Blog Posts

by Luca Dellanna

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A one-minute exercise to de-risk your life

The most effective exercise I know of.

#risk#Winning Long-Term Games

Culture is the track record

Organizational culture is not a set of concepts but a track record of actions and reactions.

#management#culture design#Best Practices for Operational Excellence

The Depolarization Manifesto

You don’t win at politics when your party gets elected; you win when your party loses, and the government is still good.

#public policy#poverty and prosperity

The Planner and the Gatekeeper

The difference between decision-making and action-taking

#behavior#The Control Heuristic

Reproducible Success Strategies

The 3 properties for long-term Success

#entrepreneurship#management#Winning Long-Term Games

The Dellanna Method

How to develop competence fast

#coaching#management

The Dellanna Diagrams

A visual framework to understand antifragility

#antifragility#complexity#adaptive systems#taleb

Agency is trainable

Proven techniques to make your team more proactive.

#management#Best Practices for Operational Excellence

10 ways to kill motivation as a manager

Number one – ask your people to do things, then do not check whether they did them.

3 Catalyzers For Change

How to drive long-lasting change within your organization

Mimetic Societies

In mimetic societies, hierarchies are defined by one's ability to perform rituals. Because of the above, mimetic societies label themselves as meritocracies.

#The Control Heuristic#society

The Key To Success

The key to success is to spend more time on important-yet-not-urgent activities than most of your peers.

#winning-long-term-games

How to kill a country's education system

in 10 simple steps

#politics#poverty and prosperity

A framework for managing underperformance

The simpler way to get your team to use AI

With concrete use cases and applications

An effective tool for team development

The Manager's Role from the employees' point of view

The role of a manager is often defined from a business point of view only. But what about the role of a manager from the employee's point of view?

#management#Best Practices for Operational Excellence

Five telltale signs of good managers

Good managers dig deep, they front-load clarity…

Reversing the Arrow of Time

A thought experiment to resolve the debate about whether the world has gotten worse.

Races to the bottom

Careers, communities, and activities that eventually became a competition for who’s willing to sacrifice more.

#wisdom#Winning Long-Term Games

Mixed Signals, Mixed Results

Managers who give their teams mixed messages get mixed results.

Ergodicity as a non-binary property

Traditionally, ergodicity is defined as a binary property, but it can be better understood as a spectrum.

#ergodicity#taleb

Coach your team to write more effective emails

A low-hanging fruit to make your team more effective.

#management#guide

The Lindy Effect

Basics and generalization across space and other dimensions.

Wittgenstein’s Ruler

The more the free parameters, the less you know what is being measured.

#wittgenstein#taleb

The magic of obsessive consistency.

Pain is a signal of vulnerability

Pain is not a signal of damage but of possible future damage regardless of present damage. This explains psychosomatic/psychogenic pain.

#medicine#psychology

Cars, efficiency, and drivers

Cars are inefficient, but people are willing to pay a premium for them.

Minimal Quality of Life

Three principles and three action points

#poverty-and-prosperity#economics

Cultural subsidies

Precisely because culture should be a common good, it is paramount to keep theaters and museums' costs low and cut unnecessary expenses.

#poverty and prosperity#public policy

The Power of Commitment

We often think we should wait to commit until we find something worth committing to. But sometimes, it's the commitment itself that creates the worth.

#winning-long-term-games

The 0.03-Second Margin

The importance of choosing games where there can be multiple winners

#Winning Long-Term Games

Managerial Capabilities Assessment

How to surface cultural problems and opportunities within one's organization

#management#Luca's services

Assessing Communication Quality and Stakeholder Performance

Tips for project managers and infrastructure risk managers

#management#project management

The problem with LASIK patient satisfaction surveys

62% of the patients reporting that the operation created persistent eye pain still rated the operation as satisfactory

Adversarial vs Collaborative Feedback

How to give feedback and suggestions that are well-received

How to kill a country's economy

in 10 simple steps

#politics#poverty and prosperity

Three mistakes that derail AI adoption (and how to fix them)

It's not enough to give your workers tools; you must also ensure they use them and use them well. Here is how.

Everything I published in 2024

Videos, podcasts, posts, and more

#Year in review

Static thinking is idiotic policy making

Forgetting about dollars and instead reasoning in terms of goods and services would produce much smarter policy-making

#poverty and prosperity#economics

The Chess Paradox

Whenever there is imperfect information, there is a luck element, even in fully deterministic contexts.

#wisdom#Winning Long-Term Games

The Maintenance Paradox

Maintenance never makes sense in the short term, yet it is indispensable in the long term.

#wisdom#Winning Long-Term Games

Bad, good, great

A fantastic framework for communication

#management#Best Practices for Operational Excellence

Five thoughts on management

1) People perform up to your clarity.

#management#Best Practices for Operational Excellence

Not all the time we dedicate to work is work time. Sometimes, we are in hobby mode. The key is to correctly label it as such and be deliberate about it.

Selection Effects

Are attractive people less funny? And other stereotypes

Democracies and Long-Term Games

What do pre-autocracies look like, and how can we prevent our democracies from devolving into them?

#politics#Winning Long-Term Games

How to get feedback from your team

Three simple steps to get more helpful feedback

Coaches should be experts

Luca's thoughts on coaching

Values, Time Horizons, and Social Technologies

Values require long time horizons; how to create them?

#Winning Long-Term Games

What it means to be an adult

Being an adult is about taking responsibility and learning how to commit.

Long-term risks in investing

A simple story explaining a fundamental concept.

#investing#risk#Winning Long-Term Games

Pulled-forward growth

Why it backfires and what to do instead

#Winning Long-Term Games

The real culture war is between people who want to win (a more prosperous country) vs people who want to win the argument (more status even if it means less prosperity).

What’s better, learning from Ws or Ls?

Studying losers helps you avoid mistakes

#Winning Long-Term Games

Short-Term Activism

Trying to achieve long-term goals through short-term tactics is a dead end.

#politics#Winning Long-Term Games

Mentorship Meetings

Most mentorship meetings are a waste of time because they are not structured. Here’s how to make the most of them.

How I built a Twitter network from scratch

How I went from 0 to 24,000+ Twitter followers from scratch – never knowing any of them in real life first, living in an isolated city, and without cold-contacting any of them.

#Social Media#Winning Long-Term Games

Practice your practice

Why people do not listen to your feedback

It's about building a track record of being helpful

#management#feedback

Lindy for Managers

The longer a problem has been around, the longer it is expected to stick around in the future.

#management#lindy effect

Wittgenstein's Ruler and business metrics

The more free parameters, the less you know what is being measured. Hence, always couple metrics cannot be relied upon with direct qualitative observations

#management#wittgenstein#taleb

Ten tips to become a better presenter

A collection of tips on how to improve your presentation skills.

#communication#management

Do not be so clear that you can be understood. Instead, be so clear that you cannot be misunderstood.

The First-Order Thinking Bias

Short term bias and negativity bias are actually first-order-thinking biases.

#behavior#The Control Heuristic

Skill, Luck, and Imitation [Did Elon Musk get lucky?]

If you don’t take extreme risks, even if you’re the most skilled person, you will be outperformed by someone who did. And if you take extreme risks, you will have worse average outcomes than if you didn’t.

#statistics#ergodicity

Too much micromanagement or too little management?

Micromanagement might be bad, but not doing enough management for fear of micromanaging is also bad.

23 tips for a better career as an employee

Many people are stuck in their careers at the office because they don’t know the unspoken rules of promotions. Here are a few principles that I learned during my time as an employee.

How to get its productivity gains without also making your organization more fragile

Bottom-Up Manifesto

Long-lasting progress is always bottom-up, because the bottom-up becomes adopted after having being proven to work.

#The Power of Adaptation#taleb

How the antifragile breaks

#antifragility#taleb

Ruthlessly Pareto

If you’re reading the same percentage of pages for each book, you’re doing it wrong. Etc.

Bad decisions in life arise from having optimized for the wrong metric

Regretful choices arise from using a widely-accepted metric for success instead of a personally defined one.