Most deals fail quietly before they fail publicly. The earliest signal is not margin compression or governance crisis, but something subtler: information that slows as it moves upward. After years of privately studying thousands of organizations across industries, I began to notice a recurring sequence. Performance does not collapse first. Transmission degrades first. This essay traces that pattern from underwriting through integration to the boardroom, and argues that latency in truth flow is a structural valuation variable, whether it is modeled or not.
Eddie Killian 