There’s a particular species of corporate document that lives in conference rooms and SharePoint folders across the world. It looks impressive. It has boxes and arrows and swim lanes. People nod solemnly when it’s presented. And it accomplishes absolutely nothing. The value stream map has become that document for many organizations. What started as a […]
5 Red Flags Your Value Stream Map is Just “Process Theater” Read More »
Every business consultant worth their retainer will eventually pull out the gap analysis. It’s the Swiss Army knife of strategic tools. They’ll map your current state, paint a vision of your future state, and present a roadmap to bridge the chasm between them. What they won’t tell you is that some gaps don’t need bridging.
The Gap Analysis insight Your Consultant Won’t Tell You About (Because It Fixes Itself) Read More »
You spent three hours crafting that data analysis. You traced every thread, explored every angle, built your argument brick by careful brick. You hit send feeling accomplished. Your boss reads the first paragraph and stops responding. What happened? You organized your thinking like a story. Your boss needed it organized like a verdict. The Courtroom
Why Your data “Deep Dive” Feels Like Drowning to Your Boss Read More »
Most businesses don’t die from bad decisions. They die from no decisions at all. You sit in meetings where everyone nods. Your products still sell. Customers still pay. Revenue looks stable, maybe even slightly up. Yet something feels wrong, like watching a plant that hasn’t grown in months but hasn’t died either. It just exists.
The Ansoff Matrix Audit: How to Tell if Your Business is Stagnating in 10 Minutes Read More »
Every management consultant’s favorite party trick involves drawing four squares on a napkin and convincing a room full of executives that their business problems can be sorted into neat little quadrants. BCG Matrix, that deceptively simple 2×2 grid born in 1970, has survived decades of business evolution like a cockroach in a nuclear winter. But
Every business decision carries a hidden weight. The choice to hire someone, launch a product, or invest in new software demands we calculate something we can never fully know: the future. So we build spreadsheets. We construct models with assumptions stacked on assumptions like a house of cards in a wind tunnel. We pretend certainty
Forget Complex Formulas: The Back of the Napkin Cost Benefit Analysis Read More »
Most business dashboards look like they were designed by people who believe more is more. Charts stacked on charts. Metrics breeding more metrics. Colors that would make a peacock nervous. And somewhere in all that visual noise, the actual story your business is trying to tell gets lost. The irony is thick. We create scorecards
The McKinsey consultants walk into the conference room with their deck. Slide three reveals a pyramid. Slide seven shows three perfectly non-overlapping circles. Slide twelve presents four neat boxes that somehow contain all possible outcomes of a $2 billion decision. Everything is MECE. Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive. Nothing overlaps, nothing escapes. The client nods. The
Your employees are getting smarter. Just not in the ways you planned. While you’ve been busy designing learning and development programs, approving training budgets, and mapping competency frameworks, something curious has been happening in the shadows of your organization. Your best people have been building an entirely different skill set. One you didn’t commission, didn’t
The Competency Black Market: Why Your Best People are Learning Skills You Didn’t Approve Read More »
Most strategic planning sessions end the same way. Someone draws four quadrants on a whiteboard. The team fills them with strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Everyone nods. The document gets filed. Nothing changes. This isn’t strategy. It’s corporate theater. The SWOT framework isn’t broken. The way we use it is. We treat it like a
Weaponizing Your SWOT: How to Attack While Others Analyze Read More »