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That’s the best they’ll ever look. Senior faces. War stories. Confidence. Nice slides. Big promises. Then you sign and meet the real delivery team. A new account lead you’ve never met. A junior buyer. A “strategist” whose main skill is arranging a status call. And the people
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They just have not processed it yet. 2021 was fundraising season tickets. LPs were throwing commitments around like it was Taylor Swift presale and they had a spare bot army. Now it is more like trying to get a decision out of an investment committee in August. Lots of “active
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For years, they were not just tools. They were status symbols. If you were brilliant at the model and deadly in a deck review, the industry assumed you were smart enough to help build value. Maybe. Maybe not. Plenty of people became extremely senior while contributing mostly organised confidence. Now
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Most people actually want data to show up in a board pack once a month so they can point at it and continue doing whatever they were going to do anyway. This is the difference between dashboards and advantage. Top left is dashboard theatre. Beautiful charts. Live dashboards. Eight filters.
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The weather changed and a lot of firms discovered the “operating model” was mostly just cheap debt, forgiving exits, and a decent haircut. That was the core of my keynote at SuperReturn Operating Partners Miami. For years, PE could get away with governance theatre and call it value creation. Quarterly
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Most people attribute it to all sorts of things. It’s from Lawrence of Arabia, when T.E. Lawrence casually pinches out a lit match, burns his fingers, and shrugs like it’s admin.  That line is basically the job description in business, especially in private equity. The work that
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Speed to lead isn’t a “nice to have”. MIT’s work on lead response showed qualification odds fall off a cliff when you wait, including a 21x drop comparing 5 minutes vs 30 minutes. So when the team celebrates “pipeline” while leads sit in a queue, that’s not
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They read like this: “Fix pricing. Improve sales. Add AI. Grow faster.” Brilliant. Someone call the Nobel committee. What they usually miss is the boring stuff that creates the actual value: Baseline numbers, not vibes. Timing, because “Q3” isn’t a plan. Investment required, because everything costs something, even “quick
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You can have a brilliant product and still lose. Quietly. With great NPS and no revenue. The graveyard is full of “best in class” products that nobody could actually buy, find, or understand without a 45 minute demo and a prayer. This quadrant is basically the market telling you what
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Lovely. Most of them still cannot answer three quite basic questions without a minor archaeological dig through spreadsheets, CRM exports, call logs, and somebody from finance doing a heroic amount of guesswork. What happened to revenue last week. Which channels actually drove it. Where margin leaked on the way through.
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Very different hobby. Deloitte’s new State of AI report is basically a 41 page obituary for corporate theatre. Access is up 50% in a year, from under 40% of workers to around 60%, yet fewer than 60% of those with access use it in their daily workflow. So we
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The pattern is painfully consistent. A charismatic interview. A title that sounds impressive enough for LinkedIn. A scorecard that reads like “drive growth” and “build a modern marketing engine”. Then six months later everyone’s shocked that nothing moved, the CEO hates marketing, and the board deck has a new