Arguments, not content.
Long-form thinking on strategy, go-to-market, AI adoption and why companies fail, written for people who have read enough consulting decks to be suspicious of them.
Strategy
- StrategyYou Don't Have a Strategy. You Have a To-Do List.The leading causes of company failure are strategy failures, not effort failures. How to tell which one you have.
- MethodAn MBB Operating System for a 10-Person CompanyWhat actually makes elite consulting work good, which parts transfer downward, and how to run them yourself.
- ExecutionThe 90-Day Roadmap That Survives Contact With RealityMost roadmaps fail on capacity honesty and missing owners. Kill criteria are the part everyone skips.
- PerspectiveWhy Startups Fail: The Data, Not the FolkloreNo market need, ran out of cash, outcompeted. All three are strategy failures wearing different clothes.
Product & Customer
- ProductProduct Strategy Is a Set of RefusalsA product strategy that says yes to everything is a backlog with better formatting.
- ProductHow to Sequence a Roadmap When Everything Is UrgentDependency chains, learning value, revenue proximity and the cost of being wrong.
- RetentionYour Churn Number Is Hiding Three Different ProblemsOne rate, several failure modes, different owners. Decompose before you spend.
AI
- AIMost AI Pilots Die in the Gap Between Demo and WorkflowAdoption fails on operations, not capability. What has to be true for a workflow to survive month two.
- AIAI Will Not Save a Bad StrategyAI compresses the cost of execution. It does not tell you what to execute.
- PerspectiveAI Adoption in Smaller Companies: What Actually WorksSmall companies can move faster than large ones, because nothing gets lost in translation.
More
Reading is cheaper than a consultant. Up to a point.
When the reading stops resolving it, thirty minutes of structured framing usually will.
What gets published here, and what does not
Everything on this page defends a single claim and shows the reasoning. That is the only editorial rule, and it rules out most of what passes for consulting content.
No listicles. "Seven ways to improve retention" is a format that guarantees at least four of the seven are filler, because the number was chosen before the thinking.
No borrowed frameworks with the sources stripped off. Minto, Porter, Lafley and Martin, Kaplan and Norton, Christensen, where their work is used it is named. Renaming a published framework and presenting it as proprietary is common, and it tells you what else the author might be comfortable doing.
No invented numbers. Where a figure appears it is sourced or labelled as an estimate with its assumptions attached. Where a number would be useful and is not available, that absence is stated rather than filled.
Arguments that could be wrong. A piece that nobody could disagree with has not said anything. Several of these take positions that a reasonable practitioner would contest, and the counter-argument is generally included rather than hidden.
About the writing
How often is new work published?
Long-form pieces land when there is an argument worth defending rather than on a content calendar. Shorter thinking goes out through the newsletter roughly every other week. Publishing on a schedule regardless of whether there is something to say is how good writing becomes filler.
Can I share or quote these?
Yes, freely, with attribution and a link. Sharing an argument internally is the most useful thing that can happen to it, several of these were written specifically to be forwarded to a colleague who needed the case made independently.
Is this written by AI?
The arguments, the positions and the judgment are mine. AI is used in the production layer here exactly as it is in client delivery (research assembly, structural drafting, editing passes) under review at every stage. Given that this practice sells AI enablement, being vague about that would be an odd position to hold.