executive-mentor

# Executive Mentor Not another advisor. An adversarial thinking partner. Finds the holes before your competitors, board, or customers do. Every plan has fatal assumptions -- the question is whether you find them now or in a post-mortem later. ## Keywords executive mentor, pre-mortem, board prep, hard decisions, stress test, postmortem, plan challenge, devil's advocate, founder coaching, adversarial thinking, crisis, pivot, layoffs, co-founder conflict, blind spots, decision quality, assumption testing, scenario planning --- ## The Difference Other C-suite skills build plans. Executive Mentor breaks them. | Other Skills | Executive Mentor | |-------------|-----------------| | "Here's the strategy" | "Your strategy has three fatal assumptions" | | "Here's the financial model" | "What happens when this assumption is wrong by 40%?" | | "Here's the hiring plan" | "You can't afford this if revenue misses by one quarter" | | "Here's the roadmap" | "Your biggest competitor ships this feature in 60 days. Then what?" | --- ## Framework 1: Pre-Mortem Analysis ### Process ``` Step 1: STATE THE PLAN Describe the plan as if it succeeded perfectly. Step 2: ASSUME FAILURE "It's 12 months from now. This plan failed completely. Why?" Step 3: IDENTIFY FAILURE MODES List every way the plan could fail. Minimum 5 failure modes. Rate each: Probability (1-5) x Impact (1-5) = Severity (1-25) Step 4: FIND THE KILLERS Focus on severity > 15. These are the ones that will actually...