The meeting went well. At least, that is what the founder believed when they left the room. The investor had been engaged. Asked good questions. Stayed for the full session. Said something polite at the end about following up. They did not follow up. This is not a story about bad manners. It is a story about what investor silence actually is, and what founders systematically misread it to be. ...
Role clarity has a reputation problem. In most founder-led companies, the conversation about who owns what is filed under HR — something to sort out when the company is big enough for a proper structure, when there is time, when the immediate priorities have been dealt with. It is associated with org charts and job descriptions and the kind of administrative tidying that feels like overhead rather than value. This is an expensive misclassification. ...
Strategy has been turned into a separate discipline. It has its own consultants, its own frameworks, its own job titles. Large organisations have chief strategy officers. Mid-sized companies hire strategy consultants. Smaller ones are told they need to do a strategy exercise — usually once a year, usually with external help, usually producing a document that gets filed. The effect of all this specialisation is that most leaders — at every level — have come to believe that strategy is not their concern. It belongs to the people whose job it is. The team leader running a department of eight people does not think of themselves as doing strategy. The founder who built a company from nothing delegates the strategy work to whoever has the right title or the right framework. The manager who keeps their team aligned, focused, and moving — they are leading. They are not, they would say, doing strategy. ...
The previous essay in this series broke the Stagnation Tax into three buckets and showed how to estimate each one. The third bucket — zombie projects — was described as politically the most difficult to address. This essay is about why. The economics of ending a zombie project are straightforward. The project is consuming resources that could go elsewhere. Stopping it frees those resources. The calculation is simple and the answer is obvious. ...