GoalScreenTM Blog

Chasing Profits at Others’ Expense Can Harm Investors

The mutual fund revolution is overturning a fundamental principle of finance that it’s in the interest of investors for CEOs to maximize profit over time. This principle depends on an increasingly fragile assumption – that most investors in a firm hold shares in...

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Toy story: How Looker supports discovery

Toy story: How Looker supports discovery

Special to Santa Cruz Works “Looker?” asked the sales consultant over the roar of 5,000 entrepreneurs and engineers frantically canvassing the vendor hall at The Indus Entrepreneurs 2018 Inflect conference in Santa Clara. Pivoting in front of his company’s neural-net...

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From B2B payments to intelligent supply chains in Santa Cruz

From B2B payments to intelligent supply chains in Santa Cruz

PayStand is not the only fintech startup in the Monterey Bay area. But B2B platforms like PayStand are a rarity – collectors’ items for any local economy. PayStand’s recent successful funding round and the attention it’s getting in Silicon Valley (see CEO Jeremy...

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Signal to pivot

Signal to pivot

What do you do when big gaps between actual and projected sales or cash flow stare out at you from the books (or your computer screen) week after week? If you’re like most people, your first reaction is to work harder. After all, volatile results make backers nervous...

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Before you measure – guess

Before you measure – guess

A recent blog on an automated business-scorecard site helpfully suggests 18 key performance indicators that you should track. Along with 13 bonus performance indicators. And a link to another 37 indicators. The list faithfully follows the structure of the balanced...

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When working harder is a mistake

When working harder is a mistake

People.ai CEO Oleg Rogynskyy busts the urban myth that Y Combinator has become Silicon Valley’s Ivy League – an incubator with a surface veneer of hard work glossing over an engine of great networking. Here’s what he writes. “Y Combinator is about understanding the...

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What if ElementAI really does democratize deep learning?

What if ElementAI really does democratize deep learning?

Parochial data – the failure to share data or its analysis – can be lethal. In 2008, I published a case study of the 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery that killed 15 and injured 100 people in my book Relevance (Wiley). One key point was that the firm had...

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When to KISS

Anyone who has struggled with car windows, door locks, audio settings, and climate controls subject to the latest onboard digital platforms without a manual control in sight will feel some nostalgia for the slogan of Lockheed Skunk Works lead engineer Kelly Johnson – “Keep it simple, stupid” – KISS for short.

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Testing assumptions about impact

Impact scorecards help you improve business outcomes by measuring the effectiveness of your strategy as well as execution. After all, it doesn’t matter how well you execute a strategy if it’s the wrong strategy for hitting your goals.

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Investor diversity at the SoCap15 conference

For this attendee, the strongest impression of the SoCap15 conference for impact investors last week in San Francisco was about investor diversity. There were plenty of impact investors looking for energy, health, and data startups and boasting about exits.

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Assumptions Based Metrics: Recipe for Success

Two challenges facing U.S. businesses raise the question of how well our performance management systems are performing. One: Although average worker productivity has risen briskly for two decades average wages have stagnated. Two: The flattening of U.S. consumer...

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Sharpening Your Risk Intelligence

From seeing risks as generally matching rewards and risk avoidance as little safer than risk taking over much of the past 60 years, business has returned to the darker pre-war view that what can go wrong will do so.

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Know What Matters to Hit Your Goals

As consumer demand falters and raw material costs rise, the pressure on business leaders, marketers, finance executives, and operating officers to pinpoint what is driving – or hindering – progress toward their performance objectives ratchets up.

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David Apgar
Founder – Goalscreen

About David Apgar

David has helped entrepreneurs around the world achieve their goals by identifying powerful new drivers of organizational growth. He has advised businesses on best practices at McKinsey and CEB, managed small-business and microfinance funds, and taught at Johns Hopkins and Wharton.

David has a BA from Harvard, an MA from Oxford, and a PhD from Rand’s Graduate School. The GoalScreen coaching program and software platform have evolved out of his desire to make it simpler and easier for small businesses and social enterprises to take advantage of the power of assumption testing and impact scoring.

Ready to see if GoalScreenTM coaching is a good fit for you and your small business?

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