Extending the Runway: Leadership Strategies

Extending the Runway is a must-read book for every C-level executive and venture capitalist who now or has ever managed a fragile, growing young business. Authored by Dave Berkus, a seasoned entrepreneur and investor acknowledged as "Director of the Year" for early stage businesses by the Forum for Corporate Directors, this book provides thoughtful material to help management and investors gain alignment at the board level on issues of limited resource allocation toward and beyond the break-even point. The book provides tips and describes traps for growing companies, and explores insights into managing for preservation of capital and business growth. Berkus delves into issues revolving around optimal use of resources, such as time, money, relationships, context knowledge, and process understanding. He shares real accounts of young businesses whose management fell into traps which could have been avoided, and how some extended their runways to make more efficient use of invested funds. Extending the Runway uses examples and stories from aviation to draw an analogy between trained, disciplined management in the cockpit compared to that in an often chaotic corporate world. The book explores the elimination of bottlenecks that impede growth, and common pitfalls the author has experienced firsthand as an entrepreneur and in coaching CEOs of more than sixty-five portfolio companies in a career that has spanned more than fifty years. This is an easy-reading but powerful text for C-level corporate planning. The last chapter alone provides over fifty discussion topics for senior executives of growing businesses to use in testing their own preparedness and in gaining valuable board level agreement on issues of strategic importance within growing businesses of any size.