Most organizations that I meet operate on what I call entitlement funding. So see if this sounds familiar. Once a year we have a strategy off-site that takes, I don't know, three days, where the exalted executives of the company get together and decide how budgets will be allocated for the coming year. And it's a very intense process to align resource allocation with our current strategy, yes? But here's a strange fact in most companies that I don't think we really pay enough attention to. If I take the deck of all the approved projects from last year and the deck of all the approved projects for the coming year, what percentage of projects that are on this side are also present on that side? Anyone want to shout it out? Anyone have one where it's less than 90%? Anybody? It's almost exactly the same set of projects. How much strategy did we really do? I call this entitlement funding because we all know that the vast majority of projects are entitled to continue quarter after quarter, year after year, maybe with their budget increased a little or decreased a little, but they continue barring a catastrophic failure. If you're seen to have really screwed up, then your project could be canceled. But most projects are not canceled. This creates horrific incentives for individual teams. Think about it from the point of view. If you're a team leader. From a budgetary point of view. I have to make a choice. I've built my product. Should I ship it today or wait until later and ship it later? Let's make a little two-by-two matrix, shall we? Two possibilities. Ship it or don't ship it. Well, if I ship it, two possibilities. It works or it fails. What will happen to my budget? If it works, nothing. Budget continues. If it fails, budget could be canceled. Okay. If I don't ship, if I delay, there's two possibilities. Either I delayed for a good reason or I didn't delay for a good reason. Right? Well, if I delayed for a good reason, what will happen to my budget? Continues. And if I delayed for a bad reason, just kidding, there's an infinite number of good reasons to delay at all times. So now do the math. Why would you ever ship anything? It's a ridiculous idea. Of course, you should always delay to make it a little bit more perfect. Just a little bit. Let's delay for one week. And of course, during the week, you know, we could add one more feature. Oh, but we could make it a little bit more perfect. And who really wants to be the person to say, let's say the imperfect thing and ship it. So entitlement funding creates an environment where we pay people not to ship products to customers. And then we're frustrated that they're so slow. So the alternative is what we call metered funding. This is how we do it in Silicon Valley. We give people discrete rounds of financing. And we set very clear criteria for what it takes to unlock more funding. And the vast majority of projects do not continue. from period to period. And the funding is always proportional to the level of validated learning that they have gotten from customers. This automatically moves the consciousness of teams from entitlement to scarcity, from, you know, bureaucracy to creativity, and most importantly, to have a sense of urgency to accomplish something for customers before the deadline expires. That simple change by itself can do a lot of good. But there's a number of changes that have to be made all at the same time to build an integrated management system just like we had to figure out in the 20th century. And so what we're really talking about is a corporate transformation.