Skip to content
Founders’ price Launch pricing for your first twelve months. 40 Playbooks, 40% discount for Founders. View the playbooks →
04Precedent · how it went for them

The situation“A dependency has failed and I need a plan B by tomorrow.”

Leaders who made the same call — what each did, and how it went.

WorkedHalf-workedShouldn’t have been tried

Worked · Elsie Inglis, Scottish Women's Hospitals, 1914 onwards

At the outbreak of war in August 1914, Dr Elsie Inglis — a 50-year-old senior consultant in Edinburgh with thirty years of medical practice — offered the British War Office two fully equipped all-female hospital units of 100 beds each, funded by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.

Worked · Corie Barry, Best Buy, March–April 2020

When Corie Barry became CEO of Best Buy in June 2019 — one of the youngest Fortune 100 CEOs in the country at the time — the retail model she inherited was built on a single assumption that had been settled for Best Buy's entire history: customers came into the store.

Worked · Muriel Siebert, New York Stock Exchange seat purchase, 1967

In 1967, Muriel Siebert was running her own securities-research practice on Wall Street and had decided to apply for membership of the New York Stock Exchange.

Worked · Lookery, 2008–2009

Lookery was an early advertising network built specifically for the Facebook application ecosystem, at a moment when Facebook was aggressively opening its platform to third-party developers.

Worked · Adena Friedman, Nasdaq pandemic split-teams operating model, March 2020

When COVID-19 began moving through New York in early March 2020, the operational dependency at risk for Nasdaq was not technical and not financial.

Half-worked · Stepan Pachikov, Evernote, 2008

In early 2008, Pachikov had decided to shut Evernote down.

Shouldn’t have been tried · Aaron Harris, Tutorspree, 2011–2013

Tutorspree built a marketplace for in-person tutors.