Capabilities
What the guides actually teach you to do.
A guide covers a subject. A capability cuts across them — the same handful of things turn up in the work of a compensation analyst, a school principal and a restaurant leader alike. These are those things, with the books that ground them and the roles that ask for them.
Skills
Trained proficiencies — what you get better at by practising.
Exploratory Data Analysis
Thorough summarization and visualization of data before and during modeling to build intuition about distributions and relationships.
Taught across 2 subjects · 93 books
Experimentation and Validated Learning
Hypothesis-driven, high-tempo, small-batch experimentation and prototyping to learn empirically what works and reduce risk before major commitment.
Taught across 2 subjects · 59 books
Knowledge
Bodies of understanding a field expects you to hold.
Statistical Power and Sample Adequacy
The probability of detecting a true effect given sample size, effect size, and significance level, and the sufficiency/representativeness of the sample for stable estimation.
Taught across 3 subjects · 124 books
Evaluation Metric Appropriateness
Selection of performance metrics aligned with the business objective, task type, class importance, and cost structure (e.g., under class imbalance).
Taught across 2 subjects · 93 books
Incentive and Reward System Design
Designing compensation, pay mix, and incentives aligned to strategy to shape motivation and behavior while managing cost.
Taught across 2 subjects · 59 books
Industry Structure and Competitive Forces
The external competitive forces (entrants, buyers, suppliers, substitutes, rivalry) and environmental conditions that bound industry profitability and shape opportunity.
Taught across 2 subjects · 59 books
Dispositions
Enduring characteristics — how you reliably show up.
Fact-Based / Data-Driven Decision Making
Reliance on objective data and rigorous analysis (combined with appropriate intuition) as the primary guide to strategic, tactical, and operational decisions rather than gut feel, bias, or politics.
Taught across 3 subjects · 142 books
Evidence-Based Decision Making
The behavioral shift toward grounding decisions in validated data, analytics, and insight rather than intuition, habit, or opinion.
Taught across 2 subjects · 124 books
Fact-Based Decision Making
Reliance on objective data and rigorous analysis as the primary guide to decisions across all organizational levels, using intuition only where appropriate.
Taught across 2 subjects · 24 books
Effort and Motivation
The amount of effort and persistence an individual exerts toward a goal, energized by being slightly behind a reference point and diminished or extinguished (quitting) when too far behind or when complacent while far ahead.
Taught across 2 subjects · 2 books
Intrinsic Motivation
The desire to engage in an activity for its own sake because of interest, satisfaction, or meaning, potentially undermined by controlling extrinsic rewards.
Taught across 2 subjects · 2 books