In businesses’ quest for profitability, in a world that seems to be more and more demanding, and also in a journey where achieving success is increasingly challenging for most business leaders - high competition, rapid technological changes, various sorts of crises (economic, political, health, …) and so on, to be able to better understand and obtain a certain excellence in timing could the most promising way to secure a reasonable profit margin. To know when to accelerate one’s engagement in a business, as well as when to decelerate, appears key. It seems to be a matter of skill regarding “ins and outs”.
It is also important to consider that these “ins and outs” are not only about entering and exiting a business, but rather can also refer to turning on or off a “business dial”, which can be more another type of action, e.g. opening or closing a division, changing or upscaling or phasing out a product, growing or stabilising a revenue stream, spending or saving, etc. There are signals out there for all of those types of decisions, too. Perhaps by concentrating more broadly on “ins and outs” and its classical reference to only entering and exiting a business, we are thinking too narrowly. We suggest considering timing, breakpoints, and signals in different contexts depending on significant business decisions.
All businesses are different. This implies that each business leader must develop their own lead indicators. Our book (Lorange and Mugnaini, 2024) provides support when it comes to this. In our work
