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...
The Complexity Curve: How CALM Teams Cope with Wicked Problems
Calm teams cope with wicked problems. There’s some evidence for this below but the real question is how. Calm teams seem to adapt to unstable goals, innovate around inadequate solutions, and be mindful of surprising results. These are general signs of team...
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...
PayStand is building technology that strengthens the fight against corruption
Special to Santa Cruz Tech Beat, 5 June 2018 As a modern, bank-independent, digital B2B payment processor, PayStand is part of a wave of democratizing financial technologies with the potential to lift all businesses – and not just the biggest. And yet the technologies...
Last-mile transport under construction at the end of Route 17
Special to Santa Cruz Tech Beat March 13, 2018 — Santa Cruz, CA (Image above: Contributed by author, from July 2015 Inmotion newsletter of Dallas Area Rapid Transit) Santa Cruz has plenty of cool alternative transport startups. It’s true they can seem peripheral at a...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Data vs. algorithms – what wins the predictive analytics race?
Malcolm Forbes supposedly said that on Wall Street, whoever has the most toys wins. His magazine argued more recently that in Silicon Valley, whoever has the most data wins. Andrew Ng of Stanford and Coursera agrees, as do most Big Data entrepreneurs and evangelists....
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...
The EU fines Google: three views of the future of technology and capitalism
The $2.7B fine that the European Union (EU) imposed on Google at the end of June for displaying its own comparison-shopping results over rival websites conjured not just two but three starkly different views of the future of technology and capitalism. The one under...
Robots Need Not Apply
This presentation explores why complex business problems require creativity. DOWNLOAD PRESENTATION
Impact scorecards for small businesses and social enterprises
This presentation shows how impact scorecards can help small businesses and social enterprises improve performance at a fraction of the cost in time, cost, and data of traditional consulting and advice.
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.
Three myths about the impact Mark Zuckerberg is seeking
As self-professed impact experts line up to advise the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative – the $45B LLC just announced by the Facebook founder – it may be worth debunking three myths about impact.
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.
Two critical qualities of the entrepreneurial mind
What if the qualities of mind needed by successful entrepreneurs conflicted with one another?
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.
The False Promise of Big Data: Can Data Mining Replace Hypothesis-Driven Learning in the Identification of Predictive Performance Metrics?
This paper argues US manufacturers still fail to identify metrics that predict performance results despite two decades of intensive investment in data-mining applications because indicators with the power to predict complex results must have high information content as well as a high impact on those results.
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...
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.
Lean Planning and the Learning Advantage
A metric is relevant to an assumption if the assumption’s truth or falsity greatly affects the metric’s expected results.
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.
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.
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