In 2014, a hedge fund with fewer employees than your average Sweetgreen line took down the entire board of Darden Restaurants — the $8.5B parent of Olive Garden, LongHorn, and 7 other big-time chains.
Why?
Because the executive team and board had driven the company straight into the ground with seven deadly execution mistakes.
If you’re not familiar, this became one of the most famous activist battles ever.
The hedge-fund — Starboard Value — dropped a 108-slide takedown deck that turned into a battle cry for how to not f*ck up strategy and execution.
I went through those 108 slides and pulled out the 7 traps that I see wrecking founders at the $5M–$10M stage all the time.
Then I built a founder-ready playbook to help you sidestep them.
Here’s the short list:
Execution Drift: Products slide from delightful → disappointing.
Too Many Layers: Managers managing managers. Decisions slow to a crawl.
Feature Creep: Doing everything, excelling at nothing.
Customer Distance: Internal dashboards matter more than real customers.
Vanity Metrics: Revenue up, but usage and experience down.
Innovation Illusion: Shiny rebrands while the core business rots.
Cultural Decay: Wrong incentives drive talent out the door.
And this isn’t just “big company” stuff.
These traps show up in startups all the time, and I’ve experienced (and learned from) many of them myself.
👉 That’s why I put together Scale Faster by Doing Less: The Founder’s Playbook — frameworks to spot these mistakes early and escape them before they wreck you.
⚡ Important: every single trap comes with an actionable prevention step so you aren’t just nodding along, yeah, yeah, etc — plus, please make sure you read the slide notes under each lesson — that’s where I go deep with the full context on what’s broken and exactly how to fix it.
Happy reading,
Jordan
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