Our work, views & career tips.

The Strategy Pulse – October 2026: The Missing Rung

It's graduate recruitment season. So it's a good moment to look at who's actually getting through the door, and how many fewer people that is than three years ago.
The Strategy Pulse: September 2026: The Portfolio Cut

August was about reading the customer. September is about reading the balance sheet. Whitbread just closed all 106 Beefeaters in one week, and the reason isn't really about restaurants.
The Sharp End Skills, stories & signals shaping tomorrow’s teams Edition 12 — September 2026

Every month I talk to organisations about the talent they need and the people they are — or aren't — hiring. Over the past year, a pattern has emerged that I haven't seen anyone name clearly yet. The market for insight, research, and strategy professionals is not shrinking. It is concentrating. And the shape of that concentration tells a story that has significant implications — not just for the people trying to navigate it now, but for the organisations that think they have solved their talent problem by restructuring their teams. They haven't. They've deferred it.
The Strategy Pulse | August 2026: The K-Shaped Playbook

August's question is sharper: which customer, on which day, buying which basket. Two shoppers, two sets of expectations, one org chart trying to hold it all together.
The Sharp End Skills, stories & signals shaping tomorrow’s teams Edition 10 — July 2026

AI has done something remarkable for the insight and strategy industry. It has made execution faster, cheaper, and more scalable than at any point in the profession's history. Studies that once took weeks now take hours. Analysis that required a team of analysts can be turned around by one person and a well-configured platform. There is just one problem. None of that helps if the question was wrong. This month, we look at the most under-examined document in the insight process — the brief — and why getting it right has never mattered more.
The Sharp End Skills, stories & signals shaping tomorrow’s teams Edition 11 — August 2026

There is a version of the research and insight profession that is being automated. Sampling, scripting, data cleaning, synthesis, reporting — platforms now handle significant portions of all of these. The junior analyst producing recurring reports from a template is, as one industry analysis put it recently, already a diminishing investment. But there is another version of this profession that is not being automated. It is, in fact, becoming more valuable precisely because everything around it is faster and more confident than it has ever been. The question is which version you are building.
The Strategy Pulse | July 2026: The Proximity Play

Six months ago, most leaders were still calling hybrid work the settled question. It isn't.
The Strategy Pulse | June 2026: The Org Design Reckoning

May was about execution: whether companies can actually deliver on their strategies. June is a harder question. Before you can execute, your structure has to allow it. And right now, a lot of organisations are discovering that it doesn't.
The Sharp End Skills, stories & signals shaping tomorrow’s teams Edition 9 — June 2026

Over the past eight editions, we have covered a lot of ground. Retrainability. AI literacy. The power shift. Integration. Non-linear careers. Each one has been about adapting — becoming more visible, more connected, more legible to a market in motion. This month, a different question. Not what you need to become. But what it takes to last. Because the strategists who fade are rarely the ones who stopped trying. They are the ones who kept trying — furiously, visibly, permanently — in the wrong direction.