One question. One evidenced answer.
Not a company blog. Each article answers exactly one question a decision-maker actually asks — with sources and without claims no one can verify.
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The supervisory board question
Executives usually answer the impact question with activity: project status, milestones and budget consumption. A robust answer would compare expected and realized value contribution for each initiative. Where this comparison is missing, continuation depends less on impact than on the persuasive power of the person presenting it.
Read more →The first 90 days after the decision
After a strategy decision, nothing happens for months because there is a translation step between decision and execution, and no one owns it. Strategy formulates goals; the organization needs measures with owners and dates. If this translation is not forced in the first weeks, daily business takes over, and it already has an agenda.
Read more →When the best client does not return
A satisfied client books elsewhere because satisfaction is measured at project end while the next mandate is decided months later. For that later decision, the ending matters more than the total performance: in a randomized study, a better ending alone raised the probability of return by 41 percent, even with a more unpleasant overall experience.
Read more →What a Strategy Execution System is
A Strategy Execution System steers strategy execution through impact, while a project management tool steers individual initiatives through status. Gartner has treated these as separate markets since 2019. A project tool answers whether an initiative is on plan; a Strategy Execution System answers whether it is still the right use of resources compared with all others.
Read more →The sameness test
AI-generated strategies resemble one another because a language model reproduces the average of what has already been written about a question. The range of results depends more on the procedure than on the model: feeding in company data and several creative methods produces different proposals than asking an open question.
Read more →The concept trap
Consulting success is hard to prove because impact appears after the mandate ends, and at that point no one measures what caused it. There is no industry-wide survey on how often this measurement happens. What is documented is that 44 percent of transformations land in a grey zone: value is created, but targets are missed.
Read more →Why AI pilots get stuck
AI pilots get stuck because before launch no one defines what success will look like or who decides transfer into the line. A pilot without these two elements can neither win nor fail; it simply continues. Seven percent of companies say they can prove an established return from AI.
Read more →What remains of consulting
What remains of consulting is the part a language model does not deliver: selection under uncertainty, conflict and commitment in execution. A field experiment with 758 consultants shows both sides. With AI, they worked faster and at higher quality, but they were significantly more often wrong when the task sat outside the model's capability frontier.
Read more →When no one can say what works
An executive team can identify the effect of individual initiatives only if the expected effect was defined at the decision point. Status reports do not answer that question because they show activity, not impact. Where this definition is missing, the issue is not reporting but steering: the portfolio is added up instead of prioritized.
Read more →When more analysis does not help
More analysis rarely improves strategy decisions because the bottleneck sits before the analysis: in the procedure by which an executive team reaches a decision. A study of 1,048 business decisions attributed about 39 percent of outcome differences to that procedure and about 8 percent to analytical quality. Without changing the procedure, more analysis mainly buys more justification.
Read more →The growth ceiling of boutique consulting
A boutique consultancy grows linearly with its seniors as long as its methodology exists only in their heads. Utilization and daily rates are capped, so hiring remains the obvious lever, and every additional senior first consumes the capacity of the existing ones. The non-linear lever is a standardized methodology in a system that carries process, structure and follow-up, while judgment, conflict and trust stay with the senior.
Read more →See how strategy arrives.
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