Strategy

And if there’s one place I see businesses struggle, it’s making the shift from “educated guesswork” to a test-driven way of validating product ideas, feature concepts, and market moves. I get it. Testing sounds simple in theory. In practice, it’s hard. Not because businesses don’t care, but because testing has a few built-in traps that make it easy to avoid, postpone, or do poorly. Over time, I’ve noticed three reasons this happens again and again. First, our tests are often

In a world of nonstop disruption, resilience is the minimum. Anti-fragile businesses do something better: they protect the downside and keep investing in the upside while others freeze.

Most small and mid-sized businesses don’t lose to a single dramatic punch. Instead, they lose to a slow, almost imperceptible drift. A competitor ships something slightly better. A customer expectation quietly shifts. A new channel starts working for everyone else. Prices change. Tech gets commoditized. And by the time you notice, you’re not “a little behind”, you’re trying to do a frantic catch-up lap with your shoelaces tied together. That’s what a market radar is for: a s

Most small business strategy discussions have a weird problem. They happen in a vacuum. You’ll see a familiar parade of frameworks: boxes, bullet points, tidy categories. “Capabilities.” “Capacity.” “Initiatives.” “Investments.” Everything gets typed into neat little containers. However, the missing ingredient is usually the one that matters most: context. Where is the market going? What are competitors doing? Where is the ground already occupied? Where is it wide open? Most

In businesses that have grown past the “everyone in the same room” phase, decision latency becomes a stealth tax on everything you care about: revenue, morale, customer trust, and the ability to seize opportunities before they turn into someone else’s press release.

Over my career, I’ve watched organizations get blindsided and immediately panic, not because the situation is unsolvable, but because they have no options on the table. When you haven’t thought through alternatives ahead of time, it feels like there are no alternatives. That’s when fear takes the wheel.