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

Editor’s Note

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.

Market Signal

The data on this is striking and a little uncomfortable.

DHR Global’s 2025 Workforce Trends Report surveyed 1,500 knowledge workers and found that 88% reported feeling highly engaged — while 82% were simultaneously experiencing burnout. Not disengaged people burning out. Engaged ones.

Deloitte’s research sharpens the point further. A third of workers say they prioritise work that is most visible, regardless of whether it actually creates value. Forty-one percent of daily working time is spent on activity that doesn’t contribute to meaningful organisational outcomes.

And Deloitte’s 2025 Human Capital Trends report identifies AI as quietly making this worse — accelerating the pressure to stay current, adding to workloads, and creating burnout as a silent byproduct of what looks, from the outside, like engagement.

The pattern that emerges: people are busy, active, visibly on — and hollowing out. High signal. Declining substance. This is what performed relevance looks like at scale.

Frontline

A senior insight professional, reflecting on a period she now describes as her least productive despite looking like her most active:

“I was posting, attending, upskilling, presenting. I had opinions on everything. I could talk fluently about AI, about brand, about commercial strategy. But when I’m honest, I couldn’t do any of it deeply. I was performing currency I hadn’t actually earned yet. It caught up with me.”

Relevance performed is relevance borrowed. It has to be repaid.

The repayment usually arrives when something real is asked of you — a project that requires genuine depth, a room that requires actual authority, a moment where fluency in the vocabulary is no longer enough.

Sharp Skill: Building from a Stable Centre

The alternative to performing relevance is not stepping back. It is building from a stable centre — a clear point of view, a defined type of problem you solve well, a reputation that doesn’t require constant maintenance to survive a quiet month.

McKinsey’s research on expertise development draws on psychologist Anders Ericsson’s work across multiple fields — medicine, music, athletics — and finds that it is deliberate practice, not repetition, that compounds real capability. Doing more of the same thing more visibly does not build expertise. Intentional, effortful engagement with the right problems does.

For strategists and researchers, a stable centre usually has three components:

1. A type of problem you are known for solving. Not a job title. Not a methodology. A specific kind of challenge that recurs across industries, sectors, and contexts — and that you have genuinely developed judgment about over time. This is the thing that makes you the first call, not one of several options.

2. A point of view that is genuinely yours. Not an aggregation of other people’s frameworks. A perspective — on how insight creates value, on what strategy actually requires, on where organisations consistently get things wrong — that you have earned through repeated exposure and honest reflection. This is what makes a conversation with you worth having.

3. An energy model that compounds rather than depletes. Research on career longevity is clear: burnout-based productivity cycles cannot sustain a long career. The capabilities most relevant to complex strategic work — judgment, pattern recognition, influence — continue to improve well into midlife, but only if the energy model is sustainable. The strategists who last are not those with the highest output. They are the ones who have learned which work builds them and which merely maintains the appearance of motion.

Case in Point

Stanford’s Centre on Longevity published research in early 2026 noting something counterintuitive about knowledge-work careers: while processing speed does decline after early adulthood, the capabilities most central to complex strategic work improve with age. Judgment. Pattern recognition across contexts. The ability to read a room, hold ambiguity, and move toward a decision without full information.

These are not skills that trend-chasing builds. They are skills that accumulate through depth — through repeated, deliberate engagement with hard problems over time.

The strategists who remain genuinely valuable at 45, 50, 55 are not the ones who successfully performed relevance across every passing cycle. They are the ones who built something real underneath it.

Closing Thought

There is a version of staying relevant that is exhausting and ultimately unsustainable. It requires constant attention, constant output, constant signal. It performs currency that has to be repaid when real demand arrives.

There is another version that is quieter and harder. It requires knowing what you actually stand for, which problems you are genuinely equipped to solve, and which trends you can afford to watch without chasing.

The second version does not look as busy. But it compounds in ways the first one never can.

Stay sharp. Not just current.

The Sharp End is a monthly field guide for strategists, researchers, and insight leaders. If this edition resonated, share it with someone navigating exactly this moment — or forward it to a colleague who might be performing more than they’re building.

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Nicholson Glover is a London-based specialist recruitment consultancy, founded in 2002. We place mid-to-senior professionals across four disciplines: Customer Research & Insight, Strategy & Innovation, Data, Analytics & AI, and Product & Technology. We recruit qualitative and quantitative researchers, behavioural scientists, data strategists, econometricians, foresight specialists, product managers, and senior strategy leads — with agencies, consultancies, corporate insight teams, and venture-backed businesses across the UK and globally. To speak to us about a role or a hire, contact Francis at francis@nicholsonglover.co.uk or visit nicholsonglover.co.uk.

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.