An example of a disproved hypothesis

- There will be times that your analysis…will change your entire recommendation.…I know of a situation where a company was looking to buy…some competitive assets in Europe,…and the CEO did not want to do this deal.…The problem was, there were a lot of other people…in the organization who wanted to buy…the assets that were for sale.…So the CEO said, we should not buy the assets in Europe…because we can't get scale, the logistics won't work,…and customers won't care if we have…an expanded European presence.…

And he created a column architecture that talked about…scale and logistics and customers.…In the scale section, he said as initial hypotheses,…there's not a lot of scale in terms of…revenue opportunities by owning these assets,…and we can't take out a lot of costs in terms of…synergies of buying those assets.…His hypotheses in the logistics column were that…owning these European assets would not overlap at all…with their existing supply chain in Europe.…

So there were no logistics benefits.…And then the two points he had in the customers column was…