Bodhih Arena glossary: the ideas behind each simulation

A week-by-week list of the cash you expect in and out over the next quarter, rolled forward every week. It shows when the low point comes and how deep it is, so you can arrange the cure before you need it.

Practise it in Cash Crunch Friday.

A check on whether a step in hiring screens out one group much more than another. If a group's selection rate is less than four-fifths (80%) of the highest group's rate, the step needs a close look: is it measuring the job, or something else?

Practise it in Hiring Panel.

A way of judging a company on several measures at once, such as profit, value, customers, people, planet and trust, so that winning one at the expense of the rest does not count as success. In Meridian Mobility the weights are visible to every team from round one.

Practise it in Meridian Mobility.

Three ways to get a capability. Build: most control and fit, slowest and riskiest to staff. Buy: faster, but you pay a premium and must integrate people and code. Partner: fastest and cheapest up front, but you share the value and depend on someone else.

Practise it in Build, Buy or Partner.

Net cash burned divided by net new annual recurring revenue in the same period. Below 1.5 is excellent, above 3 means growth is too expensive. It tells investors how efficiently each dollar turns into lasting revenue.

Practise it in Runway.

Cash from operations divided by net profit. Near or above 1 means profits are turning into cash. Well below 1, year after year, means the profit is tied up in stock or unpaid invoices, or has been counted before it was earned.

Practise it in Five-Minute Balance Sheet.

Price minus the costs that rise with each extra unit. It is what each sale contributes towards fixed costs and profit, and the right test for an extra order when you have spare capacity.

Practise it in Price the Deal.

Checking a deal against evidence that it can close: a real need, an approved budget, access to the person who signs, a buying process under way and a date that matters to the buyer. It turns a pipeline from a wish list into a forecast.

Practise it in Pipeline Triage.

Match how you delegate to the person and the task: hand over fully when they have the skill and the capacity, coach when the task stretches them, and keep it yourself only when neither works and it truly matters. Delegating builds the team; doing it yourself only gets today done.

Practise it in Delegation Dash.

Each extra dollar in a channel brings fewer extra sales than the one before. The best budget split is where the next dollar earns about the same in every channel, not where the average looks best.

Practise it in Launch Budget Split.

A short first response that acknowledges the issue, says what you are doing and when you will update, without claiming facts you have not checked. It stops the "they are ignoring us" story and keeps your options open.

Practise it in Brand on Fire.

A short first public statement issued while facts are still emerging. It says what is known, what the organisation is doing, who is affected and when it will update next, without speculating about cause or blaming anyone.

Practise it in Crisis Room.

Designing an AI system so that people review, approve or can override its outputs where errors are costly. The right amount of human checking depends on the cost of an error and on measured accuracy, and should change as evidence comes in.

Practise it in Deploy the Agent.

An entrant wins the least demanding customers with a cheaper, simpler product, then improves until it is good enough for the mainstream. Incumbents that ignore the low end, or fight it with their main brand's margin, often lose more than they protect.

Practise it in Disruptor at the Gate.

A chart of the ways to cut emissions, each drawn as a bar: its width is the tonnes it removes, its height is the cost per tonne. Read it left to right to find the cheapest route to a target, and compare it with the carbon price to see what pays.

Practise it in Carbon Budget.

What the next dollar of savings from a line really costs you in lost revenue, customers or people. It rises as you cut deeper, so the best plan takes the cheapest slices across many lines rather than the same percentage from every line.

Practise it in Cut 10%.

For a one-shot buy, order up to the level where the chance of running out equals the cost of a spare unit divided by the cost of a spare unit plus the cost of a lost sale. For repeat buys, reorder when stock on hand plus on order falls below expected demand over the lead time plus safety stock.

Practise it in Order Right.

The value of keeping a choice open until you know more. It is high when uncertainty is large and the investment is hard to reverse, and it falls when a rival can take the opportunity while you wait.

Practise it in Enter or Wait.

The set of deals that cannot be improved for one side without making the other side worse off. Deals below the frontier leave value on the table that both sides could have shared, usually because they split every issue instead of trading on differences.

Practise it in Negotiation Arena.

Each firm is tempted to cut because a cut pays if the other holds. When both cut, both earn less than if both had held. The way out is to make cooperation visible (signal) and make attacks pointless (respond in kind, or compete on something other than price).

Practise it in Price War.

The money a business has left after paying its costs. Profit = money coming in (sales) minus money going out (costs such as lemons, cups, help and adverts). A busy day is not always a profitable day.

Practise it in Young CEO.

When a model treats a protected group differently through inputs that stand in for the protected characteristic, such as a postcode or a spending pattern, even though the characteristic itself is never used. Removing the protected field is not enough: you must test outcomes by group. Depending on the hidden cause, the debrief may instead teach disparate impact or historical bias.

Practise it in Model Gone Wrong.

Stated is what people say they would pay in a survey. Revealed is what they actually pay when money changes hands. Stated is usually higher, by different amounts in different segments, so price and target from tests, not surveys.

Practise it in Segment Hunter.

A planned conversation with someone you want to keep, asking what keeps them, what frustrates them and what might tempt them away. It turns guessing about retention into evidence, and it is far cheaper than an exit interview.

Practise it in Flight Risk.

Trust is a stock: it builds slowly through many small actions (flows in) and drains through neglect or broken promises (flows out). You cannot buy it quickly when a crisis arrives, so you build it before you need it.

Practise it in First 90 Days.

Every process has one step that limits its output: the constraint. Find it, get the most out of it, make everything else follow its pace, then lift it, and start again, because the constraint will move. An hour lost at the constraint is lost for the whole line; an hour saved anywhere else is a mirage.

Practise it in Bottleneck Factory.

Time to recover is how long a failed supplier takes to get back to normal. Time to survive is how long you can keep serving customers without it, using stock and other sources. If recovery takes longer than survival, you need alternatives in place before the gap opens.

Practise it in Supplier Down.

The best negotiated deals swap things that are cheap for one side and valuable to the other. You can only do it once you know what the other side values, which is why the questions come before the offer.

Practise it in The Discount Ask.