value creation

Tom Koor

Long-term industry experience dooms leaders to failure.

Long-term industry experience dooms leaders to failure.

 What is the purpose of this article?

Enable boards, shareholders, and C-Suite to have a discussion regarding the capabilities leaders need to succeed in a future that is fast changing and unpredictable.

You can download a PDF of this article from; Long-term industry experience dooms leaders to failure

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

What are the critical learnings in this article?

  • The world used to change slowly; therefore long-term experience used to be a pre-requisite for leadership success. The future wasn’t much different from the past.
  • The world is now changing very quickly. The future will be very different and very unpredictable.
  • Historical facts, knowledge, behaviours, and decision making can lead to failure in the very different future.
  • A different set of inter-related skills is needed for future success.

When was long-term experience crucial for success?

  • Hundreds and thousand of years ago, the world changed very slowly.
  • As people got older, they learned they learned more and more about a slowly changing environment.
  • Knowledge was not written down thus the only way to learn was from both experience and the knowledge of people who had lived a relatively long time.
  • Long-term experience was critical e.g. knowing weather patterns, animal behaviour, how best to raise what crops, etc.
  • Long-term experience was a combination of facts, knowledge, and decision-making processes.

Even 50 years ago, the world was changing relatively slowly. Company growth was often organic, based on reinvesting profits.

Change can be extremely rapid these days e.g.

  • Chat GBT-4 announced Nov 30, 2022
  • 1 million users within 5 days. Instagram took 2.5 month to reach 1 million. Netflix took 3.5 years.
  • 100 million active users within 2 months after announcement. Countless companies exploring and using Generative AI and LLM (Large Language Models).  Employment already being affected.  Some company valuations being massively affected (both up and down)

The world often, but not always, changes very fast.

  • Customer needs and problems they are willing and able to pay.
  • Market sizes.
  • How customers make buying decisions.
  • Customer expectations.
  • The number and type of competitors.
  • Technology – the types of technology and their speed of deployment.
  • Talent expectations e.g. what employees expect from their careers and their companies.
  • The availability of low cost outsourced solutions to build a company.
  • The availability of unlimited capital to launch and build companies.

How does major, complex change with huge implications and risks impact leaders with deep long-term experience?

  • Their facts and knowledge are obsolete – but the leaders often cannot or will not recognize that.
  • The stress and pressure make leaders feel threatened. The natural tendency is the use the comfort and familiarity of their obsolete historical facts, knowledge, and decision making processes. It’s natural to use the obsolete approaches which helped the leaders succeed in the past.
  • The leaders lose access to the parts of the brain that help them think creatively, collaborate, and discover new ways of doing things.
  • Even if they know the “right thing” to do, they are afraid to do it. They don’t have experience with the new “right thing” and are afraid of doing it poorly.

The leaders have fatal flaws in some of the 7 components of talent.

#1 Self-awareness: e.g. Does each director understand their strengths, weaknesses, capabilities? Do they understand how others perceive them? The leader may not recognize that the world has changed and that they now have major weaknesses.

#2 Character: e.g.

  • 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 and director, nor what everyone else is doing.
  • The stress of industry disruption and major reveals weaknesses in the culture the leaders created.

#3 Relationship skills: e.g. Ability to create and sustain a network of personal relationships. This includes 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. Industry disruption and major change require the identification and creation of new relationships, and spending less time on obsolete relationships.

#4 Crystallized intelligence: e.g. what skill, knowledge, ways of thinking, mental paradigms, and facts must the managers have. It is key to have current and relevant information.

#5 Fluid intelligence: e.g.

  • The ability to solve problems without past experience. This is critical for innovation, which is coming up with new and better solutions.
  • The future is impossible to predict but actions and decisions are focused on this unpredictable future.
  • The future will also be different from the past. i.e. there won’t be historical experience to draw upon.

#6 Cognitive skills: e.g. Able to collect and do fact-based analysis with sound logic and reasoning. There are new sets of facts and new types of analysis required.

#7 The ability and interest to learn, and unlearn, quickly.

Leaders who transform an industry often have little industry experience.

Elon Musk graduated with a bachelors degree in physics and economics. After college he founded a software company.

Jeff Bezos graduated with degree in electrical engineering and computer science. His first job was with a fibre optic telecom company.

The founders of the majority of unicorns (startups which achieved a $1 billion valuation) had no previous domain experience.1

 What are your next steps?

  • Define the leader’s future role in: value creation, crisis situations, and major change. The leader’s role may include: accountable for leadership, accountable for results, providing advice and recommendations, and support. There will be several future scenarios because it’s impossible to predict the future.
  • Assess the leader’s capabilities in-term of the 7 components of talent.
  • Determine what improvements the leader must make.
  • Replace the leader if: you judge that they will not be able to make the necessary changes OR if it turns out that they are unable to make the necessary changes.

 Footnotes

1 Ali Tamaseb, Super Founders, New York, New York , Hatchette Book Group, 2021, page 267

 What further reading should you do?

Tom Koor

How can the the board of directors create value? (V4)

How can the board of directors create value? V4

 What is the purpose of this article?

  • Provide a framework and process to enable discussion and action planning among owners/shareholders, boards of directors, and CEOs regarding the directors’ role in creating value.
  • There is no one-size-fits-all answer. The approach and action plan will be unique to the specific situation of each corporation.
  • The article does not address the implications of: shareholders agreements, voting trusts, term of loan agreements, the authority of regulators, and others who can make decisions or limit the value creation power of the board.

This article does not provide legal or financial advice.

You can download a PDF of this article from: How can the board of directors create value V4

What are the critical learnings in this article?

  • You must have clear agreement who has the ultimate accountability for long-term company performance and value creation.
  • Companies can both create and destroy value for the ecosystem members.
  • There are 7 inter-related components of talent.

Who is ultimately accountable for the long-term success of your company?

  • Boards are ultimately responsible for the long term success of their organizations. 1
  • My discussion around boards creating value assumes that boards are ultimately accountable for creating value. If this is not the case for your company, there’s no need to read further.
  • Many discussions regarding the value of directors use words such as “oversight”, “noses in, fingers out”, and other vague definitions of board accountability. It’s critical to be absolutely clear regarding board accountability.

What is value, and value to whom?

Is value (or wealth) simply the financial returns to shareholders and the C-Suite? Ecosystem members may have varied and conflicting perspectives regarding benefits and costs they incur.

The corporation can both create and destroy value (both benefits and costs) throughout its ecosystem. An example of value destruction is increasing worker compensation below the rate of inflation.

How is value creation (benefits) and value destruction (costs)allocated among members of the company’s ecosystem ? e.g. the directors, management, employees, shareholders, , and society?  For example, if an unprofitable facility is shut down in a region with no other employment, who should bear the cost of keeping the former employees fed and housed?  Should the corporation focus on shifting as many costs as possible onto society and minimize the benefits provided to society?

What is the company’s ecosystem?

The company’s ecosystem is the network of people and organizations, including stakeholders and third parties, directly and indirectly involved in the operation of the business through both competition and cooperation. The idea is that each entity in the ecosystem will affect and is affected by the others, creating a constantly evolving set and nature of relationships in which each entity must be flexible and adaptable in order to survive, as in a biological ecosystem. The actions and behaviours of the ecosystem vary, depending upon what attribute of the company is considered. For example, the ecosystem has different behaviours when regarding the second to second corporate delivery of products or services versus when the company is dealing with CEO succession.2

 

What are the seven components of talent?

#1 Self-awareness: e.g. Does each director understand their strengths, weaknesses, capabilities? Do they understand how others perceive them?

#2 Character: e.g.

  • 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 and director, nor what everyone else is doing.

#3 Relationship skills: e.g. Ability to create and sustain a network of personal relationships. This includes 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 Crystallized intelligence: e.g. what skill, knowledge, ways of thinking, mental paradigms, and facts must the managers have. It is key to have current and relevant information.

#5 Fluid intelligence: e.g.

  • The ability to solve problems without past experience. This is critical for innovation, which is coming up with new and better solutions.
  • The future is impossible to predict but the directors actions and decisions are focused on this unpredictable future.
  • The future will also be different from the past. i.e. there won’t be historical experience to draw upon.

#6 Cognitive skills: e.g. Able to collect and do fact-based analysis with sound logic and reasoning.

#7 The ability and interest to learn, and unlearn, quickly.

How does board talent impact value creation and growth?

  • The board’s VME sets the tone for the culture of the board, C-Suite and the entire company. What are the stories that people tell about what they see directors do and say?
  • Approving and committing to the purpose of the corporation. The purpose remains fixed while operating practices, cultural norms, strategies, tactics, processes, structures, and methods continually change in response to changing realities. 3 Many employees, including the C-Suite seek alignment between their personal purpose and the purpose of the company.  This can especially true for the most talented employees, whose rare skills are in great demand.
  • Approval of the decision making process and principles for the board and C-Suite.
  • Approval of the long-term value creation plan which include the long-term cash flow forecast, capital allocation, and talent creation/allocation. The scope of the talent creation/allocation includes; the individuals on the board and the C-Suite, and policies for the rest of your company. The board approves: director nominations (directors are elected by shareholders), compensation, development and succession processes. The board also approves and oversees the succession pool and development processes for potential C-suite successors.
  • The board approves the delegation of authority to the CEO and awareness process i.e. Does the CEO make the decision and not inform the board OR make the decision and then inform the board OR make the board aware of the decision prior to making the decision OR discuss the decision with the board.
  • The board approves policies which constrain the decision making of the board and the company.
  • Directors create and maintain relationships with members of your company’s ecosystem. Those relationships provide external knowledge.  Relationship with potential customers, suppliers, and employees can enable growth.  Relationships with investors, regulators, NGOs and others can help directors understand the implications of their decisions.

The board also decides how to allocate value creation and value destruction among: directors, management, employees, shareholders, and other members of your company’s ecosystem including society.

What about the processes and technology supporting the board?

  • Board value creation can be enabled, or hindered, by processes and technology.
  • Does your board know what processes and technology are required? This refers back to skill #4 above, crystallized intelligence.

What are your next steps?

Questions for your board and CEO/management to consider.

Ask the following questions and document the agreed upon answers, as well as points of disagreement.  Remember, the Supreme Court does not always have a unanimous point of view.

  • Is your board ultimately responsible for the long term success of your company? If not who is, and what is the board accountable for?
  • How do you measure the board’s collective impact on value creation?
  • How do you measure each individual directors impact on value creation?
  • How do you measure the competitive differentiation of the board as a whole and of each individual director?
  • How to you measure the skills of current and prospective directors?
  • What value has the company created, or destroyed? For shareholders, employees, other members of the ecosystem? Compare this to others in the industry and more broadly.
  • If your company is a global leader in value creation, why, and what role did the board play?
  • If your company is not a global leader, what actions and behaviours must your board directors take? What talent must each director have?
  • You must be specific regarding director actions and required talent. E.g. What if the board considers CEO appointment or termination as one of the biggest impacts on long-term value growth. Must a director have had experience in and accountability for: the appointment and termination of CEOs? Or C-Suite members? Or middle management?  Or is any experience at all required?  If experience is required, how many directors of those voting on the CEO appointment/termination must have relevant experience?  All directors?  Majority?  One?
  • How is the value creation role of the directors reflected in formal governance documents, including: board mandate, board chair mandate, committee and committee chair mandates, etc.
  • Do the directors have the potential to change, with coaching, or must they be replaced?
  • Review the director onboarding process. Consider having potential directors as board observers for one-year prior to nomination, at full compensation.  This is critical part of potential director assessment.
  • Recognize that the directors are not advisors to management. Create an advisory board for the CEO.
  • The directors may need external advice from subject matter experts with extremely deep domain expertise. Create an advisory board for the board.
  • What is your action plan, if any?

Footnotes

1 Professor Didier and Estelle Metayer, “Does your board really add value to strategy?”, IMD, Global Board Center, https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/board-strategy/

2 Adapted from Investopedia 2018 May 11

3 Page 17 The five most important questions you will ever ask about your organization (2008)   by Peter F. Drucker,  Jim Collins et al, I adapted.

 What further reading should you do?

Tom Koor

How do you measure the success of your startup? V2

How do you measure the success of your startup? V2

 What is the purpose of this article?

  • The focus of this article is on startups where the intent is to create a large long-lasting company.
  • The startup may have equity investors (other than friends and family) or it may be bootstrapped.

This article is intended to enable discussion.  The article does not provide legal or financial advice.

You can download a PDF of this article from: How do you measure the success of your startup V2

What are the critical learnings in this article?

The measures of success depend upon who in your company’s ecosystem is doing the measuring.

Startup founders can measure success from three perspectives:

  • The customers’ perceptions;
  • Engagement with the customer; and
  • Internal measures, especially the monthly cash flow forecast and tracking,

What are the two types of founders?

#1 The startup represents their life’s calling. The intent it to create a company they can be with for the rest of their life.

#2 They understand they may have to exist the eventual successful company, due to acquisition or other reasons.

Most equity investors in a startup want to get a return on the capital, which requires someone to buy their investment. This often requires selling the company.  IPO’s are relatively rare. This can create a misalignment between the founders, who intended to create a long-lasting company, and the equity investors. Some founders retain control of their company by using dual-class shares and/or shareholders agreements.

Buyers may have many reasons to buy a company. E.g. Buyers (or investors) believe in future potential, even when the current situation may appear bleak.  The buyer can enable the startup’s success. Instagram was less than 2 years old, had zero revenue, and 13 employees. Facebook (now Meta) paid $1 billion U.S. to buy Instagram.

What is a startup?

Startups are not building a solution.  They are building a tool to learn what solution to build.1

The startup is a temporary organization designed to search out a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business with customers who are willing and able to pay to solve their problems and needs.

What are the possible outcomes for a startup?

The search for a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business with customers that are willing and able to pay to solve their problems and needs can end three ways:

  • Found a profitable business with major potential for significant scaling
  • Found a profitable business which has little or no potential for significant scaling.
  • Failed to find a profitable business. Company survives due to capital infusions by investors.
  • Failed to find a profitable business. Company fails.
  • Do an IPO
  • Be acquired.

Profit means that life time customer cash profitability exceeds customer acquisitions costs.  This implies that in a period of high growth, cash flow may be negative.

There are many types of financial success, including

  • The startup may have “failed” but still be acquired for a large amount of money. g. Facebook pad $1 billion for Instagram, which had no revenue and 13 employees.
  • The founders bootstrap the company, with no 3rd party equity investors other than friends and family. E.g. Zoho’s founder became a billionaire. The company is family owned.
  • The founders bootstrap the company and then. E.g. Mailchimp was sold to Intuit for $12 billion, 20 years after being founded. It was initially a web design consulting firm.

Measuring success depends upon who is doing the measuring. E.g.

  • Founders
  • Employees
  • Customers and users
  • Angel investors
  • Early stage funds
  • Venture Capital
  • Investment Bank
  • Strategic Buyer

What are the three sets of startup success metrics?

#1 Customer perceived metrics.

Understanding customer perception means that you have to listen to what the customer tells you.  This is NOT your opinion.

Documented customer problems and needs

  • What are your customers urgent problems and needs?
  • What would be the value to them if their problems and needs were addressed?

Documented customer value proposition

  • The value proposition is based on what current, past, and potential customers think, feel, believe, and perceive. The customers’ perception of net value they achieve, which is a combination of the benefits they achieve and their costs of adopting your solution. Their costs are often far higher than what you charge your customers.
  • How does the customer perceive your value proposition, relative to the competition? (And the competition always includes the current situation)

NPS Net Promoter Score

  • The NPS (Net Promoter Score) i.e. “Would you recommend our solution to others?” Follow on questions could be: “If so, why?  If not, why not?”
  • The appendix will direct you to further information regarding NOS.

Sean Ellis Product Market Fit test

You can start measuring NPS once customers start to use your solution, even in the pilot and testing phases.

You ask the question: “How would you feel if you could no longer use our product or service?”

  • Very disappointed?
  • Somewhat disappointed?
  • Not disappointed – it’s not really that useful?
  • I no longer use.

At least 40% of your target customers must say “very disappointed”.  If it’s less than 40% you need to reposition/change your product.  One approach can be to segment the answers to find a customer segment where the response is above 40%.

You must understand the group above 40%.  The 5 questions to ask them are: 1) who are you (demographically) 2) why did they seek out your product/service?  3) how are they using it 4) what is the key benefit 5) why is that benefit important?

Market Size

Market size is driven by the number of people who believe: they have a problem, they’re willing to pay to solve it, and you’re providing a competitively differentiated value proposition.

Market segments will be driven by: different sets of problems and related value proposition (i.e. this is why tiered pricing is needed), geographies, channels, etc.

#2 Your measurements of customer engagement

Non-revenue metrics can include:

  • Website visits – how many, what they look at, how long they spend on your website
  • LinkedIn followers and visits for your company profile
  • Newsletters – how many sign up, click on content
  • Number of incoming calls and emails
  • Number of meetings and zoom calls
  • Pilots and other paying customers using your solution
  • Letters of intents

Revenue metrics can include:

  • MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) from you solutions. This excludes revenue not-related to your solution
  • Customer retention or churn
  • Signed contracts with committed future revenues

#3 Business and Customer Profitability

Profitability is examined from a cash flow perspective, not accounting statements.

Your revenue must exceed the total of: CAC (Customer Acquisition Costs), COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), R&D New Development and G&A (General and Admin).

Your lifetime customer profitability must exceed your CAC. You need to always consider G&A in your profitability analysis.

In a high growth situation, your monthly cash flow may be negative, due to the time lag required for long-term customer profitability to cover CAC.

The foundation is your monthly cash flow forecast, linked to your milestones and assumptions. Your forecast milestones will show the impact of spending on: new product releases, new channels, new partners, CAC, churn, etc. Your tracking will show the actual results.

You must have scenarios, both for revenues and costs.  E.g. would you be profitable if stopped investing in major new product development? What if your churn rate turns out to be higher? What if CAC doesn’t decrease but increases? Etc.

The appendix provides further information regarding customer and business profitability.

What are your next steps?

  • Set up a financial process (including General Ledger) and associated software. The software would ideally support both financial and non-financial metrics.
  • Document your definitions of the different cost components.
  • Create you initial set of assumptions.
  • Start measuring customer perceptions and customer engagement from day 1.
  • Your monthly cash flow forecast and tracking is a critical tool to reduce the odds of running out of cash.

What further reading should you do?

Do you understand your customers?

https://koorandassociates.org/understanding-customers/do-you-understand-your-customers/

Appendix – Customer and Business Profitability

Your monthly cash flow forecast and tracking.

  • This is done on a cash flow basis, not accounting statements.
  • There are four major cost groupings
    1. CAC
    2. COGS
    3. R&D/Engineering/New Development
    4. G&A
  • Further grouping to consider include: customers (and related costs) by cohort, customer segment, channel, partner
  • The cash flow forecast includes:
    1. Links to major milestones
    2. Scenarios – remember, no-one can accurately forecast the future
    3. Capital infusions.

What are the definitions of the metrics?

CAC includes all the costs to acquire a new customer:

  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • Onboard
  • Related compensation of the people.
  • Overhead associated with the people.
  • Technology to support CAC.
  • Legal expenses associated with sales and marketing

If you have a freemium business model, then all of the costs associated with the “free” service fall into CAC.

What comprises cost of COGS? Everything required to meet the direct needs of current customers.  E.g.

  • Customer support people, and software
  • Technology e.g. software, cloud services, communications costs.
  • Bug fix and minor enhancement to the software – after all you do need to retain current existing customers.

What comprises G&A?

  • Payroll administration
  • Recruiting administration
  • Finance
  • IT security
  • Corporate development e.g. M&A
  • CEO salary/benefits
  • Legal expenses (both in house and external), other than those associated with sales contracts

Let’s use QuickBooks to illustrate the concept of the financial metrics.

There is a GL line item for salaries.

Then then there is a class i.e. where does the salary belong?  (i.e. QuickBooks class)

  • CAC?
  • Cost of goods sold?
  • R&D/Engineering/New Development?
  • G&A?
Tom Koor

What is the purpose of my website?

What is the purpose of my website?

  • Help business leaders (current and emerging) succeed.
  • Help business leaders have a positive impact on society.

What is my overall framework for looking at companies?

 #1 What is your competitively differentiated talent?

  • The right talent will figure out how to succeed in a rapidly changing and competitive world
  • Do you have the right talent in the right places to succeed?
  • Do you have the right processes and technology to attract, retain, develop and exit talent?

#2 Who are your customers?

  • What are the problems and needs customers are willing and able to pay for?
  • How do customers perceive the value of addressing their problems and needs?
  • How do customers perceive your competitively differentiated value proposition?
  • How many of these customers are there?

#3 What does your company’s ecosystem look like?

A business ecosystem is the network of organizations—including suppliers, distributors, customers, competitors, government agencies, board of directors, C-Suite, employees, society, and so on—involved in the delivery of a specific product or service through both competition and cooperation. The idea is that each entity in the ecosystem affects and is affected by the others, creating a constantly evolving relationship in which each entity must be flexible and adaptable in order to survive as in a biological ecosystem.

Ecosystem members (even those with no direct involvement with your company), can have a massive positive or negative impact on your company e.g. social license to operate.

#4 What is your competitively differentiated business model?

Who is your customer, why they buy from you, and how do you make a profit?

Your business model describes, for a single point in time:

  • The value the company enables its customers to achieve.
  • The resources and capabilities to create, market, and deliver this value.
  • How to generate profitable and sustainable revenue streams.

#5 What is your competitively differentiated business framework?

  • The business model describes for a single point in time who your customer is, why they buy from you, and how you make a profit.
  • The business framework outlines the components needed for a complete company i.e. what’s necessary to plan, implement, operate, and change the business model.

#6 What are your competitively differentiated value creation plans?

  • Your company cannot exist without customers who are achieving value. Other members of your company’s ecosystem also need to achieve value. Thus the need for value creation plans.
  • There are multiple sets of value creation plans e.g. the board of directors has one, the CEO has one, other parts of the company have their own value creation plans. Al these must be aligned.
  • Value creation plans are explicitly focused on creating value. Strategy and strategic plans mean different things to different people.

 What is on my website?

My website has over 100,000 words of thinking, reflected in my points-of-view.  My points-of-view freely available for anyone to read and download.  I am constantly learning, and unlearning, which means the documents continue to evolve.

My points-of-view are organized into 9 sections. This links below will take you directly to each section.  There is also a section for my charitable support – the Geoff Carr Fellow at Lupus Ontario.

The following are links to sections of my website.  Each section contains my points of view.

Avoiding business failure

The startup journey

Understanding customers

Investor interactions

Corporate Governance

Only talent creates business value

Value creation planning (strategy)

Business transformation

Values, morals, and ethics

Charitable support – the charity I support.

Tom Koor

Note taking is key to value creation.

What is the purpose of this article?

  • Help people understand the value of note taking.
  • Identify some possible ways to take notes.

You can download a PDF of this article from: Note taking is key to value creation

What are the critical learnings in this article?

  • In today’s fast changing world you need to be constantly learning. Future value creation demands learning.
  • Note taking is different from transcription and minutes.
  • If you don’t take notes, it’s likely you’ll either forget or incorrectly remember what you heard.
  • Note taking improves your understanding and memory.
  • You need a structure process to maximise the value of note taking.

How is personal note taking different from transcription and minutes?

  • Transcription is a word for word documentation of what was said. E.g. transcription that is taken in court. This enables later review and analysis of what was said.
  • Minutes establishes a common understanding of key items in a meeting, such as; Decisions; who will do what by when; issues; facts; assumptions. Some examples are: board of directors minutes and company executive committee minutes.
  • Personal note taking is focused on learning and the association recollection of what was learned. You process what your are hearing, seeing, feeling, and thinking. Your notes reflect your key learnings.

Why must you take notes in presentations and meetings?

  • If you don’t take notes, it’s likely you’ll either forget or incorrectly remember what you heard.
  • “People forget 40%-80% of what they hear immediately. Half the information people do recall, is recalled incorrectly”1
  • The process of taking notes force you to think about what you are learning.

What are some other benefits of note taking?

  • Keeps your mind and body active.
  • Reduces drowsiness.
  • Helps you identify insights and organize your learnings.
  • Provides a record for later review and learning.

What are some ways to take notes?

Five ways to take notes:

  • An outline: write down the key points and sub points
  • The Cornell method:
    1. Divide each page into two vertical sections. The right side is Notes, which are the notes you take in the meeting. Usually done in outline format. Left side is Cues, which are the main points, or questions answers, in the corresponding Notes. The Cues are usually done after the meeting, while reviewing Notes
    2. There is a Summary section at the end, summarizing the entire meeting.
  • Mind Map: this is a drawing of the inter-relationships between complex or abstract ideas. Visuals help with memory and learning.
  • Flow Notes: Combines text, arrows, diagram, etc. The intent is to maximize your learning while taking notes.
  • Writing on handout slides: Write your notes on the handout slides.

What are some note taking hints?

  • You are NOT a transcribing machine, writing down every word you hear or see.
  • You are processing what you see and hear, actively thinking and learning
  • Focus on the main points.
  • Write down: questions you have, actions to take later, and thoughts/learnings that occurred to you.
  • Be concise: use abbreviations, symbols, and bullets. Don’t write complete sentences.
  • After the meeting, review your notes. Good time to add summaries, questions, action items, and additional learnings. You may rewrite your notes.

Which is better: taking notes by hand or on your computer keyboard?

  • Any kind of note taking is better than no note taking.
  • Some research shows that handwritten notes require more thinking and thus improve learning and memory.
  • Some research shows that people taking notes on computers and phones are distracted and doing things other than focusing on learning from the meeting.
  • Computer keyboard note taking has the risk that you become a transcription machine rather than a thinker and learner.

What are your next steps?

  • Experiment with different note taking systems.
  • Gradually improve over time.
  • Remember, what’s easiest to do isn’t what’s best to do.

Footnotes

1 Lindsay Wizowski, Theresa Harper, and Tracy Hutchings, Writing Health Information for Patients and Families 4th Edition (Hamilton Health Sciences, 2014), Page 5