Annie Duke
Author & Decision Strategist at First Round Capital (Special Partner)
Bestselling author of 'Thinking in Bets' and 'Quit,' former professional poker player who won over $4M in tournaments including a World Series of Poker bracelet, now helps companies make better decisions as a special partner at First Round Capital.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Annie Duke, bestselling author and former World Series of Poker champion, shares frameworks for dramatically improving decision quality in product and business. She argues there's no such thing as a long feedback loop if you identify correlated leading indicators, explains why making implicit assumptions explicit is the single most impactful change companies can make, and reveals how she transformed decision-making at First Round Capital.
Leadership Principles
- → Take what's implicit and make it explicit — intuition is sometimes right, but if you don't make it explicit you can't find out when it's wrong
- → There is no such thing as a long feedback loop — shorten it by identifying correlated leading indicators
- → Pre-mortems are only useful if you set kill criteria and commit to actions when you see those signals
Notable Quotes
"It's so incredibly necessary in improving decision quality to take what's implicit and make it explicit. Your intuition is sometimes right. If you don't make it explicit, then you don't get to find out when it's wrong."
— On the fundamental principle of better decision-making
"There is no such thing as a long feedback loop. The way you shorten it is to say, what are the things that are correlated with the outcome that I eventually desire?"
— On using leading indicators to evaluate decisions before final outcomes
"People generally think the purpose of a meeting is to discover, discuss, decide. The only thing that's supposed to happen in a meeting is the discussion part."
— On restructuring meetings for better decision-making
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