Product leaders often feel they must present a perfect, unassailable plan to executives. However, the goal should be to start a discussion. Presenting an idea as an educated guess allows for a collaborative debate where you can gather more information and adjust the strategy based on leadership's feedback.

To ensure robust decision-making, Eclipse requires that if a partner feels strongly against a potential investment, they must join the deal team alongside the champions. This forces a direct confrontation of the risks and ensures that by the time an investment is made, all major concerns have been addressed.

To encourage adoption of tech benefiting multiple business units, Oshkosh's CVC arm uses a central budget to fund initial proofs of concept. This removes the "who pays?" friction, as no single department has to bear the initial cost for a company-wide benefit, with the successful unit paying later.

Oshkosh's CVC team is a hybrid, not siloed in one department. It includes members from corporate development, a venture lead in a tech hub (Bay Area), and a counterpart in an engineering business unit. This structure ensures that strategic goals, technological feasibility, and market deal flow are constantly aligned.

Cisco moved from a dysfunctional "throw it over the wall" M&A model to an integrated one. The key change was implementing quarterly reviews where the integration team reports back to the original deal team on progress and synergy attainment. This forces dealmakers to learn from the downstream consequences of their strategies.

Analyzing past failures, TA found that deals approved by lukewarm Investment Committee (IC) members led to poor outcomes. They now require enthusiastic IC support and add approved deals to the IC members' personal track records. This system aligns incentives and prevents conviction from overriding caution.

The most critical decision in venture isn't the final investment vote but the mid-funnel choice of which companies get a deep look. The costliest errors are false negatives—great companies dismissed prematurely. Firms should therefore optimize process hygiene at this stage, implementing mandatory post-meeting debriefs to avoid these misses.

TA Associates uses a hybrid investment committee. A central group reviews deals but delegates final approval to a small team of four partners (two from the deal team, two from the committee) who conduct deep, in-person diligence. This decentralizes decision-making to those closest to the information.

To avoid bureaucratic slowdown, LEGO's CEO broke his leadership team into smaller, empowered subgroups like a "commercial triangle" (CCO, COO, CMO). These groups handle operational decisions, only escalating disagreements. This has cut full executive meetings to just one hour a month plus quarterly strategy sessions.