad. She used the triad to evaluate business expertise. And so she developed a Profiler, an assessment that she could administer. She was, she would be brought in by the boards of companies, right? She says that she knows a lot of chairman, and my guess is that that's how she would be brought in in those early years after she had developed this mental model of expertise, right? And the way that she would administer it was that she would come in to all the executives, right, and they would have no choice but to go through the assessment because the board of directors is the one asking for it.

And they would be given five, year by year, five years worth of annual reports of a competitor in the same industry, and this will be taken from publicly available information like annual reports, uh, you know, every year public companies have to submit an annual report, and she would excerpt out various, uh, bits of the annual report and the financial statements, um, plus whatever they've said on, you know, shareholder calls, and present this information to the executives and say that, given this information, um, what do you think would happen next?

In the next year, right? And these questions will be excerpted from all three legs of the triads, from operations, from the market, and from, uh, capital, from the capital perspective. And you would answer, you know, uh, here's what I expect to happen to this competitor in the same industry that I am, uh, next year.

And then she would present you with the second year. And then she would say, huh, you see, now you've got some feedback, right? Some of your guesses were right, some of your predictions were wrong. What do you expect to happen in the next year? And then she would do it for five years. And at the end of it, your answers will tell you how good you are, based on how able you are to predict things, on each leg of the triad.

And it will also test your cognitive agility because it would test whether you were able to self correct when it when you realize that hey, I I'm getting answers wrong, you know on this particular aspect of the business, right? So at the end of the the assessment there would be a profile of each individual in your executive team and in business, business is a game of distributed expertise, which means that it's possible for people to be quite less good or more, you know, or better at various aspects of the triad, but they all shore up each other's weaknesses.

Because it tests your predictive ability, your ability to predict what's going to happen in the business. It actually is quite a good measure of expertise. Um, and that was how she started with a consulting business, right? So she eventually stopped publishing that much. Um, and a lot of her more, more than work, it's actually not published and proprietary and very interesting, but you can't really get it unless you hire her.

But that was how it started, and eventually, she turned it into full blown business simulations, designed to change the way an executive team or a business thought about its own operations, or thought about its own business, right? So, all of this is to say that there is some validity. It's not this person has come up with an interesting model, and therefore it works.

The reason why I felt that it worked was because I had already been noticing such things from other business people, plus the original paper where she created this model, or she published this model, came with testing predictive validity. And that is one of the markers of like, if something is true in science, or in epistemology, which is a fancy, uh, uh, two, dollar word, that means, how do you know if something is true, right?

So in epistemology, one of the markers is, does this have predictive validity, right? Can you predict something? Does it give you the ability to predict something? And her assessments do have this property. And that's why I was like, okay, I'm quite confident that there's something here. It allows me to organize my experiences, uh, in business, as well as my reading in business in a way that makes sense to me.

Um, so yeah.

Nigel Rawlins (3): Well, what, what you're saying is what she has provided was a framework to look at and understand business, and that's where we use that five line model, is you can go into a business and you know what to look for. But with the triad as well, I think that overlays it, so I think the five line model is probably more granular. I can't remember whether it's your podcast episode you had with her or whether you wrote it, that she was able to identify that sometimes it was the wrong person in the, in the position.

Cedric Chin: Yes. So

yeah, that came up in the podcast. That came up in a published work as well, actually. She did this project with Swiss Re, which is this large reinsurance company.

And it's publicly available now, so this is, I feel okay revealing this information. Um, she discovered that when she ran this profiler on the executive team, it was only the CEO with, that had enough capital expertise and ability to see around corners in the reinsurance industry, right, which is, it's a very cyclical industry.

And, you know, when, when things like the 2008 financial crisis hit, a lot of, you know, Insurance companies found themselves in trouble. But Swiss Re did not find themselves in trouble, if I'm not mistaken. I can't remember exactly when this profiler was done. Maybe it was after the financial crisis. Um, but they could see around corners because of the CEO, but nobody else in the executive team had this skill.

And so she recommended to the board of directors that they not replace the CEO just yet until they find somebody else with equivalent capital expertise on the executive team. You just have to have somebody on the team to have this, uh, ability to see around corners on the capital leg of the triad. The rest were more operational or marketing or sales oriented.

And those skills, well, you know, they are operations and market side. If you're in a reinsurance business and you're in the reinsurance industry, it's probably important that you know the capital dynamics of your market, right?

I think the other thing that's interesting about the triad is that it gives you a syllabus, right?

So, uh, one of the things that Lia says is that good business people can recognize other good business people by recognizing the facility with which they're able to reason about the relationships between the three legs of the triad, right? So, a yogurt billionaire could talk to a mining billionaire and recognize that they're both good at business because they're able to talk about how to navigate the economic cycles or the capital cycles in their particular industry.

And they're able to sort of talk, map out like, here's my market, here's my customers, here's the emerging threats, here are the emerging opportunities, and here's how I'm going to fund operations or expansions into these various opportunities, and here's how I'm thinking about my company operations, and here's the people that I have, and here's how I'm thinking about allocating resources to match the capital climate and the opportunities in the market that I see, right? And this facility with which they are reasoning across all three legs of the triad and they know how each leg of the triad interrelates or changes things in the other legs, right? It's how they recognize other people who are good at business.

Um, and I've noticed this as well. I've noticed this when I'm talking to good business people, right? Uh, they can pick out when you are good or when you're missing certain bits of business. You're not, you're literally not able to see, and more novice people in particular are not able to see. one or more legs of the triad, right?

And I think the other sort of thing that was super interesting about her model is that it predicts your blind spots. So I came up on the operations, the, like, basically running a business like an entrepreneur. Um, I'm a bit more blind on the capital side of the triad, right? Uh, if a, if a

company issues bonds or does an equity swap or does M& A, I'm a bit confused, or at least I was.

I'm, I'm, I'm quickly trying to show up that the, uh, That side of the knowledge. So I can use it as a syllabus, um, but you can, when you have somebody who has been in management consulting for a number of years, you can actually quite reliably predict that they are likely to be short on the operations side of the triad, but they're pretty good on the market side of the triad.

And they're maybe, you know, not so bad on the, on the capital side of the triad. Ditto for investors. Investors seem to be particularly bad at understanding what it actually takes to run a business, right? Because they just deal with the capital side of the triad and sometimes they have to analyze the market side of the triad, but then you put them in an operating role and the business explodes So, Lia's work is useful both as a syllabus for yourself, because you can diagnose what bits of business as a skill you lack.

It's also good as a diagnosis. So I've had a reader who is a consultant, and now he goes into an executive team, and by just having a couple of conversations with each executive, he can have a rough idea of what legs of the triad they're strong on, and what legs they're completely blind to. And that helps him, sort of, relate to them when he's engaging with them.

So the triad is actually a lot more subtle, a lot more powerful than you might think. And the good news is that all my writing related to Lia DiBello's work is completely free. I made it freely available when I reorganized Commoncog to have topics and basically all the topics and essays on Commoncog and the cases all organized according to the triad.

And as a result, the original series that described the triad is now free.

Nigel Rawlins: I think that's, a wonderful explanation because if you're an independent consultant, you've got a skill and you're getting work, that's good, but you're still running a business. Just like Commoncog is your business. Now I want to go back a little bit because I, I do know that you're very interested in judo and you did a little experiment with your judo.

So tell me something about what is your interest in judo and how does that influence Commoncog?

Cedric Chin: So for those who are not familiar with Commoncog or, you know, you've not been following along in my writing, um, at the end of 2022 and the start of 2023, I took four months, where I relocated to a different city. And I train, well, maybe five months actually. November, December, January, February, March.

Five months. And I train five hours a day, every day, for those five months, for a judo competition. The Malaysian Senior Nationals. I did that for, uh, a small handful of reasons. The first reason was, uh, regret, because I was competitive as a teenager. But I didn't get very good and I never won anything at the national level.

The second reason was that I was actually, you know, I'd written a lot about deliberate practice. I just gave you a whole spiel about how it's useless, you know, because I've tried to apply it to business expertise. And then I discovered that it's quite useless. But I never actually experienced a good deliberate practice training program.

And that's partly because I grew up in a small town. I didn't have access to the best coaches. And partly because, uh, I, I didn't, I didn't know what deliberate practice was. I also couldn't recognize it, even if you, you hit me over the head with a training program, right? So, I found a coach in Kuala Lumpur, which is the capital of Malaysia, and he was at one point, ranked 13.

Like, he got 13 at the World Championships in 1991. And to this day, I think he's the highest rank or like the person who went the furthest in the world championship from Southeast Asia. And the reason he could achieve that was because he started judo in the West, and in the West they have good training programs for judo.

So I was like, okay, here's somebody who could teach me, um, and put me through the ringer, uh, with an actual deliberate practice program and accelerate my expertise in judo, which is great. I'm not, you know, I'm only getting older and there's a time window in which I can actually do something like this. Um, And so, and I think the third reason was that he had a very particular strategy for me to win, which I wanted to see if it could work, which was I was supposed to win either on the ground or through penalties.

And this is not something that you know how to do unless you are taught. In Western training programs in Judo, train you and have developed drills for how to achieve this, uh, but it's a secret in Southeast Asia. It's an open secret in Europe and the U. S. It is an unknown thing in Southeast Asia.

So I went and did that, and the thing that I learned is that, um, I broke. I broke mentally. It was very, very tough mentally, and when you've not been in sport for a while, and you're a working adult, you forget how hard it is on the body and how, how, difficult it is to maintain mental strength. And so the story of that, you know, there's a, there's a long essay that I wrote, one of the most difficult essays that I actually had to write, um, that I've ever written.

It's called Mental Strength in Judo, Mental Strength in Life. It's on Commoncog. com. It's basically the story of how, uh, the arc of my training was, I went in with all these ideas about deliberate practice and, um, excitement of like learning and getting good at judo. And then I broke down around the two month mark.

And then my coach, uh, himself, uh, realized that his training wasn't working because I was breaking down and then he started giving me mental training And it was a discovery for both of us, right? The discovery for me is that, oh, it takes a lot more than just skill to win. And the discovery for him was that, oh, you know, a coach's job isn't just to, uh, do technical stuff.

But you actually have to provide mental training for people who are, uh, mentally unable to take the training. And this was remarkable because to me, it was remarkable because like, shouldn't he know? But my coach is not a normal person. He was a very mentally strong person, and training me was the catalyst for him to realize that, oh, not everybody is as mentally strong.

Nigel Rawlins: did you go through to the championships? Did you get through?

Cedric Chin: I did, I did. So I won my first match with exactly using the game plan that he developed, but over the course of the match, the opposing player dug his fingernail into my eye, and then I basically was bleeding over the mat, and they wrapped up my eye, so I only had one eye, and I won that match with just one eye.

But then after that, I couldn't deal with losing my vision, so I couldn't, I mean, I was warming up for my second and third matches, and I couldn't block the grips, and I went on tilt, basically. And no amount of training at that point in time, you know, could have saved me from the fact that I was just too scared after that, and I lost the next two matches.

But it was still a win. Like, the fact that I managed in the first match, execute the game plan, right, even through all that ordeal, um, was meaningful to me and my coach. And I guess, you know, the other thing that's a bit hard to communicate was that the match was 11 minutes long. It's like, how a judo match feels is like doing burpees. So imagine doing burpees for 11 minutes, yeah. Well, 11 minutes stoppages, but it's like 7 minutes total, I think, in match time. Try doing burpees for 7 minutes.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, I can tell you at my age, try skipping for one minute. It's exhausting. So 11 minutes, was that an unusually long match?

Cedric Chin: It was the longest match of the tournament. Yes, it was incredibly long. The other guy could barely get up by the end of the, the match, right? But I had the training, and here's the surprising thing, the mental training, the thing that made the biggest difference, um, for my mental strength was body language training.

My coach did not allow me to look defeated on the, on the mat. I was not supposed to slouch. I was not supposed to slump. I was not supposed to rest with my hands on my legs, right? I was always supposed to look like, okay, I'm ready. Go, come, let's fight, right? No matter even if I was hurting, if I was tired, and he would yell, he would say, Cedric, body language, right?

How, how you act is how you feel. And to my surprise, it worked, you know? If you force yourself to stand up tall and say, you know, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go another round, right? Something happens to your brain from your body, and then you're like, you're actually feeling, you actually feel better, and you're actually feel better able to cope with the next round, right?

So I, I don't know what it is. I'm sure there's like some research that shows that embodied, you know, how you act affects the way you feel. But it really worked, and I trained every day for five hours, and so I was always in pain. But it worked. So Yeah, now, you know, when I'm doing business, I'm making a difficult decision.

I just sort of remind myself, like, no matter how hard it is or how scary it is, it's not as bad as getting choked every day.

Nigel Rawlins: Exactly. That's grounding yourself that you did five hours a day for several months.

I mean, you'll Never. forget that. I mean, I ran a marathon one year. Oh, God. Many, many, many years ago. I never want to do another one. But I had done it. And there's probably things in our life that we've done physically that, you know, we're proud of it. So, do you think that Judo has influenced the way you go about your work or you think about your work?

Cedric Chin: This is a difficult question that I've thought about a lot. Um, when I ended that Judo experiment, uh, which was, like, April, last year, April, a friend observed quite wisely that it would probably take some time for me to realize how it has impacted me. So, the courage with taking business decisions was a big thing.

I started making a lot more business decisions after the experiment was finished. But, the other thing is that this one is not that difficult to talk about, but I wrote an essay called, The Ability to See Expertise is a mark, it's like something worth aiming for, and I sort of described how in any business, well, any domain of skill, business and judo, um, there is a level at which you have to start making up your own vocabulary, because you start noticing things that there's no proper English words for, right?

And, before I started the judo experiment, I was not able to understand what was going on at the Olympics or the IJF. Well, I thought I understood what was going on, but actually I was missing a whole bunch of cues. And now after the judo experiment, I'm able to watch the Olympics or the IJF tour, and I'm able to see lots of things that other people miss.

I know when an attack is fake. I know when something is done for strategic, tactical or tactical reasons. I know how to create penalties now, I know there are basically only four ways to create penalties in, uh, in judo, and so I can recognize it when it happens, and many people watching the same match would not be able to recognize it, right?

And I think about that a lot because it's like there's a before and after, a very distinct before and after, in a just a five month period, um, and in business, there are probably cues that I'm not seeing, right? So I think about that a lot because I, I, now I'm sort of like, at the end of that Judo experiment, I told my coach that I know what it takes to get world class at Judo and I know I will never be good at Judo Because I know what it costs

And I'm not willing to pay that cost. But I want to be world class in business.

And I'm willing to pay that cost, right?

And so I'm able to see things in business that I am not before, but given the skill tree of Judo and how high it is I'm also beginning to think that there are certain things in business that are just, you know, they're lying there in plain sight, but I'm not able to see it yet.

And so I think that this, this is the more legible, easy to talk about.

The difficult things to talk about is like what that mental training, that ordeal, has done to me internally. And maybe it takes a bit more time to reason about that.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, I think the point you're making there is, In mastering the Judo you did, you're now able to look at, the competitions and see things that novice can't see. And what we're talking about in terms of business, there's aspects of ourselves. For example, I've been running a marketing services company for 25 years. This year, I've spent several thousand dollars on training myself in marketing in different areas that I've just let go. You know, I'm coming back around to things that, you know, people say, you've got to do this, you've got to do this. I haven't. And then I'm thinking, I'm now seeing them, how relevant they are.

So in other words, I guess with Lia DiBello's Triad mental model and my five line model, is we're able to look with a framework to maybe focus on something a bit more clearly. Now, the other thing that I think you wrote about, I think you had a quote from Deeming about knowledge,

Cedric Chin: Mm.

Nigel Rawlins (3): That there is no such thing as truth in business, only knowledge. And so I think all of this informs us. Now, you know, people are probably listening to this, who are independent consultants working for themselves are probably wondering, well, you know, this is all fairly highfaluting. How does this apply to me? But, you know, they are in business. So let's go back to Commoncog.

Commoncog is basically you, isn't it?

And you've got people you hire to help.

Cedric Chin: Yes, I've got a bunch of part timers, and, well, by this time next year, I should have some full timers. Fingers crossed.

Nigel Rawlins: So you're running a business. Now, it's not a big business. I mean, I don't know

how many subscribers

Cedric Chin: not a business.

Nigel Rawlins (3): got. So it's you, and you're managing. So, you know, you're going to have to go operational. You've got to do the financials. You've got to do the marketing. How does, all of this influence your business?

Cedric Chin: Oh my

Nigel Rawlins (3): What you know now.

Cedric Chin: Everything, everything. The, the neat thing about Commoncog is that whatever I write about or whatever I test, I test on Commoncog itself.

And so when the ideas work, it results in more money, which I can then use to operationalize the company so that I can go try out new ideas. And then, and then it works.

There's this nice little cycle where the ideas I try work, and then the business becomes better. Um, and then I apply the ideas into the business again. I buy myself more time to apply the ideas into the business. So, I'll tell you what I'm doing now. Um, I think the single biggest change that, uh, the single biggest change to the way I run companies has been working with Colin Bryer, who was Jeff Bezos second shadow.

So a shadow is the technical assistant was the formal name. Basically you followed around, uh, Jeff as he went out about running the company. And the first shadow is, is famous because he's now the CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, right. And Colin Bryer was the second shadow and Colin Bryer taught me how to be data driven.

He taught me something called the Amazon Weekly Business Review. And of course I've written about this over the past year or so, as I've been putting it to practice in my business. And it has transformed the way that I run my business, because for the first time, given the fact, you know, even setting aside that I've been involved with two businesses before this, and both of them have, you know, ended in multi million dollar outcomes, it's for the principals involved, not for me.

This is the first time that I'm actually running a business that I actually understand end to end.

I know what causes my business to grow. I know what levers to pull. I know how to monitor things that are affecting the business in the environment, right? And all of this is from Deming's work, and I won't go into it because it takes too long, but there is a way of looking at numbers that is not reductive, that is in fact expansive, that in fact allows you to put your fingers on what's actually going on in your business so that you know how to manipulate it like you would a machine, right?

So that's the one big thing that's going on in Commoncog, and we are chasing that insight to the to its logical extremes. So I've hired people to write software to make it easier for me to instrument the business and run the WBI every week. I'm also experimenting, when you're building the software, you're also basically doing process improvement, right?

So we're trying to see if there are better ways to run this more efficiently. Um, apart from all the innovations that Amazon has figured out over the two decades that it's been running this process. Um, the other sort of big thing that I stumbled on is that the problem with a business like mine is that it's very easy to get trapped into writing every week, and you're working in the business, not on the business.

And there are actually many alternative traps as well, uh, linked to it. Um, so I wrote a thread recently, uh, uh, in my private members forum, I sort of laid out all the potential traps for creator businesses, right? People who write or create media online, and they monetize it, right? Some of those traps include things like, you know, you tie your personal identity too much to the business.

You cannot step away from it or you monetize by doing consulting which ties up some of your time right in unscalable ways So I've spent a fair bit of time thinking about how to scale this business given that it's fairly small and it's kind of reliant on me and the way that I sort of thought about it is that Um I need to be able to sell to people who need the content that I'm writing, but in a way that doesn't depend on me as a writer.

And one aspect or one thing that I've been investigating over the past year is the use of business cases. Um, and I think I, we've, we've, uh, you're quite familiar with the approach. The approach is basically in business, it's not enough to look at concepts alone, right? You need to understand how they instantiate in the real world.

Uh, and to that end, uh, it, it actually matters a lot that for each business concept that you learn, you have 10 to 20 examples. And so I'm building and operationalizing that, right, so that I'm creating 10 to 20 business cases for every single concept that one might need to learn. Um, and then using that as Commoncog's primary direction for the next year or so.

And so when we're talking about my business, right, that's the sort of way that I'm thinking about it. I'm trying to figure out ways that allow me to avoid some of the traps that I've identified with creative businesses. At the same time, I am applying ideas that I've learned to Commoncorg itself and making it better.

And so that's the fun thing, because for me, business is incredibly fun.

You get to try all these things.

Nigel Rawlins: Mm. You're thinking about it and you're evaluating. A simple case, as you mentioned, from the restaurant owner who asked for money up front, not a lot of people are going to do that. Many, many, many years ago I was an elementary or primary school teacher and I was a vice principal in a primary school. I quit 25 years ago or more. I decided that it would be cheaper if I trained to be a first aid trainer and then I could train all the staff and it would save us lots of money. So I became a, trainer in first aid had no experience. And the people who were the best trainers were ambulance drivers because they could tell you the stories and they just know how to do it. And that's the problem. You can learn all the theory or you can do all the book learning but without the actual practice and without the actual experience it's absolutely useless and that's the biggest danger. At least the people hopefully listening to this are in business or doing something in business and have got a sense of what we're talking about. And what you're showing is there's so much more to learn and, it's probably not complicated.

case studies is similar to what the ambulance officer said. They had lots of stories or case stories and I'm sure many experts would have examples. The more experienced ones would. And that's expertise as well, isn't

Cedric Chin: it?

Yes, it?

is. Yes, it is. Expertise, to some degree, is pattern matching. And not in a kind of new, like, not in a naive way. Experts are able to see patterns that novices cannot, right? And one of the things that differentiates an expert, and this is exploited in military training programs, right, is that experts have seen more cases, they're able to spot cues across cases, and they understand that concepts that they learn, say in strategy, right, if we're talking about the Marines, concepts that they learn in textbooks, when it shows up in the real world, can be incredibly varied.

And so one way that these training programs, the NDM folk, uh, use cases, right, is they use cases to sort of quickly, uh, uh, whatchamacallit, quickly see the pattern matching capabilities that all humans have, right? We're all very good at spotting patterns in, in, in, if, if we've, you know, been doing something for a very long time, right?

So, uh, in the case of the ambulance driver, because they've seen so many examples of a heart attack, they know that every heart attack is somewhat unique, but there are certain ERR patterns, some underlying patterns that unite all of them, right? And so the question is, how do you accelerate, doctors who are straight out of medical school, right, they just learn from textbooks, to experienced doctors who understand deeply like, hey, a heart attack can show up in a thousand different ways, and you need to be able to to evaluate and immediately diagnose, right, if you see any one of those thousand ways.

And the way that they accelerate this, the military and, you know, these NDM augmented medical training programs, is that they, they give you lots of cases quickly. , right? And they force you to grapple with the fact that reality is this incredibly complex, incredibly varied thing, right? So with the Marines, they give you lots and lots of scenario simulations and, and, and then they ask you to reflect and introspect, like what concepts do you use or what concepts came up here, uh, when, say a commander came in and give their answer, right?

For the tactical situation, simulation that you were under. And for the doctors, this particular, I mean, we can't get into it now, but I've covered this particular approach of creating training programs, and if you're interested, you should go to commoncog. com and look up Learning in Ill Structured Domains, or Cognitive Flexibility Theory is the name for the theory.

It's another two dollar word, but it's, it's, It gives you something very valuable. The way they do that is that they give you a lot of cases of different medical situations, right, for say heart attack, right, and you're supposed to go through 10 to 20 of them, and then they give you a new case to diagnose, where you're referencing these 10 to 20 cases that are very varied or some of them are similar and some of them are very different, right? And then immediately when you start doing exercises like that, right you as a medical student quickly internalize that hey, know I should expect the unexpected here. Symptoms can look very different because human beings are very different and and you know, they actually do accelerate to get good results accelerating doctor performance through these these methods and Commoncog is trying to apply this approach of training to business.

And I don't know if it'll work. I mean, I do have some, I've run some experiments and I do believe that it does make a difference. But we'll see. You know, early signs of some promise in results doesn't mean that it would be successful. But I'm inclined to give it a go and let's see what happens.

Nigel Rawlins (3): Well, my feeling is that I'm learning stuff from your writing and the depth of your thinking. So, I mean, well, obviously you're very curious to have searched out many of these concepts, and then seeing the value in them, and then you've actually tried to explain them. And they're not simple concepts, but the way you explain them is understandable.

I mean, you know, you've explained, Lia de Bello's Triad model, and you've written about it, and I'd highly encourage people, if they're very interested In business like this, to, to look into it. Now, obviously, a lot of small businesses or creators who work for themselves are probably not going to need the depth of this. But, anyone who has a curiosity like mine, an intellectual curiosity to, to go into it. That's why this is my second year. I think you're the only person I would pay to read at this stage because there's a lot of people out there running around throwing out advice but it, it lacks the depth and it lacks the the authority that you bring to it. You're probably one of the smartest business educators that I have come across. I would assume that, lot of business schools, uh, just wasting the time and the money of many of the students who would be better off out there, subscribing to you and trying to run a business

Cedric Chin: Well, my suspicion is that if you force the business professors to run a business, and to teach only the ideas that have worked for them, you get something very close to Commoncog. So it's not really smart, it's just an extreme rigor around ideas that work.

Our internal policy, that is, I tell the team that I work with, is that we must optimize for usefulness.

We must be useful. If you're running a business, regardless of size, you should, when you're reading Commoncog, find something that you can actually put to practice and have a good chance of working. And the way that we prove that to you is that we actually test the ideas. And then we say, hey, we tried this, this happened, that, you know, this worked, that didn't work.

Right? And then people learn from that, because even if we fail, the fact that we've tried, is valuable information. Whereas a lot of business professors, I'm sure some of them do good work, because you have to have people who do high level research on various business trends, or industry practices, or what have you.

Right? That's valuable knowledge, but it's not the knowledge that business operators would want, I think. Um, yeah. But, you know, that said, if there's an business professor out there with something useful, it's highly likely that Commoncog will find them and then test the ideas, and then profile them, and then interview them.

So, yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: Definitely. I think that's the case. Cedric, how would you like people to find you? I will put all these in the show notes, but how would you like people to contact you right now if there's somebody listening here and they, ooh, I need to talk to Cedric. I don't just mean to have a chat or anything like that. find out more about yourself.

Cedric Chin: Yeah, I think, uh, if you want to find out more about Commoncog, I highly recommend signing up for the newsletter. So I send a newsletter nearly every week. Some weeks are a bit later than others, like this week, for example. If you want to reach out to me can just send me an email at cedric at commoncog.com

com. I can't promise that I will reply, but I will read every email. And if you sign up to the newsletter, you get basically updates every time there's new content or new cases on the, on the blog, right? And some of the cases that we're going to cover at the end of this year, I'm really hoping that we get to it.

We're going to start covering Asian conglomerates. So all these traditional Asian business people, you know. It's a bit curious how, in Asia, the vast majority of the large companies are conglomerates. That run like, you know, they're just like, they make smartphones, and they sell fish. And they do construction, and they have shipyards, right?

They do a gajillion things, which is really strange. And so we're going to start doing cases on those, right? And I don't think, I don't think that many business thinkers or writers focus on Asian businesses, but that's a, that's an interest of mine because, well, I'm Asian and I live in Asia. So I'm hoping that I can get to that, but in the meantime, like the ongoing stuff that's on Commoncog that may be interesting to readers would be the Becoming Data Driven series, I know multiple execs have read it and some of them have turned it into assigned reading for their teams.

Some people have told me that that's actually been a life changing series of essays because it makes them look at running businesses very differently. And it's tested. It's all tested. I've applied it to Commoncog and it works. I know exactly how to double revenue this year. And the other piece that we're sort of covering is a bunch of cases around, um, I would say Capital Allocation.

It's not clear actually if you're looking at the case by case like I've written about restaurants and in a couple weeks we'll be publishing some cases about cosmetics but the point with all those cases is that it's trying to build up like this picture of what it looks like when you're allocating resources and taking risks, right?

And and this might not be maybe that relevant to your particular audience, but it's something that I've always been interested in, because like, when you're running a business, right, how do you think about allocating capital or resources to something that might not pan out, right? And so, and so I'm publishing cases along that trend, um, with the expectation that at some point, very soon, I'm going to write a synopsis piece of things that I've noticed of all these cases.

And that's one of the wonderful things that you can do when you're publishing cases. You can like, Hey. Haven't you noticed this weird pattern that shows up again and again, right? I really enjoy, uh, doing that and then, you know, usually it sparks some interesting discussion as well.

Nigel Rawlins: That's fantastic. Well, thank you, Cedric, for being my guest. It's wonderful to talk to you. It's been amazing reading all your materials and seeing your newsletters and now talking to you. So, I really hope that people are picking up on what we're talking about here about business because, you know, it's actually quite a very interesting area when you get into it.

So, thank you, Cedric.

Cedric Chin: You're welcome, and thank you for having me on.