Executive Education · Est. 2024
The last competitive
advantage
is the quality of your judgment.
Thinking Class trains executives in the cognitive disciplines that AI cannot replicate, builds you a working second brain in Obsidian, and gives you the exact knowledge to lead your organisation through the transformation without losing your mind in the process.
Ancient rigor • Modern relevance
When the entire world is moving fast and breaking things, that’s exactly when you should take a moment and think through your next move.
The Problem
The Atrophy of Executive Intelligence
The degradation is quiet, cumulative, and almost entirely invisible until the moment it matters most.
Nobody warned the executive class that AI would make them more confident and less careful at the same time. It does not appear in productivity reports. They measure outputs, not intelligence.
Cognitive capability atrophies without use. The intellectual traditions designed to guard against it, from the Socratic method to Munger's inversion, became considerably more relevant when GPT-4 was released. Not less.
Thinking Class exists because someone had to build it.
“AI has not made executives smarter. It has made them faster at being wrong, more confident while doing it, and considerably cheaper to deploy.”
73%
of Fortune 500 executives report reduced confidence in novel, high-stakes decisions since broadly adopting AI tooling
6×
faster time-to-decision in AI-assisted leadership teams, with no measurable improvement in decision quality
15 yrs
is how long this shift will take to play out. We are 12 to 18 months in. The executives paying attention now are not the busiest ones
The Framework
The barbell strategy
Embrace the new without abandoning the proven. Tools that have survived centuries are more trustworthy than tools from last quarter. The new stack requires fluency, not faith.
Proven / Lindy
Ancient rigor
Years of proven relevance
The shortest bar (32 yrs) is not yet Lindy. It is included for context.
Frontier / New
Modern relevance
Months since emergence (scale: 48 mo)
All frontier items are younger than the shortest Lindy bar by a factor of six.
In Tandem
Socrates had no notes. His dialogues were his memory system. Your Obsidian vault is the modern equivalent: a structured record of interrogated assumptions. The LLM queries the vault. The vault reflects the Socratic habit. Neither works as well alone.
Before deploying any AI agent, write the list of what it must never do. Munger's inversion applied to AI architecture. Twenty minutes of this catches more failure modes than a week of positive-case testing.
Treat every model output as a prior, not a conclusion. Update proportionally to evidence. The Bayesian reflex stops both traps: sycophancy (accepting everything) and cynicism (rejecting everything).
A language model has read everything and understood nothing — not in the way a physicist understands quantum mechanics. The Munger lattice identifies which mental models are load-bearing. That is the prompt the machine needs.
Neither side is optional. The bar between them is your judgment.
Curriculum
Three pillars. One coherent mind.
The curriculum is not a survey of interesting ideas. It is a structured programme to rebuild how you think, drawing on the most durable cognitive tools in history and the most urgent capabilities of the present.
Classical Reasoning
Philosophy fell out of fashion in business education around 1990 and was replaced with frameworks that were easier to teach and less useful. The problems it addressed (reasoning under uncertainty, arguing without deceiving yourself, changing your mind without losing your nerve) did not go anywhere. This pillar puts them back.
Socratic Method
Not a rhetorical device. A protocol for dismantling the assumptions that produce bad decisions. The goal is not to win the argument. It is to find out whether the argument was worth having.
Stoic Decision Hygiene
The distinction between what is and is not in your control sounds obvious. It is genuinely difficult in practice. Marcus Aurelius wrote about this problem in 170 AD. It has not been solved.
Bayesian Updating
Changing your mind proportionally to evidence is a learnable skill. Not capitulating to the loudest voice in the room, nor defending a prior stubbornly, but updating with calibrated precision.
What You Leave With
Three things. They compound.
Most executive programmes produce a certificate and a folder of slides. Thinking Class produces three tangible outputs you will use for the rest of your career.
A working second brain.
A working Obsidian vault: structured, searchable, designed to compound over time. The Obsidian culture in Silicon Valley is serious about this for a reason. Your knowledge base is a competitive advantage. Most executives have not built one.
Fluency as a builder.
The executives winning right now are not just users of AI products. They understand why MCP endpoints matter. They know what agent debt looks like before it accumulates. They can evaluate a forward-deployed engineer. They know which open-source models are good enough and for what task. This is what principal-level AI fluency looks like.
Your organisation's AI playbook.
Getting an organisation AI-capable without the disorientation that leads to expensive reversals is a specific skill. You leave with a working playbook: what to act on immediately, what to wait on, and how to build conviction without creating chaos. AI-pilled, without the psychosis.
"We are 12 to 18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The executives who are paying attention right now are not the ones who are busiest. They are the ones who have made time to think."
The urgency among those building at the frontier is not performative. The organisations being rebuilt right now, agent-first, with smaller teams and sharper tooling, are not waiting for the dust to settle. Neither should you.
The Format
Three options. One curriculum.
The intellectual content is the same. What you leave with — and how long it holds — varies with the time you give it.
Option 01
One Day
For leaders who cannot disappear.
A single concentrated session covering one curriculum pillar in depth. In your city. At three participants, effectively private.
- 8 hours
- Up to 3 participants
- In-city venue
- Available monthly
Pillars covered
Concept application over 12 months
Option 02
Weekend
Friday evening to Sunday.
The most popular format. Two and a half days, residential, small group. All three pillars at meaningful depth.
- Fri evening to Sun
- Up to 5 participants
- Residential venue
- Available quarterly
Pillars covered
Concept application over 12 months
Option 03
Five Days
Monday to Friday.
A private cohort of ten executives, one week away, all three pillars and all three deliverables in full. The complete programme.
- Mon to Fri
- Up to 10 participants
- Residential venue
- Available twice yearly
Pillars covered
★ all three deliverables included
Concept application over 12 months
Format comparison
Curriculum pillars
Total contact hours
Deliverables completed
Individual attention
inversely proportional to group size"The cohort model is not decorative. Thinking alongside demanding peers creates friction. Friction is the point. You will not find it on a webinar."
Locations
The programme runs in the cities where the decisions that matter actually get made.
The programme runs in the cities where consequential decisions actually get made. Venues are confirmed upon booking.
Applications
Apply for a seat
in the next cohort.
Tell us which format interests you and we will send programme details. There is no automated shortlist. We read everything.
The question at the bottom is not rhetorical. Your answer will tell us more about your readiness than your title ever could. Executives who write two sentences rarely proceed.
- Formats: one day, weekend, or five days
- Six cities across Europe, Americas, and Asia
- Tuition: available on request
- Response within 7 working days