Learning Path 29
The General Manager
The whole system, for someone accountable for a unit rather than a team. Decision rights, measurement, and reward as one architecture; the coordination cost of every extra team and the internal markets that price it; profit centers, shared services, and the accountability each one creates; the unit economics the whole thing is judged on; and the agency theory — moral hazard, screening, the optimal contract — that explains why the incentives keep behaving the way they do.
- Advanced
- ~20h estimated
- 18 modules
- 107 topics
Suggested before this path:
Why this path matters
A general manager owns three things at once — an organization, a P&L, and a set of incentives arguing quietly with both. The failures that end GM careers are almost never a bad decision; they are a structure that made a reasonable person decide badly, and structure is the part you can design in advance.
What you will understand
- How a single sale actually makes — or loses — money.
- The other side of the table is thinking too.
- Who decides, what gets measured, and what it pays.
Modules in this path
Core Margin Math · Unit Economics
- Unit Economics Basics
- Contribution Margin
- Gross Margin versus Real Profit
- Break-even CAC
- Break-even ROAS
- Ad Cost per Order (Cost per Click → Cost per Order)
Acquisition Economics · Unit Economics
- Blended CAC versus Channel CAC
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Payback Period
- Revenue Quality versus Revenue Volume
- Fixed Costs versus Variable Costs
- Operating Leverage
Costs, Leverage, and Safety · Unit Economics
- Margin of Safety in Pricing
- Hidden Costs per Transaction
- Refund-adjusted Profitability
- Chargeback Risk
- Cash Conversion Cycle
- Inventory Turnover
Cash Flow Realities · Unit Economics
- Dead-stock Risk
- Working-capital Traps
- Profit versus Cash
- Why Fast-growing Businesses Can Still Go Broke
- Revenue Concentration Risk
- Customer Concentration Risk
Concentration and Stress Tests · Unit Economics
- Supplier Concentration Risk
- The One Bad Month Stress Test
- Price Elasticity
- Demand Destruction
- Price Anchoring
- Decoy Pricing
Pricing Power and Fees · Unit Economics
- Bundle Economics
- Subscription Economics
- Buy-now-pay-later Fees
- Marketplace Fees versus Direct-to-customer Margins
- Reading Financial Statements
Strategic Interaction · Strategic Economics
- Nash Equilibrium and the Best-response Map
- Sequential Games and Backward Induction
- Credible Commitment and the Value of Removing Your Own Options
- Repeated Games and the Folk Theorem
- Entry Deterrence and Strategic Capacity Commitment
- Mixed Strategies and the Value of Being Unpredictable
Information Economics · Strategic Economics
- Adverse Selection and the Market for Lemons
- Moral Hazard and the Incentive-compatibility Constraint
- Signaling and the Separating Equilibrium
- Screening and the Self-selecting Menu of Contracts
- Information Rents and Why the Informed Party Keeps a Share
- The Principal-agent Problem and the Optimal Contract
Mechanism and Auction Design · Strategic Economics
- Mechanism Design and the Revelation Principle
- Auction Formats and the Revenue Equivalence Theorem
- The Winner's Curse in a Common-value Auction
- The Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Mechanism and Why Nobody Runs It
- Strategy-proofness and Marketplace Rules People Cannot Game
- Matching Markets and the Deferred-acceptance Algorithm
Designing a Marketplace · Strategic Economics
- Cross-side Network Effects and Which Side to Subsidize
- The Chicken-and-egg Problem and Cold-start Strategies
- Marketplace Liquidity and the Thickness Problem
- Take-rate Design and Where a Platform Can Safely Tax
- Reputation Systems and the Economics of Trust
- Platform Governance and the Rules a Market Has to Enforce
Market Structure and Power · Strategic Economics
- Market Power and the Lerner Index
- Barriers to Entry and Contestable Markets
- Horizontal Mergers and the HHI Screen
- Vertical Foreclosure and Raising Rivals' Costs
- Antitrust and the Consumer-welfare Standard
- Price Discrimination in Three Degrees
How a Price Is Actually Made · Strategic Economics
- The Limit Order Book and Where a Price Comes From
- The Bid-ask Spread as the Price of Adverse Selection
- Liquidity Provision and a Market Maker's Inventory Risk
- Price Discovery and How Information Gets Into a Price
- Market Impact and the Cost of Trading Size
- Dark Pools, Internalization, and Where Order Flow Goes
How a Company Decides · Organization Design
- Decision Rights and Who Owns Which Call
- Organizational Architecture: Decision Rights, Measurement, and Reward
- Span of Control and the Arithmetic of Layers
- Centralization versus Local Knowledge
- Matrix Organizations and Dual Reporting
- Information Flow and Where a Company Goes Blind
Incentives and Agency · Organization Design
- Designing Variable Pay That Survives Contact with Reality
- Goodhart's Law and Metrics That Get Gamed
- The Multitask Problem and Why Paying for One Thing Kills the Other
- Relative Performance Evaluation and Tournament Pay
- Quotas, Accelerators, and the Ratchet Effect
- Relational Contracts and the Promise a Manager Cannot Enforce
Coordination and Internal Markets · Organization Design
- Internal Markets and Charging for Shared Resources
- Profit Centers, Cost Centers, and the Accountability Each Creates
- Shared Services versus Embedded Teams
- Coordination Cost and Why Adding People Slows a Project
- Process Design and Where the Handoffs Leak
- Organizational Slack and the Cost of Running at Full Utilization
Hiring and Building the Team · Organization Design
- Defining a Role Before You Hire for It
- Structured Interviews and What Actually Predicts Performance
- Adverse Selection in Hiring and the Reference Problem
- The Cost of a Bad Hire, Honestly Calculated
- Compensation Bands and Internal Pay Equity
- Onboarding as a Ninety-day System
Managing People and Performance · Organization Design
- Delegation and the Levels of Authority
- One-to-ones and the Manager's Information Loop
- Performance Management Without Annual-review Theater
- Managing Someone Out and the Conversation Nobody Schedules
- Regretted Attrition and What Actually Makes People Leave
- Managing Managers and the Second-line Problem
Culture, Bias, and Failure Modes · Organization Design
- Culture as Whatever Behavior Gets Rewarded
- Escalation of Commitment and the Project Nobody Will Kill
- Groupthink, Dissent, and the Pre-mortem
- Empire Building and the Internal Capital Market Distortion
- Why Incentive Systems Fail and How to Audit One
- The Founder-to-manager Transition and the First Fifty People