Decision-making frameworks for executives.

• Working backwards (Amazon). Write the press release first; only build what survives the customer benefit test.
• Regret minimization (Bezos). Project to age 80 and ask which choice you regret less.
• Inversion (Munger / Jacobi). Don't ask how to succeed — list everything that would cause failure, then avoid it.
• OKRs (Grove / Doerr). One objective, three measurable key results, quarterly cadence.
• Type 1 vs Type 2 decisions (Bezos). Reversible decisions deserve speed; irreversible ones deserve deliberation.
• Pre-mortems (Klein). Imagine the project failed; work backward to what killed it.
• Base rates (Kahneman, Tetlock). Anchor forecasts in how similar bets historically played out before adjusting for your case.

Frameworks are most valuable for high-stakes, low-frequency decisions (M&A, restructurings, market entry) where intuition has too few reps to be reliable. For high-frequency operational calls, intuition built from years of pattern-matching usually wins — but should still be stress-tested against base rates.

Only frameworks that appear repeatedly in the operating records of titans in this archive — shareholder letters, internal memos, on-record interviews — earn a slot. We exclude pop-management fads and frameworks whose only evidence is a book deal.

A framework is procedural: do these steps in this order. A mental model is conceptual: a lens you carry into many situations. Use frameworks for execution, models for diagnosis. See mental models for the diagnostic toolkit.