“Saul fundamentally reshaped the direction of our business. He spent time to learn our industry, understand our client, and how best to position ourselves. The work he did resulted in us creating a differentiated offering, being able to articulate it, and perhaps most importantly, it doubled our revenue.
His ability to be a creative thought partner, challenging the business, and then position the companies he works with makes him a true unicorn. Thanks will never be enough for what he enabled and unlocked for us.”
Dom Perry, CEO and Founder, Scrap It, USA.
The secret to successful business is about seeing better than the competition.
The more successful a company becomes, the harder it can become to see differently.
Success gives a business a view of the world: beliefs about where value lies, what customers want and what good performance looks like.
Whilst that logic creates focus (and is of course necessary), it also creates strategic illusions.
Over time, companies begin to treat assumptions that once made sense as facts about the future. They optimise the existing model, look for evidence that confirms it and interpret new behaviour through old category ideas.
The danger is deeper than just a blind spot.
A blind spot disappears when you change position. A strategic illusion can remain even when the evidence is directly in front of you.
The companies that keep succeeding find ways to challenge the logic that made them successful. They notice when an advantage is becoming standardised, when customer behaviour is changing, and when something once peripheral is becoming strategically important.
AI makes the stakes far, far higher, and the consequences arrive sooner.
Its greatest impact may not be making existing work faster, it may be exposing the assumptions beneath existing business models: what expertise is worth, what customers will pay for, and which work still needs to be done at all.
The question is whether companies, even in traditionally stable industries use AI to automate the past, or to see beyond it.
That is the work Strategic Sight.
I help leaders see their business better so they can create value their competition cannot.
The Eight Strategic Sights.
Strategy is often made to sound more complicated than it needs to be.
Some of that is inevitable. The questions facing a start-up are not the same as those facing a bank, a public institution or a global business. Different contexts demand different choices, and sometimes different tools.
But strategy also becomes complicated because people use the word to mean different things.
Over time, leaders, academics and consultants have produced many definitions. Many are useful, few are quite the same.
In large organisations, several versions of strategy can sit side by side. Even within close executive teams, it is not always clear that everyone is answering the same question when they talk about “the strategy”.
The result is confusion and strategy can start to feel more mysterious than it needs to be.
After thirty years of conversations with leaders, senior roles in commercial organisations and the UN, work with hundreds of organisations, and years of study, research and teaching at Oxford, I have come to a simple conclusion:
A successful strategy must be able to answer eight essential questions, and each question requires a different kind of sight.
Together, they form the Eight Strategic Sights.
Remove one, and something important is missed. The questions themselves may appear simple, answering them well requires discipline, openness and the willingness to challenge what you think you know.
I have created an e-book to show how the system works, and to offer practical guidance that can help you see your business, its choices and its competitive advantage more deeply.
‘Funny, it worked last time.’
is my weekly newsletter, that explores how to see better and think differently in business and life.
Each week you’ll get an essay, some longer than others, that will help you, I hope, look at the world a little differently.
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‘Your thinking is delicious!’