The Blog
Long-form essays, field notes, and frameworks from the FIRMSconsulting team — published weekly.
All posts
Published weekly-
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…
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Catching the Next Big Strategy Wave
Catching the Next Big Strategy Wave We’re going to stay in the telco sector for now. There have been on-again, off-again stories about how the New York Stock Exchange wanted to delist the three largest Chinese telco players. I’ve been a strategy consultant for a long time—all the way to partner and senior partner in…
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Nuances of a Private Equity Strategy
Nuances of a Private Equity Strategy Private equity and various forms of investment management have become the en vogue form of financing. Twenty years ago, it was investment banking, but now private equity has become the de facto, most elite form of financing—at least from a reputational and PR perspective. Private equity has gone through…
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Fear Is Not a Strategy
Fear Is Not a Strategy The Chinese government has done a phenomenal job in shepherding the economy to where it is today—a legitimate contender to be the largest economy in the world. China will almost certainly be the world’s largest economy if it isn’t already. Invariably, there’s usually a mistake measuring GDP, so by some…
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Electric Cars – The War Will Be Fought on the Operations Front
Electric Cars – The War Will Be Fought on the Operations Front Recently, there have been three big announcements in the automotive sector as it relates to electric cars. First, several major contenders that are challenging Tesla in the Chinese automotive electric car market have made plans to ramp up production. I’ve looked at the cars…
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Strategy is Hard: Coty’s Acquisition of Kylie Jenner’s Cosmetics Brand Example
Strategy is Hard: Coty’s Acquisition of Kylie Jenner’s Cosmetics Brand Example “It’s too early to say if Coty’s acquisition of Kylie Jenner’s cosmetics brand was a good decision or a bad decision. We’ll only know if the acquisition was a good or a bad decision if it works relative to what Coty planned to do…
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FC Insiders Update January 2021
FC Insiders Update January 2021 Over the last 3 months we moved to monthly FC Insider updates, versus weekly. As an example, in November we launched the entire Competitive Advantage with Kevin P. Coyne program (44 episodes plus 13 additional Q&As). In December and January we launched: – How to Solve Big Problems with ex McKinsey senior…
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Deep Specialization Creates Deep Value
Deep Specialization Creates Deep Value There is a great article in the Financial Times on deep specialization. It looks inside the font factory and the man who shapes the world’s letters. A font factory is basically a studio that designs the style of the letters you see published in, well, everywhere. We don’t take fonts very seriously. When…