Hi, guys. Welcome back to Entrepreneurial Strategic Management. I've introduced to you the, the major focus of this course, which is an attempt to try to answer the question, what leads to a business or even an organization's success. And I have described to you that if you are a mathematical person you might consider this in terms of an equation or a formula you know, x plus y equals z. And z on one side of the equal sign is business success, and we've got this question mark. We're trying to understand what is it that leads to business success. And this is a question that a lot of people have tried to understand. Certainly, the millions and millions of individuals who have started their own businesses all over the world throughout history have you would assume wanting to succeed. And at one time or another, probably asked themselves, what do I need to do, what, what, what plan or approach do I need to take to my business to achieve success? Certainly, there are a lot of books out there written in, in many languages where different researchers, scientists, academics business people, journalists, attempt to try to understand the answer to this question. I remember back in the 1980s, for example a famous book called In Search of Excellence, which consultants, business consultants tried to understand some universal answers to this question, what is it that we can look at from different case studies of businesses that, that lead to success? More recently, in the past 10 or 15 years, there's been a very popular book called Good to Great. That also looks at that same question. So people are continuously trying to understand this. I'm going to tell you from the get go, and I'll think I'll repeat this again in the course, that I don't believe that there is a perfect answer to the question, what leads to business success? If you've, if you've been thinking about this question I've posed you may have, have, have thought about a couple of different factors and I'm sure those are important. You probably are correct in, in answering them. But what I don't think any book or any consultant or any academic can give you is a 100% successfully executable model, or framework, or formula or recipe for success. For those of you who are thinking of starting a business in the next few months or years I can't give that to you, and I don't think there's a book that can do that. For one thing, a lot will change in the next few months or years, in your part of the world, in the business world, in technology your competitors will change. So it's not such a scientific formula that we can develop, because things are constantly changing. There are variables constantly moving around. And so I'm going to tell you from the get go that there's not a perfect answer. Now in, in modules two, three, four and five, we will give you several different models that we hope will get you a little closer to understanding what might be some ingredients that you would want to include in your attempt to accomplish success. But it won't guarantee success. Most of time, what we do, and again, I'll repeat this in other modules, is we look back in history and talk about what businesses did. And we try to use that for example, in these books that I described In Search of Excellence and Good to Great, to try to, to say what happened. And then we try to extrapolate from there and say, okay, this must be what you need to do to be successful. So we're going to, we're going to kind of deconstruct and take that apart here in module one for a few minutes in the, in the subsequent parts of this module. But, but have that in mind as we go forward.
