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Insights
Why capital projects go off track
It's not bad luck or the dollar: overruns start long before construction, in decisions no one reviews. What to look at before laying the first stone.
Read → management · 5 min readSigns your organization has outgrown its structure
When everything runs through the same person and things start to jam, the company grew faster than the way it's run. How to catch it in time.
Read → strategy · 5 min readPrice tells a story
Your pricing policy says more about your strategy than any plan. What it reveals, and how to align it with what the organization wants to be.
Read → management · 5 min readThe profitable company with no cash
A company can make money on paper and have nothing to pay with. Why growth consumes cash, and what to watch beyond the bottom line.
Read → management · 5 min readWhy change initiatives fail
They don't fail from a bad idea but from bad implementation: the report that never runs and the organization reverts. How to make a change stick.
Read → strategy · 20 min readWhat to really measure
We measure a lot and decide little. The few metrics that move the needle, and the dashboard leadership reviews each week to decide.
Read → leadership · 20 min readYou don't lead everyone the same way
Situational leadership in the light of the evidence: what the studies support and what they don't, and why the four-style grid is more mirror than law.
Read → teams · 15 min readThe myth of the united team
Assembling the best isn’t enough: half a century of evidence shows high performance is design, not chemistry. Why teams underperform their parts.
Read → teams · 18 min readWhat actually moves the needle
Psychological safety, collective intelligence, goals and structure: the four levers of high performance, each with its evidence and effect size.
Read → teams · 19 min readBuilding, developing and sustaining teams
Which team-development interventions actually work and which are theatre, the cheapest and most ignored one (the debrief), and what it’s worth.
Read → operations · 11 min readThe chronic firefighter
The system rewards whoever puts out the visible fire and makes invisible whoever prevented it. Why reaction gets confused with problem-solving —and what it costs your company.
Read → operations · 13 min readFrom symptom to cause
The 5 Whys hang laminated and almost no one uses them well. Verify at the gemba and frame the problem well: The Closed Loop, the method that does move the needle.
Read → operations · 13 min readThe problem that doesn’t come back
Solving well once isn’t a capability. Cadence, owner and the metric almost no one measures —recurrence— so the problem stops coming back.
Read → strategy · 20 min readThe machine that decides
A die moves a prison sentence; a CFO’s 80% range is right one time in three. The factory defects of strategic judgment, and their antidotes.
Read → strategy · 18 min readThe terrain sets the rules
Buffett defends moats; Musk defends speed — both are right, in different terrains. Four terrains of decision and the method each one calls for.
Read → strategy · 19 min readGut, rule or experiment?
When intuition is real expertise and when it is illusion, why a formula beats the committee, and noise: the invisible flaw in judgment.
Read → strategy · 16 min readIs everything really speeding up?
The S&P 500 slide says everything is accelerating. Six thermometers give three different answers, and two of them count acquisitions as deaths.
Read → strategy · 16 min readThe right to change your mind
Commitment creates value — and kills. Real options, discovery-driven planning and the discipline of knowing what to close and what to leave open.
Read → strategy · 15 min readThe organization built for the storm
When the storm hits, the instinct is to centralize. The evidence from 2008–2009 says the opposite: decentralized firms fell significantly less.
Read → management · 13 min readThe 4%
They logged the calendars of 1,114 CEOs in fifteen-minute blocks: emergencies came to 4%. Why your Tuesday still feels like a fire.
Read → management · 13 min readThe shape of the calendar
An algorithm found two pure shapes of running a company in the diaries of 1,114 CEOs. Neither is better: what costs you is having the wrong one.
Read → management · 15 min readI knew five minutes in
‘I can tell straight away’ is one of the few management convictions you can actually measure. Four measurements, and what to do on Monday with the interview.
Read → strategy · 16 min readTask number 19
758 consultants, two randomized halves, a preregistered experiment: AI improved all 18 tasks and lost the 19th. What to measure and what to test on Monday.
Read → strategy · 16 min readThe five numbers your board will quote on Monday
We read the primary sources behind the five AI figures that circulate most in boardrooms across the region. Not one says, at source, what the slide says.
Read → strategy · 15 min readWork that looks like work
The report arrived on time, it is well written, and it says nothing. A Danish study matched what 25,000 workers say AI saves them against their records.
Read → strategy · 16 min readThe method
The pilot went well and a year later not one line of the results can be attributed to it. What the companies where AI does show up did differently.
Read → management · 17 min readTwo hundred factories in Illinois
Three numbers open almost every family succession presentation. They come from two hundred manufacturers in a single state, counted against nobody. Four measurements do put a price on it.
Read → management · 14 min readThe successor who actually works
The dividing line on underperformance is not the family name: it is having worked outside the company at some point. Some 2,400 successions in Norway’s records.
Read → management · 13 min readThe fine that bought the right to be late
In 1998, six day-care centres in Haifa put up a fine for late pick-ups and late pick-ups doubled. What money buys, what it displaces, and what to do on Monday with your own pay scheme.
Read → strategy · 12 min readThe problem runs sideways
When execution stalls, the reaction is always the same: more targets pushed down, more dashboard, more meetings. They asked 7,600 managers where it really breaks, and the axis everyone tightens is the healthy one.
Read → strategy · 16 min readYour strategy is your budget
Across 1,616 companies measured over fifteen years, the best predictor of the capital each unit receives is not the new strategy: it is what it received last year.
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