See Clearly First, Then Decide

Founders often ask us: what is the first step in going global? Most people's first instinct is to register a company there.

Our answer is different. Let me put our view up front. The most expensive cost in going global is not flights and offices. It is fixing the direction before you can see clearly. So we insist on one thing only — insight always comes before strategic planning and business planning. Why? Because when the direction is wrong, every penny after it only accelerates the error.

We have said this many times. The first layer of the Glacier Pyramid is called the fact base, and the meaning is plain: look at the facts first, listen to the claims second. Five looks and three decisions is that sentence turned into a worksheet for going global. Evidence first, then speak.

Five Looks: Five Sets of Facts, Not Five Impressions

Look at industry trends. Look at market demand. Look at the competitive landscape. Look at your own core competitiveness. Look at growth opportunities. Five directions, five sets of facts, not five sets of impressions.

Start with a judgement easily mistaken for a hot trend. Going global is not a sector. It is the spillover of the Chinese supply chain. A complete hardware supply chain exists in one place in the world. Over there the category "going-global investment" does not exist, because the base does not. Conversely, hardware innovation over there cannot get around this chain either. Read industry trends down to that layer and what you hold finally has a name. You hold a position, not a wind.

Where reading market demand most often goes wrong is treating "there is demand" as "you can get in". Many people blame a rough start abroad on not adapting to the local climate. But the earlier wall is language: English is not widely spoken in a number of important markets, and the local language cannot be learned in six months. Which means language is not a bonus. It is infrastructure. It belongs in the first version of the org chart, in the same column as the plant and the payment terms. We are fairly sure of this one.

The look most often skipped is the one at your own core competitiveness. Why? Because it turns the lens back on you, and that step is the least comfortable. Running fast at home is real. In another system you may not still be fast. Some advantages stop working on a different continent. Some weaknesses only turn fatal there. The uncomfortable look is the one worth most.

And growth opportunities? Look at those last. Before the first four looks are done, every opportunity looks like one. But only one or two can actually be taken.

Fact Convergence: If It Will Not Compress into One Sentence, You Have Not Seen Clearly

After the five looks comes one move, fact convergence: compress the five sets of material into a single judgement that can be refuted.

Refutable means the sentence carries its own ruler — it states the conditions under which it would be wrong. A sentence everyone nods at is not a judgement. It is atmosphere. And if it will not compress? Go back and look again. The two or three weeks spent here are far cheaper than the two or three quarters of rework later.

Three Decisions: Control Point, Target, Strategy

First, decide the strategic control point — the position others cannot go around, not the largest position. There is something counter-intuitive here. Many teams pick the control point at a rival's product weakness, but a product weakness is the easiest thing to fix: one iteration, one poached hire, and it is gone. What actually works is to hit the strategic weakness they cannot fix — the kind that grows out of geography, pay structure, organisational genes. Fixing it means rebuilding the company. The same feature takes one company three months; another company cannot build it in three years. That is the lock cylinder, not the door handle.

Second, decide the target — verifiable, schedulable, attributable. Drop one of the three words and the target turns back into a wish. A target with no date is just talk.

Third, decide the strategy — from strategy to execution, down to names and a timetable. As things stand, what stalls most going-global plans is not resolve. It is that nobody claims the work. A strategy that lands on no one's head is just meeting minutes.

The framework comes from Huawei's five looks and three decisions, and we built our own working version of it for going global. It does not guarantee you get it right — no framework guarantees that. It guarantees something else: when the decision is made, it rests on evidence. You only have a choice when the window opens, and you only go far if you carry enough supplies.

Do we hold to the worksheet ourselves? We do. Twenty or thirty mandates a year, half of them new and half existing clients coming back for the next round — before we take on a company, we turn the facts over first and listen to the claims second. With the denominator on the table, the account can be worked out. Empty cup, good assets, zero froth.

(The Archive entry "2026-08-16 entry update" governs.)