Know What Matters

16

Be the Innovator in Chief

“So tell me this,” the young executive looked at me earnestly across the boardroom table, “Is Panera almost as good as Donatos?”

I briefly wondered if he was joking, but it didn’t take long to realize he wasn’t. He genuinely didn’t know the difference between Panera and Donatos, which was a pizza joint. Now, if he’d just been some guy I met on the street, fair enough. But he was a senior executive at one of the leading companies in our industry. He should have been intimately familiar with every nuance of the market. It was his job to separate the wheat from the chaff. In fact, he was in the room with me because he was considering writing a very large check to acquire the wheat.

In this story, the wheat was Panera ...