How confused are our Gang-of-Fools?I don’t know how many of you posters have been involved in establishing the strategy for a business, but for this company it shouldn’t take more than 4-weeks to complete. This isn’t General Electric. So my take is that the directors and management of this company are either severely lacking in the required skill sets, or they are hopelessly disagreeing as to what to do.
Hopefully, the present gang-of-fools haven’t spent more than 5-minutes discussing IPOs, which (among other things) will require a complete 180-degree change in market psychology, and this isn’t going to happen in 2001.
It is pretty obvious to even the most naive person, that NSI’s incubator companies need customers. The declaration that Answers have hired some salesmen is great news, how about Ktpoia?
Only 2 of the 5 incubator companies have any possible chance within a reasonable time frame of creating value for NSI, so get rid of the other 3. The longer our gang-of-fools wait, the less they will be worth. Either sell them or give them away, and if need be merge them with each other and then sell them or give them away, but do it. (Maybe we could get lucky and have Baan included in the package that we get rid of, maybe we can con others that there is value if we throw in a visionary). It’s obvious that our gang-of-fools aren’t fishermen, and missed the lesson about cutting bait.
Also, why not roll Answers and Ktopia back into NSI and operate them as divisions, which will reduce the duplication in overheads involved in three separate businesses. Then, when market conditions turn around in 2 – 5 years,IPO NSI in the USA. Baan originally guessed that Clickchoice was his value creator (nice guess-its worthless), but is now guessing that he will recover his investment through Answers. (This guys' track record is proving that he isn’t the coldest beer in the fridge.) I don’t think Baan has any idea as to the value of Ktopia, but one day somebody will point it out to him and he will become “the visionary” again.
Other than our visionary Baan, how many of the the directors and managers have any remaining actual cash invested in NSI, and how much? Options don't provide any incentive to prevent failure.