Hi guys, welcome back to Entrepreneurial Strategic Management. This is module five, in which we are going to continue trying to understand what it is that a company, or an organization, whether it be large or small, needs to do in order to succeed. And that's just a simple way of stating it. We've looked at several frameworks, most of which have come from a very famous and important strategy researcher, Dr. Michael Porter from Harvard Business School. As we talk about in module one, there are a lot of different ways to try to understand company success. There are a lot of people writing a lot of books, or articles, or consultants who look at all different facets or angles of understanding this very important issue to our society. Most of the frameworks that are out there, whether they be in books that we aren't reading in this course, or even the frameworks we've looked at have one major flaw, or negative, or con. And that is that they don't provide us any way to predict success. Everything we've talked about is going back through the past and doing sometime of analysis, and saying this is what these companies did. And we believe it was this or this or this that led to their success. For example, we've talked about Coca Cola, a great company that's been around for a long time. We can measure their success simply by this amount of time they've existed, that they've survived. And we could probably measure it in a lot of other ways. But everything that we look at about Coke, probably we do retrospectively. We do a historical analysis and we're using information that they give us and perhaps other external information to tell them what we think led to their success. We haven't mentioned that it could be luck. Right, being at the right place at the right time, and being prepared to take advantage of an opportunity. That could be an explanation to our question, or an answer to our question of what is the most important factor, or what are the factors that lead to a company's success. And so, what we really would like to be able to give to you as managers, or entrepreneurs, or leaders is some type of approach or even a model or a framework that had some predictability. We'd like to be able to tell you, under these circumstances we expect these factors to be the most important to lead to success. Now as you know, the problem is uncertainty. We don't know what will change in the future. What major events, wars, technological innovations will happen. So it's very difficult to predict that type of social phenomenon, because we are humans, and because organizations are imperfect. We're not dealing with medical science, for example, where they do controlled experiments and there still are variables, but they're able to control some aspects of the environment, and make predictions about the future, about certain medications, or other types of hard sciences. And so, this is really a struggle for anyone who studies, or tries to teach about business. How can we give entrepreneurs an approach that would increase the probability that they would succeed. Or decrease the probability that they would fail. And so, that's kind of the search. What we're going to look at in this module is an attempt to understand a framework that offers some predictions. And we can make our own conclusions, and I invite you to make your own conclusions about whether you believe that this model is moving closer to one that would give us the ability to make predictions about the future. I believe it's a very powerful model which is the reason I include it in this class. It's not the only one. There are others out there and I encourage you to continue to do research and try to expose yourself to the best knowledge possible. But that's the goal for today, is to try to understand this model or this framework and have it in that context of prediction. A future prediction or probabilistic prediction about the future.
