Guidelines

Outcome Orientation

This community is targeted towards ‘business nerds’ — folks who are interested in the art and practice of business. The overarching principle in this community is:

In general, you should be approaching discussion in this forum with an outcome in mind. In many cases it might just be “collectively making sense of some business news” or “getting inputs for some business idea”. In other cases it might be “hanging out with fellow business nerds.”

Of course, there are other rules, and the rest of this document lays them out. But this principle should inform most of our discussions.

Acceptable Topics & Category Guidelines

This community focuses on topics of interest to ‘business nerds’.

All other topics apart from those below are off-topic and may be deleted or closed at the moderators’s discretion.

The following guidelines are meant to help you get your post into the correct topics and clarify the allowable topics. Do note that moderators may move topics without notice if they feel they were placed in the wrong category.

Businesses

This topic is about businesses in general: sensemaking of current business events, analysis of specific companies, thoughts on putting business practices to the test, recommendations for frameworks or practices, and so on.

Markets

This topic is about ideas or approaches to financial markets. Interest in business often spills over to interest in investing, or at least in the capital markets. This topic is the right place to talk about those topics — and may include personal investing strategies, thoughts on investing books or frameworks, threads on the investment management business, or perhaps just clarification on basic financial concepts.

Books

This topic is for discussions and recommendations on books that may be of interest to the business nerd.

Deals + Recs

Recommendations from the community on good things to buy, or deals that might be of interest to the business enthusiast.

General Careers

If it’s about careers, it goes here. Examples of acceptable topics include negotiating at work, interviewing techniques, and learning to deal with office politics, plotting to build a career moat.

(For a primer on what career moats are, you may read the introductory guide here).

Self Improvement

This topic is broadly about self improvement. You may share your (or your family’s or friend’s) experiments, record observations about attempted practice, or ask questions about detailed implementation here. You may also talk about ideas, books, articles, and other resources for self-improvement.

Blog Comments

Discussion threads on Commonplace blog posts may be found here. New threads will be generated automatically whenever new blog posts are published on the blog, or whenever a member visits a post.

Note: unlike the other categories, this category is public.

Unacceptable Topics

1) Politics and Religion

Political and religious topics are not allowed for obvious reasons, since there are usually inevitable frictions. The only exceptions to this rule are:

Common religious expressions such as sending your prayers to an ailing member.
Usage of factual and non-derogatory political labels when necessary.
Discussion about enacted laws or regulations that may affect the individual in their careers. (Note: discussions of proposed laws or regulations are prohibited!)
Proposed regulations that are directly related to one’s life or career may be discussed if and when they are published for public comments.

2) Controversial Topics with no Clear Outcomes

If members can’t do anything with the content of a topic other than argue about it, it doesn’t belong here. Examples include:

World economic, political, tax, health care or climate policies (unless you’re directly affected by it, and can sensemake productively!)
Conspiracy theories

These are clear cut examples, but there may be borderline discussions that are less useful. It’s up to the moderator’s discretion what topics to close pre-emptively if they become too hot, or if they suck up too much moderation time.

Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree

You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:

Name-calling
Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content
Knee-jerk contradiction

Instead, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation.

Moderators may step in and edit or delete any post or topic if they see fit.

Remember that you can edit your own posts even after submitting them, so comments made in anger or haste can be rephrased before the problem escalates or a moderator has to step in.

When it comes to civility, editing is encouraged!

If You See a Problem, Flag It

Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or police.

When you see bad behaviour, do not reply. It encourages the bad behaviour by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.

Always Be Civil

Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness:

Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.
Respect each other. Don’t harass or grief anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information.
Respect our forum. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum.

These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the appearance of any of these things. If you’re unsure, ask yourself how you would feel if your post was featured on the front page of the New York Times.

Keep It Tidy

Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. General guidelines:

Don’t start a topic in the wrong category.
Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
Don’t post no-content replies.
Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.
Don’t sign your posts — every post has your profile information attached to it.

Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. If you want to take an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as a Linked Topic.

No Solicitation

Please do not solicit business or website traffic on this forum. Mods will determine what constitutes solicitation on a case by case basis, but here are some guidelines about commonly encountered issues:

Members may enter personal websites or blogs in the “Website” section of their profiles.
Members may link to relevant pages on their personal websites or blogs in replies on a topic started by another member.
Members may not post affiliate or referral links, or ask for referrals.
If you’re a company representative in a discussion about a product or service, you must identify yourself, and you should only post on that topics to correct factual errors or directly answer unresolved technical questions about your products or services.
Authors, software developers, or others looking for feedback should contact the mods for approval before posting.
If you’re unsure about a post, you may also send a DM to a forum admin or mod for approval before posting.

Miscellaneous

Serious Violations

Certain violations, in particular posting or linking to spam, threatening, abusive, illegal, or obscene material, will result in removal of the message and may lead to an immediate and permanent ban of the poster.

Usernames

Usernames must be inoffensive, in accordance with all other forum policies, and not misleading. Examples of usernames that do not meet these requirements would be any that include profanities, rude/sexist/racist comments, the names of real people other than yourself, political or religious expressions, and recognizable trademarked names.

Avatars

Avatars may be deleted by a mod or site admin at any time if it results in complaints from your fellow members, if it duplicates an existing member’s avatar, or if it includes any of the following:

animations
ads or commercial messages
misleading photos
offensive or disturbing images

Post Your Own Stuff

You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission.

A full copyright policy is available in the Terms of Service below:

Terms of Service

Yes, legalese is boring, but we must protect ourselves – and by extension, you and your data – against unfriendly folks. We have a Terms of Service describing your (and our) behavior and rights related to content, privacy, and laws. To use this service, you must agree to abide by our TOS.