One of my first tasks as I came back from maternity leave was to conduct a strategic review of one of our businesses, one where we have consistently under-performed. The premise is simple, we should have everything to succeed in this business, what is wrong then! We stopped buying that the market was slow a long time ago, as competitors deals kept being thrown in or face. We knew we had a structural problem but when we asked the team for a business plan, we got a pipeline back. Given I was reading the #leanstartup while doing this, I decided to apply a fact based approach, whereby I started from basic assumptions to question the team. After a first round focused only on market size and product details, the claim continued to be lack of transparency on the numbers. The discussion jump started to a business mix debate, as it became enlightening that people had very opposed views about why we should be pursuing different parts of the business. Diagnostic 1: no-one agrees with ...