My business-school notes
Business
& Strategy.
Things I learned at Harvard OPM, Stanford and London Business School, alongside ideas from my reading. Short notes I can return to, apply and share with my team.
Start with strategysix business topicsMy personal mini MBA.
Strategy & growth
Choose where to play. Make the choices fit.
↗02 · 6 notesFinance & cash
Follow the money, the timing and the assumptions.
↗03 · 5 notesOperations & delivery
Understand the work that creates the result.
↗04 · 8 notesCustomers & sales
Understand demand. Build a route to the customer.
↗05 · 7 notesPeople & leadership
Give people clarity, ownership and room to think.
↗06 · 3 notesNegotiation & influence
Understand interests. Create workable agreements.
↗Choose a question. Follow an idea.
My notes.
Each note has a picture, an explanation, a worked example and a question to take into the business.
36 notes
Make strategy guide daily choices
A useful strategy makes customer value, activities and everyday decisions reinforce one another.
Choose the customer first
Customer selection gives product design, pricing and communication a shared direction.
Profit and cash run on different clocks
A growing, profitable business can run short of cash when receipts arrive after payments.
Understand the cash conversion cycle
Payment timing and stock determine how long cash stays tied up and how much growth the business can fund.
Understand customer cost and unused capacity
Trace the work each customer creates, then make the cost of unused capacity visible.
Check the behaviour your measures reward
Measures and incentives direct attention, so they need to support the value the business wants to create.
Map interests and negotiate the whole package
Differences in priorities can create useful trades across price, timing, scope and other terms.
Observe the customer journey
Service design starts by understanding what customers experience before, during and after the transaction.
Sequence the change
The order and pace of change affect whether people can deliver an ambitious plan.
Choose a contract, partnership or acquisition
A partnership or acquisition needs a clear explanation of the additional value the relationship can create.
Choose the investor and the terms
Funding combines money, capabilities, decision rights and a relationship that shapes future choices.
Align the sales system with the strategy
Sales roles, processes and incentives should support the customers and economics the business has chosen.
Remove the barriers to product adoption
A new product succeeds through the people and processes that allow it to be chosen, installed and used.
Separate the result from the story
A successful outcome needs careful examination before it becomes a lesson about what caused success.
Design authority and support around accountability
A demanding role needs clear outcomes, usable authority and reliable support from the people it depends on.
Review assumptions and run useful experiments
Regular discussion and bounded experiments help a strategy evolve as evidence changes.
Develop the behaviours of good managers
Manager development becomes more useful when feedback names observable behaviours and leads to practice.
Coach the specific sales bottleneck
Target sales coaching at the stage and behaviour that most limits a salesperson’s progress.
Choose direct or partner sales channels
A sales channel earns its place through the access, explanation and service it provides for a particular customer.
Map who can make an agreement work
A negotiated agreement depends on decision-makers, influential outsiders and the people responsible for implementation.
Test acquisition value, price and funding
Assess how an acquisition creates value, how much the buyer pays and how the purchase is financed as connected decisions.
Connect data to a specific business decision
A useful decision system connects a model of the business, relevant evidence and a defined action.
Make requests for help visible
Teams can use more of their collective capability when people make specific requests and offer relevant help.
Gather unique information before forming a view
Group decisions improve when the discussion surfaces evidence held by individual members.
Release capacity by removing unnecessary work
Removing avoidable steps gives people more time and attention for useful work.
Use constraints to generate useful ideas
A clear customer problem and a deliberate constraint can make idea generation more productive.
Build agility, adaptability and alignment
An effective operating system responds to immediate changes, evolves with the market and rewards shared outcomes.
Give emerging businesses room to develop
Established and emerging businesses need measures and working arrangements suited to their stage of development.
Rehearse future scenarios and set response triggers
Imagining a future failure or breakthrough helps a team prepare actions before events force a response.
Use customer commitments to fund early learning
A paid pilot or initial order can test demand while contributing towards the cost of delivery.
Explain the assumptions behind a valuation range
A useful valuation range makes its purpose, methods and sensitive assumptions visible.
Build persuasion on trust and voluntary choice
Useful help, credible evidence and freely chosen commitments can support lasting cooperation.
Build relationships across different circles
Contacts in different communities can reveal information, expertise and opportunities beyond a familiar network.
Match planning depth to the next commitment
The next decision should determine how much analysis a venture needs now.
Make the value of an offer clear
Clarify the outcome, the evidence, the wait and the effort the customer faces.
Map the obstacles around the purchase
An offer becomes more useful when it addresses the steps customers struggle to complete.
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About this collection
This first collection brings together reviewed takeaways from my saved OPM Units 1, 2 and 3, Stanford and London Business School material, plus Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers. Several programmes revisit the same idea, so those sources share one note.
Each note identifies its source material. Programme labels describe where the material sits in my learning archive. Case discussions have been turned into original explanations and fictional business examples. The collection will grow as I work through more of my notes.