Strategy & Planning

AI has replaced the junior labor that made the consulting pyramid profitable, pushing the market toward lean, senior-led teams and outcome-based pricing. If your consulting partnerships feel different lately, they are. Maybe engagements seem smaller, with leaner teams and more senior faces on the calls. Maybe AI briefs now outnumber strategy decks. Maybe the RFPs arrive with sharper questions about speed, transparency, and outcomes. These changes are structural. Professional

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 narra

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 brin