Category: Decision Making

Culture and Ethics, Decision Making

Competency Trap or Kill-The-Goose-That-Laid-The-Golden-Egg?

Gregory Pearl

How many successful companies miss out on ultra gigantic opportunities in their industry? ATT had developed some early technology for mobile communications in the 1940s. (Yes, the 1940s). It was difficult to bring to market because of technical hurdles. Rather than continue to research and innovate to overcome these difficulties, ATT gave up and other companies took the market later. Motorola developed some of the first cell phones but also was slow to innovate.  They played catch up, succeded with some innovation with the  RAZR yet completely lost the market on the death of an influential marketing leader. Xerox was…

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Culture and Ethics, Decision Making

Four Pillars to Successful Change Management

Gregory Pearl

Almost all organizations have employees, sub contractors or other types of associates.  These are your ‘Colleagues” though their exact role and relationship to the organization will vary. We need to manage and sometimes to engineer organizational change. That’s usually a difficult task and the track record of these transformations is usually not a positive one. Psychologists – academic researchers and others – have developed some ideas on what seems to be some of the more effective ideas on what will work. This model consists of what I call the Four Pillars of Transformation – four things that can be done…

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Decision Making

My Favorite Cognitive Biases #2

Gregory Pearl

My last post listed some great cognitive biases. The human mind is easily fooled by both ourselves and others! I could list more, of course.  There is so much published on this topic that it could fill many posts. That being said, here is a bunch more. Gambling System Bias – gambling is a real problem that causes harm. I’ve seen the damage gambling can do in my own family growing up. There’s always a rationalization. And they stick to their ‘system’ well beyond the point where it obviously doesn’t work. I heard an old gambler one time say as…

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Decision Making

My Favorite Cognitive Biases #1

Gregory Pearl

Buying and Selling Companies, Investing, and even just general life involve decision-making. I’ve seen people in positions of authority really make some bad mistakes in their decisions. Decisions that were obviously bad to those around them before action was taken by the power figure. What causes this? Are they dumb? Well, in some cases yes. Just because a person has power doesn’t make them smart or wise. But sometimes otherwise smart people fool themselves. If you are really interested in this subject I would refer you to the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. If you are really…

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Culture and Ethics, Decision Making

Balance the Positive and the Negative

Gregory Pearl

Early on in my career, I worked with an astonishingly effective salesman.  He did exactly what you’d expect such an effective sales professional to do, be enthusiastic, deal well with rejection (when it happened), craft a good succinct story, understand his customer’s needs. One thing he also did is that he looked at the negative. He analyzed the situation and his customer and put it this way “Eliminate every reason why the customer can say No and then he has no reason not to say Yes.” He looked for the obstacles and problems in the situation and determined a solution…

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Alternative Investments, Decision Making

The New(er) Strategies for Massive Startup Success

Gregory Pearl

What can we learn from the startup efforts of companies that became wildly successful? What lessons can we take from the successful companies in the innovation hubs? I am talking about the massively successful startups – the ones that become unicorns (worth $1 billion or more). I’m not talking about smaller-scale, less ambitious startups. Mostly only those with unicorn potential. Startup land is a dynamic field. What works now and has worked in the past may not be a good template in the future. A lot of what succeeds in one time and place may not work in another. That…

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Decision Making, Exit Planning

The Stock Market Goes Up, Goes Down or Stays the Same

Gregory Pearl

Here are at The Value Focus we talk about business decision making around Strategy, M&A, Exit Planning and Business Valuation. Short term trading in publically traded equity markets is not what we advise on. Still, I get asked about this topic reasonably often.  So here is some perspective. Recently, the publicly traded stock markets have become more volatile. I do not know if this will continue or not. Neither you or I know how the markets will perform in the short term.  I do know that the markets tend to increase over longer periods of time. In fact, there is…

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