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If you’ve done initiatives in business, you’re very familiar with this graph:

Often referred to as a “hockey stick growth chart”, it indicates how revenue will shift from investment mode (on the left) to wonderful growth (on the right). The problem is that this is always used to project the future, not the past. What actually happens is far messier and doesn’t follow a nice pretty growth curve.

This came to mind when I heard recent reports about why WeWork went bankrupt. Since I’ve fallen into this projected-growth trap myself, I thought it might be good to explore how we might do something different.