Author: Tom Koor

Tom Koor

Does your company have current knowledge and facts?

Does your company have current knowledge and facts?

 What is the purpose of this article?

  • This article enables a discussion about the value and creation of knowledge, facts, and data.
  • The audience for this article includes: investors, board oof directors, and C-Suite
  • This article applies to all companies, ranging from pre-revenue through to long established global companies.
  • This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice.
  • You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.
  • AI did not write this article. 100% human written.

You can download a PDF of this article from:Does you company have current knowledge and facts

How is this article structured?

  • Decisions and actions are based on knowledge. Knowledge is derived from facts. Facts are derived from data.

What are the critical learnings in this article?

  • Your company’s survival and success depends on having better knowledge than your competitors and better ability to learn.
  • Knowledge explains why things happened. Your decisions and actions are based on knowledge.
  • Facts describe behaviour at a point in time and are validated. Facts are what people believe to be the truth.
  • In today’s turbulent, fast changing, and unpredictable world knowledge, facts and data often become obsolete quickly.

What is knowledge?

Knowledge explains why things happened. Your decisions and actions are based on knowledge. For example:

  • The facts could be that sales dropped last quarter. Knowledge is knowing why customers decided to buy from your competition rather than from your company.

What are the two types of knowledge?

  • Explicit knowledge is what resides in documents and electronic files.
  • Tacit knowledge is extremely difficult to document e.g. how to calm an angry customer, how to reorganize talent to cope with an unexpected crisis. Tacit knowledge resides in peoples’ brains.

 Why is current knowledge critical to your company’s survival and success?

Your company’s survival and success depend on having better and more current knowledge than your competitors in key areas.

  • Some of the key areas include: Why customers make buying decisions. Why your solution more is more profitable than the competition. Why star employees decide to join your company or leave your company.
  • You must have current knowledge. Why? For example, knowing how customers made buying decisions 10 years ago is not helpful in today’s world.
  • Why customers make buying decisions may change within days. E.g. fashion
  • The average half life of professional skills and technical knowledge is below 5 years.1

What are facts?

Facts describe behaviour at a point in time and are validated. Facts are what people believe to be the truth.

  • Facts are truthful at a specific point in time in a specific situation.
  • Facts describe behaviour at a point in time e.g. 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers.
  • Facts by themselves are not the rationale for making decisions about actions to take.

Everyone needs to have a common understanding and agreement on what the facts are.

 How does your company create knowledge from facts?

  • Analytical techniques and software, including AI, help identify potential knowledge from facts.
  • The creation of knowledge in the brains of your board directors, C-Suite, and employees requires physical changes in their brains.

Do facts need to be validated?

Facts without validation are not facts. Assumptions, opinions, hopes, etc. are not facts. Some types of validation may include:

  • Separating correlation from causation e.g. smoking and lung cancer are correlated. But it’s false to conclude that lung cancer causes smoking.
  • Getting different data e.g. the statement that the new software is great success because there were 100,000 downloads in a month is not fact when the different data shows that 99% of people uninstalled after a week, and that after a month only 10 people were cash paying subscribers.

Facts need to be constantly validated in today fast changing, unpredictable world.

How does your company create facts from data?

  • You must have a common definition of facts and data. Create a glossary for defining facts and data.
  • Create data from variety of sources.
  • Analytical techniques and software, including AI, help identify potential knowledge from facts.
  • The final step is people in your company agreeing on what are the facts.

Why are current facts critical to your company’s success?

Facts are constantly changing in todays turbulent and unpredictable world.

  • There is the risk that your company continues to believe out of date or unvalidated facts as the truth.
  • Your decisions and actions are then based on out-of-date or unproven knowledge.

What is data?

  • Data is a huge pool of unprocessed – unvalidated and without business meaning.
  • Examples include: 1,000s of customer invoices and payments, sensor readings in a factory, raw survey responses, social media posts, logs of customer phone calls and emails, etc.

Why is current data critical to your company’s success?

New and changed data often appear in todays turbulent and unpredictable world.

  • Current and relevant facts must be based on current and relevant data.
  • Current relevant knowledge must be based on current and relevant facts.
  • Your company decisions must be based on current and relevant knowledge.

What are the challenges in your people learning to create new knowledge?

It is mentally difficult and psychologically stressful to make the biological changes in your brain required for learning and creating new knowledge and new facts.

  • You will very naturally, and often unknowingly, utilize a broad range of cognitive and psychological bias to resist unlearning, and to resist new knowledge which is different from the past.
  • You will unconsciously favour decision making and planning processes from the past and which are no longer useful today.
  • Your information technology systems continue to support the old way of doing thing.

What are your next steps?

  • Define the words/concepts you are using, in a glossary. I have seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
  • Identify the key areas where your company must have competitively differentiated knowledge.
  • Identify the links between your company’s performance and your company’s knowledge.
  • Assess your company’s knowledge and facts.
  • Assess your company’s planning and decision-making links to knowledge.
  • Identify your company’s process for creating fact from data.
  • Assess your company’s leadership capabilities to quickly learn and unlearn. Start with the Board of Directors, CEO and C-Suite.

Footnotes:

1 Boston Consulting Group “Reskilling for a rapidly changing world.https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/reskilling-workforce-for-future

 

What further reading should you do?

  • What is learning? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/why-have-your-minimized-your-talent/

  • Are you solving the right problem? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/are-you-solving-the-right-problem/

  • Is you company planning to fail? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-planning-to-fail/

Tom Koor

Are you solving the right problem?

Are you solving the right problem?

 What is the purpose of this article?

  • This article enables a discussion about whether you’re solving the right problem with the greatest impact on your business.
  • The audience for this article includes: investors, the board of directors, CEOs, and C-Suite.
  • This article applies to all companies, ranging from pre-revenue through to long established global companies.
  • This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice.
  • You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.
  • AI did not write this article. 100% human written.

You can download a PDF of this article from: Are you solving the right problem

What are the critical learnings in this article?

  • A problem is a symptom (something observable) which has a negative impact on your company.
  • You need a solution which addresses the cause of the symptoms.
  • A cause explains why the symptom is occurring e.g. a fire in the building is causing smoke to pour out the windows.
  • A root cause is a cause, which if addressed by a solution, means the problem will never occur again.
  • The fundamental root cause is always people.

What is the structure of this article?

Symptoms > Problems > Causes > Root Cause > Fundamental Root Cause

What is a problem?

  • A problem is a symptom (something observable) which has a negative impact on your company.
  • A symptom occurs when what is observed in not what is expected. The observation may be by a human, sensor, or AI making an observation based on complex analysis of data. Some examples of a symptom are: smoke coming out of building windows. The observation may be measurable e.g. last quarter sales 20% below target.
  • A decision is made whether or not the symptom is a problem. It is not a problem for me if the morning temperature is 2 degrees lower than I expected. It may be a problem for your company if last quarter’s sales were 20% below target.

How do you decide if a symptom is a problem you may need to correct?

  • You have criteria to define if a symptom is a problem.
  • These criteria may include the impact on your company, employees, your shareholders, and society.
  • The impact may be in the next month, or 10 years from now.

Your company will have lots of problems. You won’t solve all of them, because many will have little impact.

Do you need a solution to the problem?

  • You need a solution which addresses the cause of the symptoms.
  • You do not need a solution to the problem.

What is the cause of a problem?

  • A cause explains why the symptom is occurring e.g. a fire in the building is causing smoke to pour out the windows.
  • A cause can only be determined after investigation i.e. is the smoke due to an electrical fire, a broken natural gas line burning, a smoke bomb, a blocked fire place, etc.

There can be a hierarchy of causes and solutions.

  • There can be a hierarchy of causes e.g. the fire was from a broken natural gas pipeline, the break occurred due to failures in installing the pipeline, etc.

What is a root cause?

  • A root cause is a cause, which if addressed by a solution, means the problem will never occur again. E.g. checking the natural gas pipeline for other defects to make sure there won’t be future natural gas fires. Turning of the natural gas pipeline may correct the immediate symptom but does not prevent future natural gas fires.

What is always the fundamental root cause?

  • The fundamental root cause is always people. E.g. who were the people who approved the process for selecting design engineers and installations firms for a poorly designed and poorly installed natural gas pipeline.

Are your focused on the right symptoms?

Have you identified symptoms which could cause major problems for your company in the next 3-5-10+ years?

  • It’s easy to focus on short-term symptoms showing that your company is currently in trouble.
  • It’s hard to identify symptoms and address causes to prevent your company from getting into trouble in the future.

What will be your challenges?

  • Measuring the symptoms and determining their impact.
  • It is easy to focus on symptoms and causes rather than root cause. It is difficult to overcome the cognitive and psychological barriers.
  • Understanding the cause-and-effect relationship between symptoms, causes and root causes.
  • In today’s inter-related systems world, there may be a large number of inter-related symptoms and root causes. One symptom may have multiple partial root causes, and a single root cause may impact multiple symptoms.
  • The fundamental root cause of people talent is often impossible to address, especially when changes are needed to the board of directors, CEO, or C-Suite.

 What are your next steps?

  • Define the words/concepts you’re using, in a glossary. I’ve seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
  • Create your own framework for analyzing symptoms and documenting problems, causes, and root causes.
  • Identify symptoms indicating current problems
  • Define symptoms which would identify future problems
  • Always include the fundamental root cause of people.
  • Define the decision-making criteria, especially the criteria for launching project(s) to address a symptom.

What further reading should you do?

Is your company planning to fail? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-planning-to-fail/

What is learning? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/why-have-your-minimized-your-talent/

Tom Koor

Is the human expert panel concept obsolete?

Is the human expert panel concept obsolete?

 What is the purpose of this article?

  • This article enables a discussion regarding the future value and structure of expert panels.
  • This article applies to all companies, ranging from pre-revenue through to long established global companies.
  • This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice.
  • You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.

AI did not write this article.  100% human written.

You can download a PDF  of this article from: Is the human expert panel obsolete

What are the critical learnings in this article?

  • The traditional expert panel answers questions from a facilitator by sharing anecdotes from the past and opinions about what should be done today.
  • The primary challenge of the traditional expert panel is that their historical experiences don’t reflect current reality or future scenarios in today’s turbulent world.
  • The AI expert panel may consist of several AIs with deep current relevant knowledge and deep analytical frameworks.
  • A human panel can focus on outlining the human implications of past experience in future scenarios.
  • You can create your own AI expert panel to have a discussion about your own questions.
  • You have to design the expert panel: all human, all AI, or a combination of human and AI.

What has been the traditional expert panel?

  • The traditional expert panel answers questions from a facilitator by sharing anecdotes from the past and opinions about what should be done today.
  • These experts have a long and deep history of knowledge and experience.
  • A facilitator asks the panel a series of questions.
  • The audience attends to learn. The audience may come from a wide range of private, public, and government organizations.

Who is in the audience?

  • The audience has a wide variety of people e.g.
  • Different industries
  • Different types of organizations
  • Different types of short and long-term issues

What are some of the challenges with traditional expert panels?

The primary challenge of the traditional expert panel is that their historical experiences don’t reflect current reality or future scenarios in today’s turbulent world.

  • We live in a fast-changing world in which the future is unpredictable.
  • Customer needs, competition, employee expectations, investors expectations change.
  • There are multiple, unforeseen crisis at the same time.

 What has started to replace the human panel of experts?

The AI expert panel may consist of several AIs with deep current relevant knowledge and deep analytical frameworks.

Let’s look at an example:

  • The panel has three AI created consulting partners: McKinsey, Bain, BCG.
  • The AI facilitator asks the panel a question about a business issue. The facilitator will also provide some context.
  • Each AI partner then shares some relevant global fact-based analysis from the past 18 months. This is followed by a specific point of view.
  • The partners then get into a discussion where they challenge each others’ points of view.
  • At the end of the discussion regarding each question, the AI facilitator summarizes the discussion.

What can a human panel do that an AI panel cannot?

A human panel can focus on outlining the human implications of past experience in future scenarios.

When looking at past experience, especially failures the audience should not repeat, the panel can outline:

  • The process for making decisions and gaining commitment to action.
  • Why people supported or didn’t support changes.
  • The human interrelationships and politics of failure.
  • The metrics being tracked before decisions were made and ever afterwards.
  • The role of value, morals, and ethics.

What are the implications for you as an individual?

  • You can create your own AI expert panel to have a discussion about your own questions.
  • You can provide the AI experts with public information about your company.
  • You might be able to provide confidential information to the AI experts if you run a Large Language Model locally on your computer.

What are your next steps?

  • Define the words/concepts you’re using, in a glossary. I’ve seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
  • Describe your audience and their learning objectives for attending? What are the issues and challenges requiring insights from the expert panel?
  • Determine the type of panel you need e.g. all human, all AI, or a combination of human and AI.

What further reading should you do?

Is your company planning to fail?

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-planning-to-fail/

What is learning?

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/why-have-your-minimized-your-talent/

Tom Koor

My regular update regarding my learnings and unlearnings

It’s easy to tell what your strategy is

The purpose of this email is to share my learnings and unlearnings, with the expectation that some will be of value to you. This email was 100% written by me – not by AI.  When you send me an email, my response is 100% written by me.

What has been my most valuable learning in the past three months?

I’ve had countless confusing discussions about strategy.  I’ve concluded that it’s easy to tell what your company’s strategy is.  Let’s assume your board of directors approves your strategic plan.

  • You have a slide at the beginning of your strategic plan presentation to the board. The slide states “Asking for the approval of ….”
  • The minutes of the board meeting document: what exactly was approved; who is accountable for the benefits; what are the metrics for measuring success; what facts and assumptions would have to change in order for the benefits to be unachievable and the board would need to approve something different.
  • The above two points illustrate that approving a strategy is a combination of a decision-making process and a learning process.

What is my personal update?

  • On the mentor roster at The Hatchery, Department of Engineering, University of Toronto, Department of Engineering.
  • On the mentor roster at the Health Innovation Hub, University of Toronto,
  • Continued my long-term fundraising for the Geoff Carr Fellowship at Lupus Ontario. Over the past 20 years family, friends, neighbours, and colleagues have contributed over 284,000.
  • Continued as a member of the Angel Capital Association in the US and the Institute of Corporate Directors in Canada.
  • Continued to share with you, and on my website, some of what I’ve learned and unlearned, with the intent that some of you will find value. The learnings and unlearnings are applicable to any size company, ranging from early-stage startups to large global enterprises.
  • Continued as Board Director at a private company.

I continue to focus my time to maximize the value and impact of my two professional purposes: #1 Enabling current and emerging business leaders to succeed, #2 Enabling business leaders to have a positive impact on society.

Sharing my learnings

Below are links to my website containing new and revised articles since my last update in September. The critical learnings from each article are included. Each article designed to enable discussion among founders, owners, shareholders, investors, CEOs, and boards of directors. The learnings and unlearnings are applicable to any size company, ranging from early-stage startups to large global enterprises.

Links to my points-of-view articles:

Does everyone agree on what strategic planning is?

  • There is no broad agreement regarding the definitions of: strategy; strategic plan; and strategic planning process
  • There is no broad agreement regarding the components and metrics of a strategic plan.
  • There is no broad agreement regarding a strategic planning process.

https://koorandassociates.org/strategy-and-strategic-planning/what-is-strategy-and-strategic-planning/

 

Traditional strategic planning dooms your company to failure.

  • TSP (Traditional Strategic Planning) evolved in a slow changing world. The future could be forecast, and decisions (and decision-making processes) were expected to be valid for several years.
  • The result of TSP was that few companies survived and most delivered poor financial results.
  • Today’s world is totally different: future is impossible to forecast, multiple sets of fast changes, multiple unpredictable crisis.
  • Strategic planning must be rethought to determine which decisions and decision making processes have a lifetime longer than a year.

 

https://koorandassociates.org/strategy-and-strategic-planning/traditional-strategic-planning-dooms-companies-to-failure/

 

Is your company actually a startup? V2

  • Most companies need to become a startup again but don’t realize it. As a result, the wrong type of talent is in place, taking the wrong actions.
  • Most companies don’t last long. Most companies have poor value creation. Most transformations and major business changes have poor results.
  • Companies need to get into startup mode to validate and invalidate their assumptions regarding: customer needs and problems, and the number of customers willing and able to pay for a solution.
  • Board directors and C-Suite cannot learn startup mode knowledge, skills and decision-making processes because their brains have hard-wired biological responses and cognitive biases.

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-actually-a-startup/

 

How will startups destroy your company? V2

  • The startup is a temporary organization designed to search out a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business model with lots of potential customers who are willing and able to pay to solve their problems and needs. Startups are not building a solution. They are building a tool to learn what solution to build.
  • Startups begin by making assumptions about the problems customers are willing and able to pay for, and about how customers would perceive the value proposition they’d achieve from the startup’s solution.
  • The startup is driven by immediate and ongoing understanding of the customer based on face-to-face interviews supplemented by surveys.
  • The assumptions are quickly validated or invalidated. Invalidation results either in a new set of assumptions or the startup stopping.

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/how-will-startups-destroy-your-company/

 

AI is not accountable for benefits.

  • AI is not accountable for benefits. I have seen countless articles start out with AI not delivering benefits.  AI is not accountable for benefits.
  • Management is accountable for benefits.
  • The way to solve this return on capital issue tis two-fold: First, improve the processes used by management to make investment decisions (including AI) and to achieve benefits. Second, improve management.

 

What is a startup? V3

  • There are no commonly accepted definitions regarding startups.
  • There are no commonly accepted definitions of a successful startup.
  • Each of the 5 US universities I looked at has different definitions, metrics, and processes for startups.

https://koorandassociates.org/the-startup-journey/what-is-a-startup/

 

How will undergraduate founders destroy your company?

  • Founders first go through a program to validate that cash paying customers believe they have a problem which needs a solution.
  • The first step is to have face-to-face interviews with cash paying customers.
  • There should a multi-disciplinary set of founders e.g. business, technical, social sciences people.
  • Program, mentor, and founder problems are addressed by AI.
  • The programs have a structured learning process to rewire the founders’ brains over a period of several semesters.
  • The program is part time, with the founders taking other courses during the semester.

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/how-will-undergraduate-founders-destroy-your-company/

Tom Koor

Does everyone agree on what strategic planning is?

Does everyone agree on what strategic planning is?

 What is the purpose of this article?

  • This article enables a discussion about your company’s strategic plan and strategic planning process.
  • The audience for this article includes: boards of directors, CEOs, the C-Suite, individual investors, and institutional investors. The article applies to all companies, regardless of size.
  • This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice. You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.

What are the critical learnings in this article?

  • There is no broad agreement regarding the definitions of: strategy, strategic plan, strategic planning process
  • There is no broad agreement regarding the components and metrics of a strategic plan.
  • There is no broad agreement regarding a strategic planning process.

 How do you read this article?

  • This article is a collection of quotes defining strategy, strategic plan, and the strategic planning process.
  • The quotes are from publicly available articles from the some of the world’s leading strategy consulting firms and business schools.1
  • I have not read every single strategy article published by these organizations. I have not included every single strategy quote.

You can download  PDF of this article from: Does everyone agree on what strategic planning is

Are there common definitions of: strategy, strategic plan, and strategic planning process?

There are no common definitions.

A few of the many definitions of strategy are:

  • “profitably differentiate a company from it’s competitors”
  • “an integrated set of actions designed to create a sustainable advantage over competitors”
  • “the ability to foresee the future consequences of present initiatives”
  • “a strategy expresses the logic of success for the organisation”
  • “explaining what enables firms to enjoy sustainable performance advantages over their competitors”

A few of the many definitions of a strategic plan are:

  • “allocate resources to critical capabilities”
  • “a road map of how to get to the desired destination”
  • “output of the planning process”, “set of plans”, “which describe objectives and alternative strategies”

A few of the many definitions of a strategic planning process are:

  • “a comprehensive process for determining what a business should become and how it can best achieve that goal”
  • “the ongoing organizational process of using available knowledge to document a business’s intended direction”
  • a process to “accomplish the enterprise’s desired outcomes”, “plan for action with clear and measurable goals linked to these outcomes”
  • “anchors a company’s vision, aligns resources, and drives impactful decisions”
  • “explicit written process for determining the firm’s long-range objectives, the generation of alternate strategies….and a systemic procedure for monitoring results”.

Is there a broad agreement on the components and metrics of a strategic plan?

There is no broad agreement on the components and metrics of a strategic plan. A few of the many examples of possible strategic plan components metrics are:

  • “the size of the profit pool available in each market”, the pool’s potential growth”, “the company’s likely portion of that pool”
  • “demonstrates how any changes in end markets, competitors, prices, and other external variables will affect a company’s profits, cash flow, and valuation if no action is taken”
  • “market growth, segment size, customer needs, competitor strengths and weaknesses, and technological trajectories”
  • “operations costs”, unit costs, total volume costs, and lifetime costs.
  • “concise sentence describing the reason the organization exists”
  • “what success looks like for the organization over a three-year horizon”, “two external tangible outcomes and one internal improvement in capability”
  • “return on investment of stockholders”, “stability, good wages, and good benefits for employees”
  • “90-day priorities for everyone in your organization”
  • “Measures that allow them to understand whether their companies are outgrowing the market and taking share from competitors”
  • Explicit stakeholder objectives “listing of all groups that contribute to the organization”, “creditors, stockholders, retailers, and the local community”

Is there broad agreement on the strategic planning process?

There is no broad agreement on the strategic planning process. A few of the many examples of what comprises a strategic planning process are:

  • First step: “describe the organization’s mission, vision, and fundamental values”, “understand the current and future priorities of targets customer segments”
  • First step: Align on the strategic challenge”, “embedding strategy into plans and budget”
  • Answer the question: “is uncertainty properly defined and accounted for?”
  • First step: “Systematically scan the environment for opportunities and risks”
  • Answer the questions: “How are the priorities and options of leading-edge customers changing?”, “Where are today’s profit pools, and how are they likely to evolve or be disrupted?”
  • First step: “Define your purpose” to create customer and employee value.
  • Answer the question: “What would it take to be the Google, the Apple, or the Walmart of this market?”
  • “Quantify various types of threats” using “AI and machine learning tools”
  • Answer the question: “Where can we continue to improve and create value for our customers?”
  • “Define stakeholder expectations and establish compelling objectives for the business”

How many strategies does your company need?

The articles from the 9 organizations identified more than 19 different strategies your company might have. 2

I am unclear from the 9 organizations about:

  • How many strategies does your company need?
  • Who makes the decision about whether or not a strategy is required? What will be the value of each additional strategy?
  • Who makes the decision regarding your company’s overall planning and management process, which includes your various strategies?
  • How does your company coordinate the various strategies: e.g. assumptions, facts, decisions about resource allocations, decisions about timing etc.
  • Who approves the process for each strategy? Process includes: the questions to answer, the people involved, technology used, the types of analysis done, etc.,
  • Who is accountable for documenting each strategy process?
  • Does each strategic plan document start with a slide that says “Asking for the approval of….”. Do the minutes of the meeting document exactly what was approved?

What are your next steps?

  • Define the words/concepts/data you’re using, in a glossary. I’ve seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
  • Collect the facts regarding your current strategic planning situation, by using answering questions 2) to 6) from the above section “How many strategies does your company need?”
  • Benchmark your company’s historical results with your direct competitors and the broader market.
  • What are implications of the above?

Footnotes:

1 Bain, BCG, McKinsey, Harvard, INSEAD, MIT, Stanford, University of California – Berkley, and Wharton

2 I’ve listed here only 19 of the many strategies from the 9 different organizations: AI strategy, AI agent strategy, AI prompting strategy, brand strategy, corporate strategy, corporate finance strategy, crisis management strategy, customer insights strategy, data strategy, go-to-market strategy, innovation and entrepreneurial strategy, international and emerging markets strategy, investor relations strategy, M&A strategy, operating model strategy, operations and supply chain strategy, portfolio strategy, pricing strategy, transformation and change strategy,

What further reading should you do?

Your company will fail. Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/your-company-will-fail-v1/

Is your company planning to fail? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-planning-to-fail/

Tom Koor

Traditional strategic planning dooms your company to failure. V2

Traditional strategic planning dooms your company to failure. V2

 What is the purpose of this article?

  • This article enables a discussion about your company’s approach to strategic planning.
  • The audience for this article includes: boards of directors, CEOs, the C-Suite, and investors. The article applies to all companies, regardless of size.
  • This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice.
  • You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.

You can download a PDF of this article from: Traditional strategic planning dooms your company to failure. V2

What are the critical learnings in this article?

  • TSP (Traditional Strategic Planning) evolved in a slow changing world. The future could be forecast, and decision (and decision-making processes) were expected to be valid for several years.
  • The result of TSP was that few companies survived and most delivered poor financial results.
  • Today’s world is totally different: future is impossible to forecast, multiple sets of fast changes, multiple unpredictable crisis.
  • Strategic planning must be rethought to determine which decisions and decision making processes have a lifetime longer than a year.

 When did strategic planning become popular?

Traditional strategic planning became popular in public companies in the late 1970s.  Many of the strategic planning concepts and methodologies are many years, or decades, old.  What were some of the characteristics of the old world?

  • Slow changing.
  • Infrequent crisis.
  • Forecasting the future 3 years out was often possible.
  • Capital was very hard to get.
  • Talent appears to be easy to get.

What did many strategic plans look like?

  • The format was executive summary, vision, mission, values, goals, objectives, multi year strategic initiatives, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators,) past and future financials, and assumptions and strategic initiatives.
  • Supporting analysis include SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats)

What were the results of traditional strategic planning?

Few companies survive

Most public companies will not survive. 3

  • A Fortune 500 company will survive an average of 16 years.
  • The typical half-life of a North American public company is 10 years.
  • Global public companies with $250 million+ market cap have a typical half-life of 10 years.
  • 50% of all U.S. companies survive for 5 years.

 Few companies generate significant value.

McKinsey analyzed the world’s 2,393 largest corporations from 2010 to 2014. The top 20% generated 158% of the total economic profit (i.e. profit after cost of capital) created by those corporations.  This was an average economic profit of $1,426 million per year. The middle 60% generated little economic profit, an average of $47 million per year. The bottom 20% all generated negative economic profit, with an average loss of $670 million per year.4

Most public companies have performed poorly5

  • 6% of all public companies have had negative returns over their entire life.
  • The median annual return for public companies (in existence for a least 1 year) has been -0.74%
  • 10% of the above public companies in had annual returns of at least 22%
  • 10% of the above public companies had annual returns of -58.24%, or less

But the world in 2026 is totally different.

  • The future is impossible to predict
  • There are multiple sets of crisis and turmoil at the same time and appearing unpredictably
  • Technology, customer needs, and competition changes in months.
  • Capital is now unlimited.
  • Talent is very scarce and very expensive. Elite employee (non-C-Suite) can reach into the millions or 10s of millions per year.
  • Two recent McKinsey articles outline: Monthly board and management meetings to discuss strategy; and weekly review of strategic KPIs by CEO and C-Suite, with intent to make any required corrections.

It is time to fundamentally rethink and recreate strategic planning.

  • What decisions can last for more than a year?
  • What decisions may be obsolete within a year?
  • What new decisions may your company need to make next month?

Your next steps.

#1 Define the words/concepts you’re using, in a glossary.  I’ve seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people. Critical definitions include: strategy, strategic plan, decision (i.e. what is a decision and the implications of a decision)

#2 Describe your potential external business environment over the next 3-5 years e.g. geopolitical changes, technological, capital and talent availability? Describe your external environment in 2020.

#3 What will your company look like in order to survive and prosper?

#4 What decisions will not need to be rethought over the next three years. Document your current decisions and decision-making processes. Some possible decisions are:

  • The processes to select, assess, develop, and exit talent at all levels of the company, including board of directors, CEO, C-Suite. This might include the role of values, morals, and ethics.
  • Talent allocation
  • Capital allocation
  • Decision making principles.
  • Board of directors approved policies.
  • Processes to launch and shut down projects lasting more than 6 months.
  • Risk appetite

#5 What decisions will need to be rethought during the next 3 years.  Document your current decisions. These could include:

  • Talent allocation
  • Capital allocation
  • Exiting certain customer segments.
  • Shutting down certain solutions.

 Footnotes

1 Renée Dye and Oliver Sibony, “How to improve strategic planning”, McKinsey Quarterly, August 2007, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-to-improve-strategic-planning

2 Martin Reeves, Julien Legrand, and Jack Fuller November 14, 2018 BCG website, https://www.bcg.com/en-ca/publications/2018/your-strategy-process-needs-a-strategy.aspx

3 “Corporate Longevity”, Credit Suisse, February 7, 2017

4 Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit, “Strategy to beat the odds”, McKinsey Quarterly February 2018, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/strategy-to-beat-the-odds

5 Hendrik Bessembinder, W.P. Caret School of Business, Arizona State University

Analysis of CRSP database of U.S. public companies, Dec 2025 to Dec 2023

https://www.scribd.com/document/924363269/2024-Which-U-S-Stocks-Generated-the-Highest-Long-Term-Returns-Hendrik-Bessembinder

What further reading should you do?

Does everyone agree on what strategic planning is?

https://koorandassociates.org/strategy-and-strategic-planning/does-everyone-agree-on-what-strategic-planning-is/

Your company will fail. Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/your-company-will-fail-v1/

Elite talent – what is it? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/elite-talent-what-is-the-purpose/

Tom Koor

Is your company actually a startup? V2

Is your company actually a startup? V2

 What is the purpose of this article?

Help shareholders, the board of directors, and C-Suite have a fact-based discussion regarding the status of your company.

The audience for this article includes: All companies, ranging from pre-revenue through to long established global companies.

This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice.

You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.

You can download a PDF of this article from: Is your company actually a startup V2

AI did not write this article.  100% human written.

 What are the critical learnings in this article?

  • Most companies need to become a startup again but don’t realize it. As a result, the wrong type of talent is in place, taking the wrong actions.
  • Most companies don’t last long. Most companies have poor value creation. Most transformations and major business changes have poor results.
  • Companies need to get into startup mode to validate and invalidate their assumptions regarding: customer needs and problems, and the number of customers willing and able to pay for a solution.
  • Board directors and C-Suite cannot learn startup mode knowledge, skills and decision-making processes because their brains have hard-wired biological responses and cognitive biases.

Where is your company it its life cycle?

#1 a startup

A startup is a temporary organization designed to search out a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business model with lots of potential customers who are willing and able to pay to solve their problems and needs.   Startups are not building a solution.  They are building a tool to learn what solution to build.

#2 most startups fail or end up as small companies.

#3 A scaling, growing profitable business enabling customers to achieve a competitively differentiated value proposition. Market share is growing, the overall market size may be growing, customers are strongly recommending the company, employees want to join and stay, etc.

#4 A slowly growing mature company. Market share is flat; the overall market size is flat.

#5 A company in decline. Market size may be shrinking. Market share is shrinking. Poor financial returns.  Transformation efforts producing little results. Etc.

Now what happens?1

Most companies need to become a startup again but don’t realize it. The company does not have a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business model with lots of potential customers who are willing and able to pay to solve their problems and needs.

  • Most companies don’t last long. The half life of US public companies is less than 11 years.
  • Most companies have poor value creation. 80% of corporations generate negative or little economic profit. Over 50% of public company generate negative returns over their entire life.
  • Most transformations and major business changes have poor results. Only 12% of major business changes produce lasting results.

 Why do companies need to become startups again?

Companies need to get into startup mode to validate and invalidate their assumptions regarding: customer needs and problems, and the number of customers willing and able to pay for a solution. This process must involve face-to-face interviews with customers by the CEO and other members of the C-Suite.

  • Customer needs and problems change.
  • The number of customers with historical problems and needs changes. Look at what happened to Blackberry: Blackberry was the cell phone leader in 2007. The iPhone was announced in 2007.  In 2008, the iPhone unit sales already exceeded Blackberry unit sales.
  • Customers perceive they get more value from a competitor.

Why are mature companies unable to get into startup mode?

The board of directors and C-Suite don’t realize they need to get into startup mode.

  • They try to do a transformation or major change – which usually fails.
  • I looked at recommended transformation approaches from the worlds leading consulting firms and business schools.
  • Only two of them (both business schools) recommended starting with understanding customers and their problems and needs. All the other have some variety of start with a vision or aspiration of where to end up. Building a solution which achieves the vision but does not address the problems and needs of cash paying customers results in failure.
  • None of the organizations I looked at recommended assessing and changing the board directors or C-Suite executives which led the company to failure.

Why can’t your board directors and C-Suite transform themselves?

  • Board directors and C-Suite cannot learn startup mode knowledge, skills and decision-making processes because their brains have hard-wired biological responses and cognitive biases.
  • One example is that the stress caused by financial turmoil triggers a threat response in the brain. The brain then relies on behaviors, knowledge and processes which have been successful in the past. This response leads to business failure when today’s reality is different from the past.
  • Another example is that their brains will strongly resist information which contradicts what they have deeply learned in the past.

What are the greatest challenges your board directors and C-Suite face?

  • Having the self awareness to recognize that they themselves must transform.
  • Having both the passion and ability to unlearn the past and learn new knowledge, skills, behaviours and actions.
  • Having the courage to recognize that they might not be the right person the lead the company forward.

What are your next steps?

  • Define the words/concepts you’re using, in a glossary. I’ve seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
  • Determine what stage your company is in by fact-based analysis of business performance and marketplace metrics. Exclude the impact of tax and financial engineering.  Assess the results of M&A by comparing the two separate companies with the final merged company.  I have often seen announcements in the financial press regarded the success of an M&A transaction while the post transaction market share, revenue, and profits were less than the two separate pre-transaction companies.
  • Determine the talent requirements for a board of directors and C-Suite in startup mode. Start with the components outlined in the article “What are the core components of talent?”2
  • Assess the cognitive biases of board directors and C-Suite and the resulting constraints on being able to move into startup mode. Determine what needs to change.

 Footnotes

1 Your company will fail. Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/your-company-will-fail-v1/

2 What are the core components of talent? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/core-components-of-talent/

What further reading should you do?

Is your company planning to fail? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-planning-to-fail/

What is learning? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/why-have-your-minimized-your-talent/

Tom Koor

How will startups destroy your company? V2

How will startups destroy your company? V2

 What is the purpose of this article?

  • Help startup founders understand what’s necessary to destroy incumbents.
  • Help incumbent board of directors, CEO, C-Suite, and investors to understand what must change to both survive attacks by startups and to destroy established competitors.

You can download a PDF of this article from:How will startups destroy your company V2

What are the critical learnings?

  • The startup is a temporary organization designed to search out a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business model with lots of potential customers who are willing and able to pay to solve their problems and needs. Startups are not building a solution. They are building a tool to learn what solution to build.
  • Startups begin by making assumptions about the problems customers are willing and able to pay for, and about how customers would perceive the value proposition they’d achieve from the startup’s solution.
  • The startup is driven by immediate and ongoing understanding of the customer based on face-to-face interviews supplemented by surveys.
  • The assumptions are quickly validated or invalidated. Invalidation results either in a new set of assumptions or the startup stopping.

Where is your company today?

  • Your company is a large, well-established incumbent.
  • Your company is not in crisis.
  • Revenues and sales have been growing yearly and are forecast to continue to grow.
  • Your board of directors is well compensated.
  • Your C-Suite is well compensated.
  • Your board of directors and C-Suite agree that everything is going well and that there is no need to make any major changes to the board, the C-Suite, or the company’s business model.

How fast can your company end up in crisis?

  • Your company can go from double digit CAGR(Compound Annual Growth Rate) to negative CAGR within 3 years.1
  • Even country empires can fall within 5 years e.g. France in 1700, The Ottaman Empire in early 1900’s. the Soviet Union in the late 1900s. 2
  • Blackberry was the cell phone leader in 2007. The iPhone was announced in 2007.  In 2008, the iPhone unit sales already exceeded Blackberry unit sales.

Will your company survive crisis?

At any given moment, 5-7% of incumbents are in free fall.  Free fall occurs when a mature incumbent comes under severe attack by new insurgents.  Only 10%-15% of companies ever pull out of free fall. 3

What are the phases a startup goes through to destroy your company?

Phase 1 – create two sets of assumptions: #1 the urgent problem or need for which cash paying customers are seeking a solution; #2 a solution which enables the cash paying customer to achieve benefits (i.e. customer perception of value proposition) as a result of addressing their problem or need.

Phase 2 – validate or invalidate assumption #1 within two months. If invalided, either create a new set of assumptions or stop trying to launch a startup.

Phase 3 – assumes that assumption #1 has been validated.

  • Now validate assumption #2. Create a version of the solution that cash paying customers will both pay for and achieve benefits from. A solution can have three components: a) what you build, how the customer onboards what you build, how the customer perceives and measures the benefits they get.
  • If customers won’t pay or does not achieve benefits, you have invalidated assumption #2
  • The startup now has two choices: create a new assumption #2 OR stop trying to launch a startup.

Phase #4 – assumes that both assumptions #1 and #2 have been validated.

  • The startup has some revenue.
  • The solution may be very unprofitable because the startup has manual processes and technology which is inefficient and will not profitably scale.
  • The startup now makes some assumptions regarding lifetime customer profitability and customer acquisition costs and the number of future customers.
  • The startup creates a plan to grow the business, with milestones directly related to the metrics defined by the milestones.
  • At any point in phase #4 the assumptions may be invalidated. There could be many reasons e.g. turns out that there are than many customers, customer problems and needs change, competition changes, etc.

 Startups will have far better understanding of customers than your company.

  • What the cash paying customers perceive as the urgent problems and needs they are actively seeking a solution.
  • What the cash paying customer perceives as the value of the solution and the implications of not addressing the problem or need.
  • How the customer perceives your current value proposition.
  • How the customer perceive the startup’s competitively differentiated value proposition.

 How does the startup gain this deep customer understanding?

  • The startup does up to 100 face to face (in person or Zoom) meetings with potential customers.
  • Why?
  • To validate that there is an urgent problem or need for which customers are seeking a solution and the customers a both willing and able to pay for.

What is the CEOs role?

  • At the pre-revenue stage the CEO is spending up to 40 hours a week (of their 80-hour work week) on learning about customers.

What other ways does the startup maintain deep understanding of customers?

  • There is a massive amount of information coming in from many sources e.g. ongoing one-on-one interviews, focus groups, surveys (Net Promoter Score), interactions with call centres, customer support, customer onboarding, notes from sales and marketing people, interactions with 3rd parties that also deal with customers (suppliers), etc.
  • The directors on the board have current and relevant knowledge of the marketplace, customers, competitors, etc.
  • The startup never stops experiments with customers.

 What is done with this flood of customer information?

  • Software (Thematic4 and ethnographic5) analyzes this information.
  • It is critical to have detection of changes in the customer perception of: problems, needs, and startup’s value proposition.

How does the startup know they will be profitable?

  • The key metric is lifetime customer profitability exceeding customer acquisition costs.
  • At the pre-revenue stage, theses metrics are assumptions. As the startup builds and scales, these metrics become facts.
  • The metrics may be tracked in a variety of categories: e.g. by cohort, channel, geography, demographic, etc.
  • It’s critical to identify a downward trend in the customer lifetime profitability/aquation cost ratio.

Does the startup start building a solution immediately?

  • No
  • The startup is a temporary organization designed to search out a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business model with lots of potential customers who are willing and able to pay to solve their problems and needs. Startups are not building a solution. They are building a tool to learn what solution to build.
  • The startup may do things manually at first, in order to improve customer understanding at low cost.

What is the underlying reason for the startup being able to destroy your company?

The founders and later the CEO and C-Suite have a set of core talents that is superior to your company.

What are the 10 components of talent?

  • Self Awareness
  • Character
  • #Relationship skills:
  • Communications
  • Crystallized intelligence
  • Fluid intelligence
  • Cognitive skills
  • Ability to quickly learn and unlearn: paradigms, frameworks, methodologies, data, facts, knowledge.
  • Creativity
  • Physical capabilities.

Further detail is available in Appendix A

What are your next steps?

  • Define the words/concepts you’re using, in a glossary. I’ve seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
  • Assess your company relative to a startup described above. Most long established companies have returned to the startup stage, but don’t realize that. It’s hard to build a roadmap for future success if you don’t know where you’re starting from.
  • Describe the talent a startup would need to be able to destroy your company. Include the board of directors, CEO, and C-Suite. Use the framework described in Appendix A.
  • Assess the talent of your company relative the startup description in 3) above.

Footnotes

1 Chris Zook and Charles Allen, The founders mentality, 2016, Page 52

2 Chris Zook and Charles Allen, The founders mentality, 2016, Page 106

3 Chris Zook and Charles Allen, The founders mentality, 2016, Page 51

4 software used to identify, organize, and interpret patterns of meaning (themes) within qualitative data such as interview notes

5 software which supports observational research method where researchers immerse themselves in customers’ natural environments—homes, workplaces, or stores—to understand behaviors, motivations, and pain points in real-time

What further reading should you do?

Your company will fail. Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/your-company-will-fail-v1/

Is your company planning to fail? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-planning-to-fail/

Appendix A – What are the core components of talent?

Even more detail is available in the following article:

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/core-components-of-talent/

 #1 Self Awareness

  • Internal self-awareness: How clearly we see and understand ourselves. Understanding what our competitive strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities are.
  • External self-awareness: understanding how other people view us.

#2 Character

  • VME (Values, Morals, and Ethics) Warren Buffett supposedly said “..looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”
  • Courage: It takes courage to make the right decision. The right decision is often not: the cheapest, easiest, lowest risk to the company, lowest risk to you, and what everyone else is doing.
  • Perseverance, especially against all odds.
  • Knowing when to stop persevering. One leader told me “If you’re digging yourself into a hole, stop digging.”

#3 Relationship skills:

  • The ability to create and sustain a network of personal relationships.
  • Persuasion and negotiation, which is key to managing different points of view and interests.
  • Creating and maintaining followers. A leader without committed followers is not a leader.

#4 Communications

Communications activities include:

  • Writing, speaking, singing, drawing, and body language
  • Speaking and singing also include tones, pitch, etc.

Communications is two way:

  • Broadcasting
  • Listening, which includes analysis of input

#5 Crystallized intelligence

  • Crystallized intelligence is comprised of historical: skills, knowledge (including ways to think, mental paradigms, methodologies), and data.

#6 Fluid intelligence

  • The ability to solve problems without past experience. This is critical for innovation, which is coming up with new and better solutions.

#7 Cognitive skills

  • Long-term memory
  • Working memory: hang onto information while using it
  • Logic and reasoning
  • Visual processing
  • Processing speed
  • Attention
    1. Sustained – for long periods of time
    2. Selective – without distraction
    3. Divided – doing two things at once

#8 Ability to quickly learn and unlearn: paradigms, frameworks, methodologies, data, facts, knowledge.

 #9 Creativity

  • The ability to think about a task or a problem in a new or different way

#10 Physical capabilities. These may include:

  • Senses, including sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste
  • Strength and endurance
Tom Koor

AI is not accountable for benefits.

AI is not accountable for benefits.  I have seen countless articles start out with AI not delivering benefits.  AI is not accountable for benefits.  Management is accountable for benefits. The way to solve this return on capital issue to two-fold: First, improve the processes used by management to make investment decisions (including AI) and to achieve benefits. Second, improve management.

Tom Koor

What is a startup? V3

What is a startup? V3

What is the purpose of this article?

This article enables a discussion about how to define what a startup is.

The audience for this article includes: investors, founders, board of directors, C-suite, and investment analysts.

This article applies to all companies, ranging from pre-revenue through to long established global companies.

This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice. You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.

AI did not write this article.  100% human written.

You can download a PDF of this article from: What is a startup V3

What are the critical learnings in this article?

  • There are no commonly accepted definitions regarding startups.
  • There are no commonly accepted definitions of a successful startup.
  • Each of the 5 US universities I looked at has different definitions, metrics, and processes for startups.

 Are there commonly accepted definitions regarding startups?

There are no commonly accepted definitions regarding startups. I looked at what the following 5 U.S. Universities have published publicly regarding their pre-revenue startups which have no customers or users: Harvard, MIT, Stanford, University of California Berkely, and Wharton. I have deliberately excluded the names of the five universities from the following definitions. I have shown some key finding for each of the five universities.

#1 What is a startup?

  • Teams focused on “defining their offering or exploring customer validation.
  • A startup is “validating their target market” and building “viable sustainable venture”.
  • A startup is “founders who are in the prototyping phase” “The entity is actively building or testing a product”
  • Could not find a formal definition. Some discussion that the intent a startup has high growth potential is preparing for venture capital investment.
  • “A temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model”.

#2 What is the process for launching a startup?

  • Has a proprietary process. First phase is focused on problem identification. The second phase validates the solution with customers, using the Minimum Viable Product the founders have built.
  • Has a proprietary process, based on Lean Startup methodology. There is a monthly simulated board meeting. Expectation that founders will meet with customers.
  • Structured 10-week curriculum, requiring 2-3 meetings with mentors.
  • Has a proprietary process. 50+ workshops along with a mentor.
  • Has a proprietary process. Starts with identifying key assumptions e.g. Do customers want this? Can this be a business?

#3 What is the approach for the first week of a startup?

  • Orientation week. Integrating founders into the university’s startup community and ecosystem
  • Simulate making decisions. Networking with senior executives. Intense one-week bootcamp.
  • Could not find published information.
  • Only information I could find was matching with mentors.
  • Only information I could find was 2.5-hour orientation.

#4 What are the metric for measuring the progress of a startup?

  • Some of the milestones included: customer definition, problem validation.
  • Weekly goal setting. Each team defines their own Key Performance Indicators.
  • Could not find published information.
  • Could not find published information.
  • Could not find published information.

#5 What is the definition of a pivot for a startup?

  • Could not find published information.
  • Could not find published information.
  • Could not find published information.
  • Could not find published information.
  • Could not find published information.

#6 What are the metrics which indicate the startup founders should stop or pivot?

  • If current solution does not address customer pain, pivot.
  • Pivot when key hypotheses are invalidated by data.
  • Could not find published information.
  • Could not find published information.
  • Could not find published information.

#7 What is the definition or set of metrics for when the startup is no longer a startup?

  • Program success is measured by student engagement, not commercial success. Startup success measures included: revenue, valuation, launching, partnerships, etc.
  • Successful transition out of the university environment.
  • Capital raised or graduation to accelerators.
  • Graduation to the university’s accelerator program. Raising capital from the university’s startup fund.
  • Graduation to the university’s accelerator program

 What does success look like to the founders?

The following are my personal observations regarding what success might look like.

  • Learn the concepts for launching a company.
  • Launch a company which generates enough profit to meet founders’ financial needs. If the founders are gone, the company disappears.
  • Launch a company which generates enough profit to meet founders’ financial needs. If the founders are gone, family /children may take over, or other owner/operators take over.
  • Launch a company which will generate enough profit to attract investors and enable founders to make large amounts of money by selling some or all of their equity.

 What are your next steps?

If you are a founder:

  • Define the words/concepts you’re using, in a glossary. I’ve seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
  • Agree with the other founders on what success looks like. Founders with different end results will likely fail. Create and sign a founders’ agreement.
  • Agree with the other founders regarding: What is a startup? What is the overall process the founders will use the launch the startup? What will happen in week 1? What are the metrics for measuring the progress of the startup? What is the definition of a pivot? What are the metrics which indicate that the founders should stop or pivot? What is the definition or set of metrics which indicate that the startup is no longer a startup?

What further reading should you do?

How will startups destroy your company? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/how-will-startups-destroy-your-company/

How will undergraduate founders destroy your company? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/how-will-undergraduate-founders-destroy-your-company/

Is your company actually a startup? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-actually-a-startup/

Is your company planning to fail? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-planning-to-fail/