An embarrassment of opportunity.

I hopped on the phone last week with one of my advisors. It had been so busy, we had not caught up in some time. He opened with, "So...are you indecisive, or is this an embarrassment of opportunity?"

He was being generous, in his way. He could see several credible things in front of me. But he wasn't following what I was building.

Then he asked the harder version of the question. "Are you leading the work, or is the work that arrives leading you?"

Why he was right

It stung for 2 reasons. And only one of them was about strategy.

The first is that it takes years to build a body of evidence and about 10 seconds to put all of it back on trial when someone you respect questions the coherence of your choices. Anyone who has done the internal work of getting past impostor syndrome knows the sensation of the whole structure wobbling at one well-aimed sentence.

The second reason is that the question was fair. Abundance IS a comfortable place to hide. Saying yes to good work feels like momentum, and it produces revenue, relationships and proof, so on its own it doesn't always seem like avoidance. But if the shape of every quarter is determined by what came in the door, then other people's demand is setting the destination.

Responsiveness can look identical to leadership from the inside for a surprisingly long time.

So, begrudgingly, I agreed to his diagnosis.

It is the prescription I want to argue with.

Pick one thing

The advice that followed assumed that clarity means being defined by one thing.

And there is something to be said for that. That means if the loop is real, variety stops being fragmented. Each part makes the next cheaper to run and harder to copy. The discipline lives in whether value is repeatable.

An ecosystem where nothing circulates is a portfolio of interesting work that depends entirely on a single founder/executive/operator (aka single point of failure) being in the room.

That is a services practice with better branding. And it stops the moment the leader does.

One logic > One thing

Owning something does not make it valuable, and calling a collection of activities a system does not produce one.

But is it one thing, or is it one intertwined logic? In fact, most really exceptional ideas look crazy from the outside, until they don’t.

But just because I see it, doesn't mean everyone does.

And while that may not be important initially when you are just starting out, it becomes more important as you bring people on the journey with you. Customers. Team members. Partners. Investors.

People want to help but can't help until you rationalize all of the endpoints.

One thing became apparent: I owe answers to the unglamorous and uncomfortable questions I ask my clients all the time:

• what the economic center is and which revenue line is load bearing,
• who is the primary customer, simply put,
• which problems my ecosystem is uniquely equipped to solve,
• how client work converts into something bigger for the whole,
• how that work produces revenue that does not require me personally,
• and what measurable outcome the whole thing is building toward and by when.

And while there is no universal formula, particularly when you are trying to build something that joins things that have been traditionally held separate, at the end of the day it does need to come together.

The filter

For Eudai, this is what the filter looks like when evaluating inbound:

• Does this work strengthen the ecosystem's economic center?
• Does it create an asset that furthers our mission?
• Does it build Eudai’s reusable capability, distribution, data or intellectual property?
• Can it eventually run without me personally carrying every deliverable?
• Is the expected value proportionate to the commitment being requested?

The filter does not sort opportunities into good and bad. It sorts them into work that builds the vision and work that consumes the capacity to build the vision. Each choice is a step toward away from that vision.

If I'm honest, most incoming work fails at least one of these, and some of the work I am proudest of would have failed the 4th a year ago.

The motion of company wayfinding - totally appropriate when you are finding your first customer - is materially different from the motion of company scaling.

If the honest answer to my advisor's question is that this is an embarrassment of opportunity, then the obligation that comes with it is to run it like one.

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Part of our work on go-to-market strategy.