Topic

Strategy consultants

Articles in Business Coaching & Consulting written specifically for strategy consultants.

Blue Ocean Strategy Undersells How Hard It Is to Verify You're Actually in One Until After the Fact

Every celebrated blue ocean success looks obvious in hindsight. The framework offers much less guidance for distinguishing a genuine uncontested market from a market that's uncontested because there's no real demand.

Confirmation Bias Quietly Shapes Which Data a Consulting Diagnostic Actually Surfaces

A diagnostic phase that begins with a strong working hypothesis is efficient — and structurally prone to interpreting ambiguous evidence as confirming that hypothesis rather than testing it fairly.

Porter's Five Forces Was Built for a World Before Platforms. Here's What Breaks.

Applying Five Forces to a platform business without adjustment produces a competitive analysis that misses the dynamic actually driving the business's defensibility.

Synergy Estimates in M&A Deals Are a Textbook Case of the Planning Fallacy, and Post-Merger Results Prove It Repeatedly

The specific synergy figures used to justify paying an acquisition premium are subject to the same optimistic planning bias that distorts every other kind of detailed, plan-specific projection.

The Illusion of Explanatory Depth: Why a Strategy That Sounds Clear in a Workshop Often Isn't

A strategy that generates confident nods around a workshop table often collapses the moment someone is asked to walk through exactly how each step causally leads to the next.

The Winner's Curse: Why Winning a Competitive Bid Is Itself a Warning Sign

If several independent, reasonable estimates of an uncertain value are all roughly correct on average, the single highest bid among them is disproportionately likely to be the one that overshot.