One Must-Read Article

The Smartest Decision-Making Tool You’re Not Using

I’ve watched Berkshire Hathaway from a distance for years. The investing returns get most of the news, but what kept pulling me back was the operating discipline underneath them. Decade after decade, Buffett and Munger avoided the predictable mistakes that took down their peers — the over-leveraged acquisitions, the diversification into businesses leadership didn’t understand, the empire-building that compounded into write-downs ten years later. That, more than any single deal, is what I came to respect.

So when Jeff Haden ran a piece in Inc. recently revisiting one of Charlie Munger’s core mental models, I wanted to explore it more deeply — not as an investing principle, but as an operating tool growth-stage founders can put to work this week.

Facing a hard decision, Munger refused to ask “How do we make this work?” Instead:

“Invert,” he’d say. “Always invert.”

Instead of asking how to succeed, ask how to fail. Map every path that leads away from the goal, then refuse to take those paths. Or as Munger put it: “Tell me where I’m going to die, so I don’t go there.”

It’s one of the most practical decision-making question ever asked. And it’s one we often refuse to ask in growth-stage companies.

Why we avoid inversion

We’re wired forward. Vision, strategy, goals — every planning framework points us toward the outcome we want. That leaves an entire half of the decision unexplored. The inverted question — what would guarantee we fail? — forces us to admit that failures are real and identifiable. It feels defeatist. It isn’t. It’s the most clear-eyed thing a founder can do.

Inversion on hiring

The forward question: What does an A-player look like for this role?

You’ll write a job description, list competencies, build a scorecard. Useful work. But the inverted question goes further faster.

The inverted question: What does the hire that destroys this team look like?

Someone who needs constant validation. Someone who can’t disagree without making it personal. Someone whose last three jobs ended in eighteen months for reasons they can’t quite explain.

The forward question tells you who to want. The inverted question tells you who to never hire — and founders often lose more time to bad hires than they gain from great ones.

Inversion on pricing

The forward question: What’s the right price for our offering?

Competitive analysis, willingness-to-pay research, value-based modeling. Reasonable.

The inverted question: What pricing decisions would guarantee we never command premium positioning?

Discounting to close a deal that wasn’t going to close anyway. Publishing prices lower before prospects understand what we do. Bundling so aggressively that we train customers to expect everything for the base price. Letting sales reps grant concessions without authority, teaching the market that our list price is a fiction.

Forward pricing strategy is a guess. Inverted pricing strategy is a list of things you stop doing on Monday.

Inversion on capital allocation

This is where Munger applied inversion most ruthlessly. At Berkshire the question wasn’t “What should we buy?” It was “What buying patterns have destroyed wealth in companies like ours?” The same logic works for a $5M founder weighing the next dollar.

The forward question: Where will this dollar produce the highest return?

Unanswerable in advance. You don’t know.

The inverted question: Where has every dollar I’ve spent in the last twelve months underperformed?

Answerable on a Tuesday with a spreadsheet. The “trade shows” that produced zero qualified leads. The agency retainer that kept renewing because nobody wanted the conversation. The software stack with eleven tools where four would do. The senior hire who should have been a contractor.

Inversion doesn’t tell you the best place to deploy capital. It tells you to stop deploying it in the proven worst places — almost always the higher-return move.

Inversion on the customer base

The forward question: Who’s our ideal customer?

Avatar development, pipeline scoring. Standard.

The inverted question: Which customers, if we keep them, will quietly drag this company down?

The ones who take 90 days to pay and need three reminders. The ones who consume support time at 4x the rate of comparable accounts. The ones whose feature requests, if built, would pull us off our roadmap. The ones whose retention is high but whose expansion is zero — a leading indicator that we’ve stopped growing too.

Most founders won’t fire those customers. The revenue is real, and firing customers feels like going backwards. But inversion makes the cost visible — it just doesn’t show up on the P&L until later.

Inversion on the calendar

The forward question: What should I be working on?

The inverted question: If I look back at this quarter and we missed our number, what was I doing instead?

Founder calendars in the $2M to $15M range fail in predictable ways. Too many internal meetings. Too much time on hiring loops for roles that should have been filled three months ago. Too much attention on the loudest customer instead of the most valuable.

The inverted calendar question doesn’t ask you to optimize. It asks you to identify what you’ll regret, then stop doing those things — which frees the time you needed for the work that actually moves the company.

Where inversion stops working

Inversion isn’t a complete tool. It works best when failures are visible and the upside is uncertain — most operating decisions. It works less well for these kinds of decisions: a new market, a category-creating product, a play that fails ninety-nine times and pays for itself the hundredth. For those, you have to play to win. But for most founders running growth-stage companies, the moments demanding “stop doing the thing that’s killing us” are constant.

Here’s My Take

To put this to work this week, run one decision through inversion before you make it. Pick anything on your plate — a hire, a price, an investment, a customer call. Write down the forward version: what should I do here? Then write the inverted version: what would guarantee this goes badly?

The inverted question gives you a clearer answer in less time — and it’s almost always something you can act on immediately.

Munger built one of the great fortunes of the modern era on the back of that question.

Tell me where I’m going to die, so I don’t go there.

Then don’t go there.