The Blog
Long-form essays, field notes, and frameworks from the FIRMSconsulting team — published weekly.
All posts
Published weekly-
Analyzing the Competition Is Hard
Analyzing the Competition Is Hard Competition is hard to understand because nobody knows what their competitors are thinking. Competitors usually send signals into the market to mislead their peers. Samsung recently announced that they’re looking to make a $17 billion investment in chip fabrication in the United States. Clearly, Samsung is sending a message to competitors,…
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Delicate Balance Needed in a Turnaround
Delicate Balance Needed in a Turnaround There are many interesting pieces about companies facing turnaround problems—from banks like Wells Fargo, to large retailers, to food and beverage companies—and these difficulties are more pronounced with COVID-19. Let’s talk about what is happening in turnarounds, why they are so difficult, and some pieces that many people have…
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Synergy Is Very Hard to Achieve
Synergy Is Very Hard to Achieve Sony, a large Japanese entertainment and electronics company, for many years struggled to get synergy across its various arms. It has video game consoles, a huge music catalog and access to intellectual property like the Spider Man brand. They also make movies, and now they own comics. Even though…
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What Is a Digital & IT Strategy?
What Is a Digital & IT Strategy? Many news articles have raised the issues of getting an IT strategy to work. The Wall Street Journal talked about Volkswagen Group’s difficulties in putting together a program to take on Tesla. There was another piece about retailers facing difficulties in going digital and making sure their e-commerce operations are…
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Promising Careers Are Also a Venus Flytrap
Promising Careers Are Also a Venus Flytrap I want to wrap up today’s Monday Morning 8 a.m. by talking about a big theme I see with executive coaching clients. I call this theme: “Promising careers are also a Venus flytrap.” When I work with clients, I ask them how their career is going. We’ve developed…
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Amazon and Knowing That One Thing That Drives Your Strategy
Amazon and Knowing That One Thing That Drives Your Strategy The next big theme I want to talk about is a little bit close to me because I used to be a corporate strategy senior partner, is what I call Amazon and knowing that one thing that drives your strategy. As you know, Jeff Bezos is…
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Shared Values vs. Paid Friends
Shared Values vs. Paid Friends The third theme is an interesting one because it comes from an executive coaching client in Australia who is the chief operating officer for a very large services company. He runs a very prestigious firm, and most of their offices are in Australia, Singapore, Japan and the United States. They…
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Apple’s Car and What It Means for Manufacturing
Apple’s Car and What It Means for Manufacturing Apple Car is about to enter the auto market, and it’s all over the news. I mentioned this earlier about what it means for decoupling and so on, but I’m going to take it further because I received many questions about this. I’m going to talk about…
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Value Chain Migration Death March
Value Chain Migration Death March We’re going to start with what I call the value chain migration death march. I’m referring to the universal tendency across every company, anywhere in the world, to want to respond to their envy. In every single sector in the world, there’s a value chain. On the one side, usually the…
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How to become a better leader
How to become a better leader A lot of clients ask us about how to become a better leader. Leadership is very confusing, nebulous and grainy. People always tell me they want to be a motivational leader and inspire their team. That’s nice, but I know many leaders who were fired even though they inspired,…
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China’s Belt and Road Strategy
China’s Belt and Road Strategy The final big topic is China’s Belt and Road Strategy, also known as the Silk Road Initiative. If China is setting up a network of interconnected sites to seamlessly move its products from China over land, sea and air to its biggest market, which is Europe in terms of proximity,…
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From Start-up to Operational Efficiency
From Start-up to Operational Efficiency The combination of Fiat, Chrysler and Peugeot group is creating a new holding company which is looking to merge the assets all these M&A bankers and M&A strategy consultants talk about—efficiency, synergies, etc. By default, most mergers fail. But this merger is interesting because given the size of the asset…