Dave Mortensen

It needs to be our vendors, which we like to call partners.

Think of all those stakeholders and you look at the impact points.

Now, it is impossible to create a win, win, win, win, win scenario.

What you don't want to create is a win-lose-lose, win-win-lose scenario.

So I care more about creating some wins through the organization, but making sure we don't create losses while we do it.

So you can balance that strategy and redefine it to strengthen it so every stakeholder is either neutral or winning in the scenarios.

And if you can create neutral to winning strategies for all of your stakeholders, guess what?

The value will get spread across your organization.

And every year, you're going to find out, yeah, we got to spend a little bit more time on our customer.

This year, we got to spend more time on our team.

And it's going to flow.

But when you get too caught up on one stakeholder all the time, guess what?

You're losing in other areas and you're blinded by, and that's where you create blind spots and you can't figure out why you're not executing that well.

And it's incredibly difficult to find decisions that net out even neutral to wins.

I mean, you have to iterate and think through all these angles.

You know, Jeff Bezos says you got one-way doors and two-way doors is a common reference he made in building Amazon, right?

These one-way doors are decisions you got to really think about because when you walk through the portal, it's going to be real expensive if you have to walk it back, right?

A merger and acquisitions, right?

Then you got a bunch of two-way doors where, hey, you know, if we test this, it doesn't work, we can yank it right back, minimal cost.

I'm curious, you know, what were some of those one-way doors outside of maybe the acquisitions that you made that stick in your mind as like, hey, we really had to put a lot of thought into this project?