Abstract

This article suggests that, at the time of entry into a new venture, there should be an equally well-planned exit procedure, and that key warning signals should automatically trigger efforts to evaluate the future of the venture, so that management is formally brought to consider the possibility of exercising its option to terminate the operation. The approach to planning an exit hereby proposed is called trend impact analysis (TIA) and is based on a technique that can help solve three problems: with reference to an agreed-upon set of indicators for measuring how well the venture is performing, determining for each indicator in the set a criterion of future performance that will signal "warning" or "danger"; improving the process of trend extrapolation so as to gain deeper insight into the issue of whether a given departure from a projected value is, in fact, significant; and accomplishing the first two tasks in such a way that communication among the principal actors is enhanced, assumptions are shared, and a consensus can be defined.