We battle-test decisions before markets do.
Social Dividend is an independent sounding board for leadership teams with a big call to make.
What’s on your desk
- A decision that has been round the table three times.
- A launch, new market or rebrand you can’t afford to get wrong.
- A sponsorship, partnership or business line to keep or kill.
- A plan the top agrees on and the ground ignores.
- Data you don’t trust enough to act on, or to put AI on.
- A pilot that worked. Who will still use it in month four?
- An agency recommendation you want a second opinion on.
- A strategy that sounds right but hasn’t met a customer.
- A three-year plan, and no measure of whether last year worked.
“A meeting can settle the decision. It can’t settle whether it will survive. Contact with reality does that.”
What matters, what doesn’t, and where the odds tip.
No decision comes with full information. What you can’t know gets named, so the choice holds upstairs and on Tuesday’s sales call. No fifty-page report. Only what you can stand behind.
“Telling us where to engage, when not to worry and what topics matter. Really useful to have by our side at a business critical time.”
Most of what breaks, breaks in between.
Strategy is made at the top. It lives or dies on the ground: the sales team, the engineers, the partner, the customer. Usually one decision turns what you already have into something that works. That is what we battle-test, before it goes live.
“You talk to Elliot and it seems so obvious and easy. You always end up further than you started.”
Listen. Subtract. Decide.
Listen. We start with what you already have: your data, your plans, your people. Then we add what is missing: outside data, and people who know the ground.
Subtract. Everything that doesn’t make the choice clearer goes. Who is this really for? What changes if you’re right? What would kill this in six months? What would you keep if everything else had to go?
Decide. We don’t tell you what to do. We put the options side by side, and the room decides. Sometimes that changes the plan. Sometimes it confirms it, and you go ahead without second-guessing.
“You were asking what would kill this in six months at the table, not after the launch. That ordering is unusual.”
Close calls
Keep or kill. A global software company’s board wanted to drop its Formula 1 sponsorship. Two years of data, thirty slides, boiled down to one.
His idea or yours. The chief executive of a global electronics group wanted to swap a working tagline for his own. Nobody told him no. The evidence did.
Persist or pivot. A global beverage company, in one of its ten biggest markets, tempted to chase bigger growth elsewhere. It kept the plan and changed how it ran it.
Tested with leadership teams in technology, finance, consumer goods, healthcare and luxury. B2B and B2C.
“An invaluable and inspiring business partner in new markets.”
AI-ready before AI-first.
Nearly half of large companies are over budget on AI this year. At six in ten, an unexpected AI bill has already changed a business decision. We battle-test AI like any other big bet: who is it for, will they still use it in month four, what does it cost at scale, which of your data can you trust.
Futurum Group, 2H 2026 survey of 1,636 enterprise technology decision makers; Mavvrik and Benchmarkit, 2026 State of AI Cost Governance, 396 enterprises.
Elliot Polak
Six companies. Sold one. Three broke. Two in progress.
You deal with Elliot directly. Behind him, whatever the decision needs. A month for one big call, a quarter if you want him alongside.
Based in Dubai, London and Boston.
“I highly recommend his integrity. Go for him.”
Tell me what you’re up against.