Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting keynotes for 23Q3-24Q1
Every year, I create three main presentations. For 2023, they are:
Delusions of determinism: Why planning for success leads to failure
Regression toward the meme: Why modern leadership continues to fall into old traps
Under pressure: Retail in a new financial era
If you want to book me for your event, workshop, or corporate speaking slot, just send me an email. To make sure I am available, however, please do so at your earliest convenience; my schedule is filling up fast. More information can be found here.
A word to our sponsors
When I began writing this newsletter, now a couple of years ago, I had no aim for it other than to be helpful; it should cover advanced theory, certainly, but always with the practical application in mind. Whether I have succeeded in that I let my audience decide. Thousands of them – from founders and owners to CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, COOs, investment advisors, management consultants, agency employees, and students – at least like it well enough to read it on a weekly basis. Some engage further by reaching out to discuss, disagree, provide further insights, and sometimes even to tell me how my work has helped them in their professional and personal lives.
I consider this flattering beyond words.
And so, when I begin every newsletter with “Friends”, I genuinely mean it. Community has become such a battered word, used and abused by crooked “advisors” looking to flog heavy buyer fallacies. But we do have something of a community going here, and I am both proud and protective of that.
Over the last year, I have received an ever accelerating myriad of offers for various forms of collaborations. It too, of course, is very flattering. Yet while the money would be more than welcomed (I have a young child, am renovating a house, and am devoting a lot of otherwise billable time to finishing my new book; God knows I need it), the relationship between me and what I consider to be the best readership on Substack rests on my openness and honesty. This is a bullshit free zone.
Consequently, if you want to run an ad at the top of the newsletter, I would be happy to listen to your proposal. We are all adults here, after all, and understand the financial realities of the world.
But if you are pitching a PR-defined narrative about a product or service, to be baked into the newsletter without notification, you will be utterly wasting your time. It would not be honest to my audience and, to be blunt, I value them a lot higher than I do you, your company, or your client.
Thank you for your understanding.
Moving on.
Where did you get that from?
Different professions, different standards
As we discussed a few weeks ago, the book that I am currently writing together with Steven McCrone will (per very intentional design) be different to the standard fare. Instead of stretching a pamphlet of an idea onto 300 pages, like butter scraped over too much bread, we have done our best to ensure that every single page provides value.
But while we emphasize the practical above all else - the book contains frameworks, tools, and tips that you can study during the weekend and implement the following Monday - we also provide the theoretical foundation for our work. We do this for three reasons.
Firstly, and most importantly, we have nothing to hide. Our argument is strong, as is our evidence for it.
Secondly, if you happen to be a pure practitioner and just want to get to work, there is nothing stopping you from skipping the chapters on the underpinning science. But they are there if you want to have a look.
Thirdly, should anyone want to teach our methods, be it professors or consultants (we know that at least two of The Four already are snooping around), they need to know where it all comes from. As Dave Snowden said, if you do not have sound theory, you cannot scale practice.
Today, intimate knowledge of the origins of one’s toolkit is sorely lacking in business. Certainly, people are educated, much more so than at any previous point in history. But few bother to study beyond the basic-most requirement.
The counterargument, as some may remember from a previous newsletter, is that it would be irrelevant to everyday practice. Indeed, real-world employees do not actually spend their days pondering matters such as differentiation, positioning, or focus. They have to deal with significantly more pressing and concrete issues, such as quarterly results, stakeholder expectations, exchange rate changes leading to higher supply costs, merger requests, and emergent patterns in ever more uncertain environments.
Yet even though that undeniably is the case, the context in which they do so is equally undeniably shaped by works that came long before them, be it in strategic management, corporate finance, economics, organizational psychology, or whatever else. And if you do not know the why, you cannot scale the how.
To take one of Steven’s analogies from the book, if we wanted to build a bridge, we could enlist the help of a self-made builder or a skillful mechanic; if nothing else, it would probably beat DIY. But we are more likely to hire a civil engineer who knows the underlying theory of bridge-building, about soil loading, load bearing, materials and exposures. In fact, we are probably going to be adamant that we do if we can be held responsible for anything that happens to a person using the bridge.
In strategic management, similar demands are seldom raised. Instead, we typically settle for a few examples of past projects, not even asking what (if anything) they added to the value of the firms in question. On the rare occasion that we do ask for financial data, top line figures suffice, even though a short-term efficiency gain achieved by cutting costs, or a short-term upswing in sales achieved by cutting prices, will do precious little to help the bottom line five years from the present.
I remember once working with a US agency that specialized in marketing strategy. In a room full of their most senior leaders and partners, nobody could define strategy, nor did anyone claim to know what made one succeed or fail. It turned out that they merely delivered plans to their clients, sent an invoice, and moved on.
As a consultant, it is your duty to know the scientific principles that underpin your work, to study them, and to understand the limitations of their application. As a client bringing a consultant on board, it is on you to ask for proof that they do - regardless of whether they are freelancers, from a small firm, or belong to one of the largest outfits on the planet.
This is not all to say that everyone needs a degree or certificate, mind, because there are plenty of business schools that fail to critically examine their teachings themselves, favoring that which is easily taught over that which is theoretically sound. But one needs to understand why and how, say, Porter’s work is flawed before one dismisses it - or why and how, say, Blue Ocean Strategy is flawed before one embraces it. Or to put it slightly differently, it is not about having a paper that says one once read a book, but demonstrating one’s ability to use what good might have been in it.
Far too few do, a result of arrogance enabled by the ergodic nature of consultancy services multiplied by a manufacturing model that favors that which is repeatable over that which is correct. Not only is it (at the very least) intellectually dishonest, but it also creates room for perception to outmaneuver reality, and charlatans to prey on those who do not know better.
And in the meantime, to conclude in Steven’s words, most bridges remain standing while many strategies collapse.
Next week will be very exciting, at least for me personally, as we will begin discussing the ABCDE framework more in detail. Until then, have the loveliest of weekends.
Onwards and upwards,
JP
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