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The Founder's Mentality
book

The Founder's Mentality

by Chris Zook, James Allen
May 2016
Intermediate to advanced
224 pages
4h 40m
English
Harvard Business Review Press
Audiobook available
Content preview from The Founder's Mentality

5 StoppingFree Fall Using the Founder’sMentality to Save aBusiness in Rapid Decline

Unlike stall-out, free fall is an existential problem that demands an immediate and dramatic response. It’s brought on by not just the internal winds of crisis but also by storm conditions on the outside that create sudden, violent, and unpredictable turbulence. It’s the combination of these internal and external forces that can threaten your very existence (see figure 5-1).

FIGURE 5-1

Free fall: Rapid decline as a result of both internal and external factors

A quadrant chart plots the net benefits of size on the vertical axis and the net benefits of founder’s mentality on the horizontal axis. High size and low mentality include stable incumbent. High size and high mentality include scale insurgent. Low size and low mentality include struggling bureaucracy. Low size and high mentality include insurgent. A small circle in the insurgent quadrant connects by a curved arrow to a larger circle in the stable incumbent quadrant, which links downward by an arrow to a white circle in the struggling bureaucracy quadrant. Large downward arrows label the complexity doom loop, the curse of the matrix, the fragmentation of the customer experience, and the death of the nobler mission. Lightning bolt symbols mark product substitution, shift in profit pools, and changes to the business model.

Free fall most often affects maturing incumbents whose business model comes under attack from ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781633691179