Strategy & Planning

How Short Phrases Get Asked to Perform Miracles - It normally begins with, “I know what we need. A tagline.” And often ends with, “You know, like Just Do It.” Somewhere in between, an executive imagines that if the right three to five words can be found, everything else will fall into place. Perception will shift. Behavior will change. Sales will increase. Crowds will cheer. In these moments, a short phrase is being asked to do the work of something much larger. To compensate

Planning didn’t fail. Prediction did. - The five-year plan didn’t die because leaders stopped caring about the future. It died because they got more honest about how little of that future they can reliably predict. For decades, the five-year plan signaled seriousness. It implied discipline, foresight, and control. If you could map revenue, costs, and growth five years out, you were seen as strategic. But in practice, most five-year plans were less like plans and more like nar

Growth during times of economic instability requires different commercialization approaches, and sometimes the exact opposite. - For decades, growth was synonymous with addition: more products, more sellers, more campaigns, more geographies. But today’s saturated, complex environment demands a new playbook focused not on sheer scale, but on clarity and selective investment. As Harvard’s Leidy Klotz, author of Subtract, puts it, “We default to addition, but subtraction often b