Hi, I'm Barnaby

By day I'm a Partner in KPMG's Deal Advisory & Strategy practice, where I lead our AI rollout in China. I write here to sharpen my thinking; publishing forces clarity. It's a more personal voice than the research I author at work.

It's also a visual archive. I'm obsessed with composition, colour and light: street, landscape and portraits in my Galleries, and the mental models I draw to make abstract ideas visible.

There's a long-running log of the coffees I brew, and notes from the books and podcasts that shaped me.

It's unapologetically an eclectic mix. The older I get, the more I think it's a mistake to centre on one discipline.

Thanks for visiting my corner of the web.

Essays Mental Models Galleries Presentations Notes From Cup of Record

White line drawing on black: Lauren Tan pulls a weed out by its roots from a raised bed while a small robot waters the plants beside her.

Technology

On pstack: the skills behind 2,500 PRs a month, and the mental models behind the skills

Lauren Tan’s agentic engineering skills, and the six pictures she uses to explain them.

Read the essay → 01 / 03

Black and white portrait of a young Lee Kuan Yew in a pinstriped suit, lit by a single studio lamp.

Notes from

From Third World to First

Notes from the book From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew.

Read the essay → 02 / 03

An iceberg seen half above and half below the waterline: a small sunlit tip in the sky, a vast glowing mass filling the sea beneath.

Strategy

80/20: The Subconscious

Part 4 of the 80/20 series. The most extreme imbalance sits inside your own head, and almost nobody uses it on purpose.

Read the essay → 03 / 03

Recent Essays

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A weathered wooden deckchair sitting alone on a quiet grassy terrace overlooking hazy hills at golden hour — work less, enjoy more.

Strategy

80/20: For Life

Part 3 of the 80/20 series. The same imbalance runs through a single life: a fifth of your time produces most of what you achieve and enjoy.

Victoria Harbour at dusk under an amber sky, the ICC and Kowloon skyline lit against the water

Markets

All That Glisters: The Gold the MPF Won’t Let You Hold

Data visuals on 10 years of HK’s MPF with narration from the great Bard.

A simple handmade sandwich cut in half on a linen napkin and pale plate in soft window light, its layers on show — a nod to the human-AI sandwich: you frame the task, the machine fills the middle, you finish it.

Strategy

Making it up, changing my mind, and learning to COPE with AI

AI’s effect on your job is still anyone’s guess. The practical response is getting good at directing it, and COPE gives you a framework for doing exactly that.

A worker in a hard hat facing steel framework on a construction site at dawn

Technology

We are all going to have to become engineers

What tinkering with agents at home taught me about deploying them at work

An empty highway running straight to a distant horizon at dawn, plains and low mountains on either side.

Travel

America – A Wider England

An eyewateringly large dinner, a business class seat that doesn’t recline, and a NASA engineer who changed history with a nine-page memo. First impressions of America at forty-five.

A man in a blue shirt stands still at Shibuya Crossing while crowds and traffic streak past in motion blur.

Technology

Strategies and Tools for Coping in the Agentic Age

The bottleneck used to be information overload. Now AI handles the mechanical work — and the real challenge is knowing what to pay attention to.

Mental Models

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Pareto Principle

Twenty per cent of effort drives eighty per cent of results.

Find the vital few inputs and put your attention there first.

Explore the model

Circle of Competence

Operate where you understand cause and effect.

Stay inside the circle, expand it deliberately, and partner outside it.

Explore the model

Eisenhower Matrix

Importance beats urgency.

Sort every task into one of four moves: do it now, schedule it, delegate it, or eliminate it.

Explore the model

01 The Idea Maze Before building, map the space: the key forks, dead ends and dependencies—so you can choose a promising path and run smarter tests. 02 The Map is not the Territory All models are simplifications. Don’t confuse the representation (map, metric, plan, narrative) with the thing itself—and update the map when facts change. 03 The PARA Method Organise everything into four buckets—Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives—so what you need is one click from action. 04 Thought Experiment Use a carefully imagined scenario to test an idea’s logic, expose assumptions, and predict consequences—before you spend time or money. 05 Thucydides Trap When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, fear and miscalculation can tip competition into conflict unless incentives and guardrails are redesigned. 06 Zero to One Aim for vertical progress—create something truly new (0 → 1), not just more of the same (1 → n). Win by building a monopoly on a focused niche and compounding from there. 07 Pavlovian Conditioning A neutral cue paired with a meaningful event can come to trigger the response on its own. 08 Perceptual Bias When perception systematically deviates—illusions, context effects—so the same data looks different. 09 Redundancy Add independent alternatives so one failure doesn’t stop the outcome; test failover so the backup isn’t imaginary. 10 Regression to the Mean Extreme results are usually followed by more typical ones—even without any real change. 11 Probabilistic Thinking Reason in degrees of belief, not certainties: use base rates, ranges, and expected value—then update as evidence arrives. 12 Star Principle Richard Koch’s rule to back category leaders in high‑growth niches; leadership + growth compounding.

Galleries

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Travel

Rajasthan

29 photographs

Travel

Sumba

10 photographs

Travel

The Northern Territory

20 photographs

Baizhangji Waterfall, Wenzhou

Photography · 17 photographs

Hong Kong, Sea

Travel · 12 photographs

Presentations

Becoming Engineers (Sep 2026) — opening slide

Hong Kong ListCo Value Creation Analytics — opening slide

Natural Hama by BeanCurious, a coffee bag photographed for the Cup of Record archive

Specimen No. 118

Recently reviewed 1.5/5

Natural Hama

BeanCurious — Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia

Natural · Light roast · 1700 masl

floral · berries · jam-like

Recently reviewed 1.5/5

Cerrado Mineiro

BeanCurious — Cerrado Mineiro, Brazil

Pulped Natural · Light roast · 500 masl

caramel · toasty · walnut

Recently reviewed 4.5/5

373 Finca Monteblanco Purple Caturra

Uncle Ben Coffee — Huila, Colombia

Lactic Washed · Light roast · 1730 masl

pineapple · cream · peach · lychee · fruit tea

Notes From

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Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson — book cover

Podcast — Walter Isaacson

How Elon Works

Notes from the Founders Podcast on Elon Musk

The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek — book cover

Book — Simon Sinek

Infinite vs. Finite Games: Rethinking AI Rivalry

Notes from Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game – and parallels to the AI “Race”

Book — Dan Wang

Breakneck

Notes from the book Breakneck by Dan Wang.

Book — Marcus Aurelius

Meditations

Notes from the book Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

From the quote library

Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast.

Morgan Housel

The Psychology of Money

Read quote