Welcome to May’s Strategy Pulse.

For the past two years, strategy has been dominated by one question: are you using AI? Boards asked it. Investors asked it. Consultants made good money helping people answer it. But a different question is starting to matter more: can you actually deliver on what you’ve planned?

The gap between strategic ambition and operational reality is widening. Organisations are sitting on well-formed strategies, refreshed roadmaps, and freshly approved budgets. But are still struggling to execute. Not because their thinking is wrong. Because the infrastructure, the people, and the organisational muscle to deliver aren’t there.

This month, we look at what’s driving that gap, what it exposed at one of the UK’s most recognisable retailers, and how the consulting industry is quietly rebuilding its entire model around the same problem.

Big Shift: The Bottleneck Has Moved

Ask most senior leaders where strategy breaks down, and they’ll point to the usual suspects: unclear priorities, misaligned stakeholders, budget constraints. Rarely do they say “we had a good plan and simply couldn’t build the thing.”

But that’s increasingly what’s happening. The strategy bottleneck has shifted. It’s no longer about the quality of the thinking. It’s about the capacity and capability to execute at pace.

A few forces have converged to create this. Leaner teams mean fewer people to absorb the operational load of transformation. AI has raised expectations dramatically: boards want faster cycles and higher output, often without proportionate investment in the people or structures needed to deliver them. And years of planning heavy, delivery light consulting has left many organisations with sophisticated roadmaps and limited institutional muscle to act on them.

The capability gap showing up most acutely is the one between people who can design strategy and people who can operationalise it. Translators, essentially. Professionals who can move fluently between a boardroom ambition and a working system, who understand AI-augmented workflows not in theory but in practice, and who can manage the messy, unglamorous work of actually shipping things.

That profile is in short supply. And organisations that haven’t started building for it are already behind.

📌 Takeaway: The strategy problem most organisations have right now is delivery. The question to ask isn’t “do we have a plan?” It’s “do we have the people and structure to execute it?”

Brand in Focus: M&S and the Cost of Execution Debt

In April 2025, Marks and Spencer was hit by a ransomware attack that became one of the most disruptive cyber incidents in UK retail history. Online orders were suspended for weeks. In-store payment systems partially reverted to manual processes. Fresh food supply chains were thrown into chaos. Analysts at Deutsche Bank estimated around £30 million in immediate profit losses, rising by roughly £15 million weekly until systems were restored, with the total hit eventually landing at around £300 million in lost operating profit. (BlackFog)

The headlines focused on the hackers. The more instructive story is what the attack revealed about M&S’s infrastructure beneath the surface.

The same hacking group hit Co-op just days later using near-identical tactics. Co-op detected the breach within minutes and suffered minimal disruption to customer-facing services. M&S endured weeks of operational shutdown. Same threat. Completely different outcome. The difference wasn’t the sophistication of the attack. It was execution readiness.

At M&S, legacy systems and tightly coupled infrastructure meant that containing the threat required bringing down broad swathes of the environment. Even though the company claimed over half of its systems were unaffected, the interdependencies made targeted containment extremely difficult. Pre-existing execution debt, accumulated over years of under-investment in infrastructure modernisation, made visible by a crisis. (MTI Technology)

What happened next is worth noting. Rather than treating recovery as a return to normal, M&S condensed a planned two-year digital overhaul into six months, rephasing investment and prioritising the infrastructure simplification it had been deferring. By 2026, M&S had partnered with Microsoft to build what it describes as an “Agentic Retail” ecosystem, deploying 11,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licences across its workforce and targeting £100 million in cost savings through AI-driven efficiency. (InfotechLead)

The M&S story is a useful frame for the execution gap more broadly. Most organisations carry some version of execution debt: deferred infrastructure decisions, legacy dependencies, organisational structures that haven’t kept pace with strategic ambition. It rarely becomes visible until something breaks. So, the question isn’t whether your organisation has execution debt. It’s whether you’re choosing to address it, or waiting for a crisis to force the issue.

📌 Takeaway: M&S’s cyber crisis was the trigger, not the cause. The execution infrastructure wasn’t built to absorb disruption. Building it after the fact is possible, but far more expensive than building it in advance.

Consulting Corner: McKinsey and the End of the Advice Model

For decades, consulting’s value proposition was relatively simple: hire smart people, get smart answers. The work was structured around expertise, delivered through slide decks and workshops, and billed by the hour or the project. Clients paid for thinking.

That model is under serious pressure. And nowhere is the shift more visible than at McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey now has around 20,000 AI agents supporting its internal work, up from 3,000 just 18 months ago. CEO Bob Sternfels has been explicit about what this means for the firm’s model: McKinsey is moving away from pure advisory work toward an outcomes-based approach, tying fees to the impact delivered rather than the time spent delivering it. (Fortune)

Around a quarter of McKinsey’s global fees now come from outcomes-based pricing. Clients are increasingly coming to the firm not with a scope, but with an outcome, and asking McKinsey to underwrite the delivery of it. Pure strategy advice, the thing people traditionally associated with McKinsey, now accounts for less than 20% of the firm’s work. The majority is implementation: multi-year transformation programmes, AI integration, operational redesign. (Yahoo Finance)

The firm has also started testing candidates on its internal AI tool Lilli during the hiring process: a signal that what McKinsey values in a consultant is changing. It’s not enough to be analytically sharp. You need to be able to work effectively within AI-augmented workflows, manage outputs that AI generates, and focus your own energy on the judgment and client management that agents can’t replicate. (Fortune)

The talent implication is significant. If consulting firms are shifting from advice to implementation, from billable hours to outcomes, from analyst pyramids to AI-augmented delivery, the people they need look different. Less about raw analytical horsepower, more about the ability to translate strategy into working systems, manage human-agent teams, and hold clients accountable to the results they commissioned.

That’s a different hire. And it’s one a lot of firms, consulting and corporate alike, haven’t fully worked out how to make yet.

📌 Takeaway: Consulting is rebuilding itself around execution. The firms winning the next decade will be the ones who can actually deliver the transformation they sell.

🔔 Final Thought

There’s a version of the execution gap that’s always existed. Strategy has always been easier to produce than to deliver. But something has shifted. The gap is wider, the stakes are higher, and the organisations that haven’t built genuine delivery capability are starting to feel it in ways that are hard to hide.

The M&S story, the McKinsey pivot, the growing premium on people who can bridge thinking and doing… they’re all pointing at the same thing. The next competitive advantage isn’t a better strategy. It’s the operational infrastructure and the people to execute one.

The organisations closing the gap fastest aren’t necessarily the most innovative. They’re the most honest about where their execution debt actually sits, and disciplined enough to do something about it before a crisis does it for them.

Want to stay on top of this? The Strategy Pulse continues monthly.

In the meantime, if you found this useful, share it with someone navigating their own execution gap.

The market isn’t broken, but it is changing shape. Here’s what’s actually happening in the insights and strategy hiring space right now, and what it means if you’re in it.

🔁 Quick Pulse: What We’re Hearing

💬 “We’re not adding headcount, we’re protecting it.”

💬 “I’d move for the right role, but I’m not taking a risk right now.”

💬 “The briefs are still coming in, it’s the sign-offs that are slow.”

🧠 One Big Trend: The rise of the “earn the move” mindset

When uncertainty rises, so does the bar for changing jobs. Candidates aren’t disengaged, but they’re discerning. The roles that are cutting through right now share a few things: clear progression, meaningful briefs, and organisations that can articulate why the work matters beyond a job description.

What this means for hiring teams: Vague EVPs and templated JDs aren’t cutting it. The best candidates have options, even in a quieter market, and they’re choosing employers who can sell the substance of the role, not just the title and salary band. The conversation has to earn their attention.

In a stability-first market, you attract the best by making change feel safe.

🔍 Method Spotlight: Skills-based hiring

With junior pipelines thinning and CVs getting harder to benchmark, more insight teams are experimenting with skills-based hiring, assessing candidates on demonstrated capabilities rather than years of service or agency pedigree.

Several consultancies are quietly dropping degree requirements for insight roles, focusing instead on portfolio evidence and scenario-based interviews. Early signals suggest it’s improving both diversity of hire and retention at the junior level.

👀 Brand to Watch: Korn Ferry

The global talent advisory firm has been quietly expanding its research and insight practice, embedding market intelligence more deeply into its talent strategy work. It’s a sign of where the industry is heading: insight capability as a core component of organisational design, not a downstream research function.

📊 Smart Stat

📉 61% of knowledge workers say job security now outranks salary as their primary reason for staying in a role. (Source: Mercer Global Talent Trends)

By Francis Nicholson – Expert in hiring Data, Insight and Strategy talent for the Age of AI

Editor’s Note

Last month we looked at the integrator: the strategist who creates value by connecting functions that weren’t designed to speak to each other. This month, a harder question. If that kind of work is increasingly where the value sits — lateral, relational, cross-functional — why does it so rarely appear on a job title, a pay band, or a performance review?

Because most organisations still reward the ladder. And most strategy careers are no longer shaped like one.

Market Signal

The data is starting to catch up with what many of us already sense.

Among professionals who have been in their roles for five or more years, 38% are no longer considering management positions as their next move. Even among current managers, 19% are actively seeking non-supervisory roles next. Progression without a title upgrade is becoming a deliberate choice, not a fallback.

McKinsey’s research on career mobility tells a sharper story still. The professionals with the most upwardly mobile trajectories — moving one, two, or three income brackets higher — were not the ones who stayed longest in a lane. They were the ones who made what McKinsey calls “bold moves”: roles that were adjacent but contained up to 40% genuinely new skills. Lateral stretch, not linear tenure, drove the biggest career gains.

Meanwhile, Deloitte finds that organisations adopting skills-based talent models — where range and adaptability are assessed alongside depth — are 63% more likely to achieve their desired business outcomes than those using traditional role-based frameworks. The logic is shifting. Most organisations just haven’t updated their reward systems to match.

Frontline

A strategy director at a professional services firm, reflecting on her last two career moves:

“Both times, I took what looked like a sideways step. Different sector, slightly smaller team. Both times, people asked me if I was sure. Both times, I came out the other side with a sharper point of view, a broader network, and frankly more interesting work. The ladder would have had me managing more people and attending more governance meetings.”

The pattern is consistent. The moves that look lateral from the outside often compound fastest on the inside.

Sharp Skill: Narrating the Non-Linear

The risk of a non-linear career is not that it limits your options. It is that others can’t read it.

Hiring managers, sponsors, and senior stakeholders are still pattern-matching against a ladder. A varied career looks like indecision to someone who has only ever seen one kind of progression. The strategist’s task is to make the arc legible — to give the range a narrative.

Three practical moves:

1. Name the thread, not the titles. The through-line of a non-linear career is rarely a job function. It is a kind of problem you solve, a lens you bring, a type of situation you thrive in. “I work at the intersection of data and commercial decision-making” is more compelling — and more accurate — than a list of lateral moves that require explanation.

2. Make range look intentional. Every move that felt exploratory at the time can be reframed as deliberate in retrospect. Not dishonestly — but accurately. The skills you built in each role were real. The question is whether you have articulated why they compound.

3. Publish your thinking, not just your work. In a lattice career, reputation travels ahead of you in ways a CV cannot. The strategists building durable visibility — as we covered in Edition 5 — are the ones whose thinking is legible before they enter a room. A newsletter. A point of view. A consistent voice on a specific tension. These are not personal branding exercises. They are how range becomes recognised as expertise.

Case in Point

McKinsey’s internal mobility research found that employees who took on rotational assignments — moving across functions, sectors, or problem types — were 20% more likely to be promoted than those who stayed within a single track. The moves that looked sideways were, in aggregate, the faster route up.

But here’s the friction: the same research shows that over 80% of role movements still involve people changing companies rather than moving internally. Most organisations structurally resist the lateral moves they claim to value. Which means that for many strategists, the non-linear career is largely self-managed — and self-narrated.

That is not a disadvantage. It is leverage, for those who know how to use it.

Closing Thought

The ladder was always a simplification. It assumed a stable hierarchy, a predictable market, and a single definition of seniority. None of those hold in the way they once did.

What’s replacing it isn’t chaos. It’s a lattice — and a lattice rewards different things: range, relationships, the ability to operate in unfamiliar terrain without losing your bearings.

The strategists who thrive in this environment are not the ones with the most impressive vertical climb. They are the ones who can make their journey make sense to someone hearing it for the first time.

Narrative is the new CV.

The Sharp End is a monthly field guide for strategists, researchers, and insight leaders. If this edition resonated, share it with someone who would find it sharp rather than safe — or forward it to a colleague who is navigating exactly this kind of career moment.

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By Francis Nicholson – Expert in hiring Data, Insight and Strategy talent for the Age of AI

Editor’s Note:
Last month we looked at where power is moving in AI-accelerated organisations: away from information holders, toward those who can align functions around a shared direction. This month, a natural question follows. If alignment is the new currency, who actually does that work — and what does it take?

The answer is increasingly: the strategist as integrator.

Market Signal

Most AI transformation programmes are stalling not because the technology isn’t good enough, but because the organisation isn’t connected enough. McKinsey’s State of AI research finds that 88% of companies now use AI in at least one function — yet only 39% see any measurable EBIT impact. The gap is not capability. It is coherence.

Meanwhile, demand for professionals who can bridge that gap is accelerating. Robert Half’s 2026 Salary Guide shows that marketing analytics managers and digital strategists are among the fastest-growing roles in the sector — specifically because employers are seeking people who connect data, insight, brand, and commercial outcomes in one fluent motion.

The integrator is not a new job title. It is an emerging professional identity.

Frontline

A senior insight leader at a mid-size FMCG company described her last twelve months like this:

“My job title hasn’t changed. But what I actually do has. I spend more time getting the data science team and the brand team to agree on what a question even means than I do running research. The methodology is the easy part.”

This pattern is showing up everywhere. The technical work is increasingly delegated — to AI, to junior staff, to automated platforms. What remains is the connective tissue: understanding what different functions need, translating between them, and holding the quality of the question.

Sharp Skill: Integration Without Authority

Most strategists who do integration work do not have formal authority over the teams they connect. They influence without hierarchy. That is a distinct skill, and it is learnable.

Three practical moves:

1. Own the question, not the answer. When different functions argue about conclusions, the integrator reframes to the upstream question. “Before we debate the output, are we aligned on what we’re actually trying to decide?” This is not facilitation. It is intellectual leadership.

2. Build a shared vocabulary early. The most common failure in cross-functional work is that each team uses the same words to mean different things. “Brand,” “performance,” “audience” — all contested terms. Name the ambiguity before it becomes a conflict.

3. Make the connections visible. When research has a direct line to a commercial decision, say so explicitly. When data science findings contradict a brand assumption, surface it as a productive tension rather than a problem. Integrators create legibility between functions — which is exactly what visibility-minded strategists learned to do for their own thinking in Edition 5.

Case in Point

In industries where AI is generating more insight faster, the bottleneck has shifted decisively. It is no longer “do we have the data?” It is “can we agree on what it means and what to do next?” Businesses that invested consistently in insight reported faster, more confident decisions and stronger capacity to adapt — not because their research was more sophisticated, but because their insight function had learned to operate across commercial, brand, and data teams simultaneously.

The strategists who thrived were not the ones with the most technical skill. They were the ones who could make insight actionable across functions that had different languages, different incentives, and different definitions of success.

Closing Thought

There is a version of the strategist that waits to be consulted. They produce excellent work, present it clearly, and hope it lands.

There is another version that operates differently. They are present earlier, in the room where the question is being formed. They connect the data scientist to the brand director before the brief is written. They know which commercial pressure is driving the urgency. They shape the context in which their own work will be received.

The second version is not smarter. They are better integrated.

That is the sharper edge.

The Sharp End is published monthly. If this was useful, share it with someone who would find it sharp rather than safe.

✍️ Editor’s Note — Power Didn’t Disappear. It Moved.

Over the past two months, we’ve talked about leverage and visibility.

But visibility alone doesn’t guarantee influence.

To understand what 2026 demands of strategists, researchers and insight leaders, we need to look at something bigger:

Where is power actually moving?

AI hasn’t flattened organisations.

It has redistributed influence.

And the shift is subtle.

📈 Market Signal — Influence Is Moving to the Integrators

The major consulting firms are already documenting this shift.

Research from McKinsey into corporate transformations found that 70% of successful transformation programmes prioritised cross-functional teams early, compared with only around 20% of unsuccessful ones.

The same body of work shows that cross-functional transformations outperform single-function initiatives by 30–40% in terms of value delivered.

And yet collaboration remains difficult.

McKinsey also reports that three out of four cross-functional teams underperform on key metrics, largely because organisations struggle to align expertise across functions.

The implication is important.

The scarce capability isn’t intelligence or technical skill.

It’s integration.

Power is increasingly concentrating around people who can:

• connect insight to commercial decisions
• translate between technical and non-technical teams
• reduce friction between functions

In a world of abundant information, alignment becomes the real bottleneck.

🗣 Frontline — “I’m Not the Expert. I’m the Bridge.”

A strategy director at a global brand described their evolving role like this:

“I’m not the person who knows the most about AI, and I’m not the commercial lead either. But I’m the one who makes the two talk to each other. That’s where the influence is now.”

This is becoming a familiar pattern.

The most valuable people in many organisations are no longer the deepest specialists.

They are the connectors — the people who can move ideas across boundaries.

🔧 Sharp Skill — Influence Without Ownership

March’s Sharp Skill is uncomfortable but increasingly essential:

Influence without formal authority.

In cross-functional environments, few people own the full problem.

But influence often belongs to the person who can:

1. Frame the problem before it becomes political
2. Make trade-offs visible across teams
3. Sequence work so others can move confidently

When organisations struggle to align functions, the people who reduce that friction become disproportionately influential.

🌟 Case in Point — The Translator Advantage

One insight lead we spoke to didn’t increase their influence by becoming more technical.

Instead, they positioned themselves between data science and marketing.

They translated modelling outputs into commercial decisions.

They surfaced trade-offs between experimentation and brand risk.

They didn’t own the budget.

They didn’t own the roadmap.

But they owned the narrative that connected them.

In a year of AI experimentation, that narrative ownership became decisive.

✂️ Closing Thought

Information is no longer scarce.

Alignment is.

And power tends to follow scarcity.

The strategist of 2020 controlled insight. The strategist of 2026 connects insight, technology and decisions.

That’s where the influence now lives.