Themes
Ten paths through the essays. Each follows a single argument as it builds from one essay to the next.
Setting strategy
Strategy begins by reading the regime you are actually in, and it is tested by nerve before it is tested by numbers.
The set opens with the read: know whether the market's normal rules are being enforced or suspended before committing to a plan built for the wrong regime. From there it moves to what that read must be honest about, a vision the board has not yet earned, a dividend floor cash cannot ignore, and a leader with the spine to choose and exclude rather than reach for consensus. The back half turns from posture to instrument: a market reclassifying a company on borrowed credibility, a convertible note built to follow value instead of guess it, and the closing tension that strategy sold as market-beating and margin expansion rarely arrive together.
- 15 Dec 2025Strategy in an age of permission
- 30 Apr 2025When vision is owed
- 20 Feb 2025An open letter to new CEOs: leading from the dividend floor
- 8 May 2024Give me a CEO with a spine, not a slogan
- 1 Aug 2026Perception-arbitrage M&A
- 17 Jan 2025Convertible notes: the missing muscle in corporate partnerships
- 14 May 2025Why beating the market and gross margin expansion rarely go together
Executing strategy and driving value creation
A strategy is only as good as the operating machine, much of it undrawable, that has to carry it.
The set opens with the claim that a strategy is only as good as the operating machine underneath it, most of which no chart can draw, then builds that machine piece by piece: the twelve recurring conversations that are the real operating system, the discipline of framing a decision, proving it and getting out of the way, the wholesale swap-in that actually changes a culture, and the governance lesson every integration learns too late. It closes with the capstone, what it takes, mechanically, to deliver value creation once the machine is built and running, and then a live application of that machine to the investment decision now facing every firm: sequencing AI spend by the damage a process can do rather than the cost of running it.
- 5 Jul 2026The model and the machine
- 28 Dec 2022The missing operating system behind strategy execution
- 18 Dec 2024Frame it, prove it, get out of the way
- 20 Nov 2024You don't shift culture: you swap it in
- 14 Feb 2023Lead with governance: the integration lesson most companies learn too late
- 30 Apr 2025Delivering value creation
- 3 Aug 2026The economics of exceptions
Growth begins at the customer
Value is made in demand, not the boardroom, and the variables that decide it are the ones no forecast contains.
The set opens by establishing the primacy claim, that the market can be wrong and the customer right, then follows growth to its actual source: sparks the customer pulls, not decks the boardroom polishes. It specifies the mechanism, design that earns adoption before it earns architecture, and the risk that mechanism creates when ignored, the emotional debt a business accrues when the feeling of using it breaks. It closes on the limit case: brands cannot manufacture the love a category refuses to feel.
- 26 Jan 2023When the market was wrong and the customer was right
- 12 Sep 2023Growth isn't born in the boardroom
- 23 Jan 2026Adoption-first design in consumer and enterprise systems
- 23 May 2023Customer emotional debt: the strategic risk you're not forecasting
- 18 Mar 2024The vanity of brands in the land of indifference
Cash is truth
Follow the cash; the discipline of corporate finance is refusing the models and multiples that launder optimism into value.
The set states the rules first, plain and simple, then the fuller ten, before turning to the two myths, the DCF and Modigliani-Miller worn as superstition, that let orthodoxy override the cash. It moves from theory to the specific games: revenue recognition engineered to inflate bonuses, as-a-service structures that are leases and debt wearing a subscription's clothes, and the shocks that turn local decisions insane when the cash discipline is dropped under pressure.
- 28 Dec 2022Simple corporate finance rules for strategists
- 4 Feb 2025The ten rules of corporate finance
- 12 Feb 2025The two myths that broke corporate finance
- 2 Apr 2023How revenue recognition games inflate bonuses, and how to stop them
- 22 Nov 2023When "as-a-service" is just debt in disguise
- 3 Apr 2023Global shocks, local insanities: the two ways supply chains fail
Building winning teams
Who you put in the room, not the story you hire for, is the team.
The set opens by naming the story companies hire for and the job it obscures, then replaces the pipeline metaphor with the truer one: leaders carry a posse of tested trust from role to role rather than build a funnel. It closes on renewal, inclusion read not as a virtue but as the structural act of throwing open the windows a closed team eventually needs to survive.
The weight of the wires
The digital is physical: mud, kilowatts, distance.
Together these insist that the digital is physical. Bandwidth is mud and distance, the cloud is a furnace that runs on kilowatts, fibre league tables mostly rank geography, and the AI future rests on a network few are funding. The shared claim: the weightless story always sits on a body of concrete, copper and power, and whoever forgets the body mismeasures the thing.
Technology strategy
Infrastructure is contested ground: sovereignty, access, accountability, and the concentration of value.
The set opens with the stack compressing as intelligence commoditises the build, then follows the same question through disaggregation without accountability, infrastructure turned sovereign and political, and access reclassified as a right. In each, the question is who ends up holding the control, the rent and the liability when the architecture changes. The combined claim is that opening a system does not distribute power, it relocates it, usually to whoever governs the layer that stays scarce.
Reading the market
Markets price narratives and permission; the master skill is knowing which regime you are in.
These essays share a master variable: permission. Markets switch between a regime where the normal rules are enforced and one where they are suspended, and almost all investing failure is misreading which regime you are in rather than analytical weakness. The set watches the switch levitate equities, reads it directly in the apparatus that prices risk, traces the stress pooling behind it in private credit, and finds the same pattern at the level of a nation consuming its inheritance.
Memoir
What ten years of advising, and the training that shaped it, actually taught.
Two reflections read together: what a decade of consulting gave and withheld, and the specific training, absorbed early at Booz, that did more to shape the judgment behind these essays than anything since. Read last, they are the origin note for the method that runs through everything before them.