The Blog
Long-form essays, field notes, and frameworks from the FIRMSconsulting team — published weekly.
All posts
Published weekly-
Stanford’s Robert Siegel on Navigating the Toughest Leadership Trade-Offs
Robert Siegel, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, venture capitalist, and former executive, shares the leadership lessons he learned working with Intel’s legendary CEO, Andy Grove, and other amazing leaders, and how to thrive in today’s era of conflicting pressures. In this in-depth conversation, we explore the concept of the systems leader, someone who can…
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New Releases on StrategyTraining.com
New Releases on StrategyTraining.com This week’s updates focus on equipping you with the tools to tackle the problems others avoid and to deliver results that endure. We’ve released new Insider and Legacy episodes, along with another Strategy Control Room Advanced update, each built on battle-tested approaches used in high-stakes engagements. The goal is to elevate…
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L. David Marquet, Former Submarine Commander, on How Leaders Make Better Decisions
L. David Marquet, former nuclear submarine commander and author of Leadership Is Language, shares a precise, operational approach to leadership, one that replaces command-and-control with a language designed for clarity, ownership, and adaptability. Drawing on his experience turning the USS Santa Fe from one of the worst-performing submarines in the fleet to one of the…
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Bain Senior Partner Sarah Elk on Doing Agile Right
Sarah Elk, Senior Partner at Bain & Company and global leader of its operating model work, brings a clear, pragmatic lens to why so many large-scale change efforts fail to stick. Drawing on decades of advising multinational organizations, she diagnoses the structural and behavioral traps that cause transformations to stall—and shares the disciplines that make…
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Ex-McKinsey Expert on War Games, John Horn: How to Read Your Competitors (Strategy Skills classics)
John Horn, professor of economics at Washington University’s Olin Business School and former McKinsey strategist, shares a disciplined framework for understanding competitive behavior by applying game theory and structured simulations. In this episode, he explains how companies can elevate competitor analysis from basic intelligence gathering to actionable strategic insight. Horn begins by debunking the common…
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McKinsey Senior Partner, Kate Smaje: Winning in the Age of Digital and AI (Strategy Skills classics)
In this episode, Kate Smaje offers a clear-eyed and disciplined perspective on what it takes for organizations to succeed in digital transformation. Drawing from deep client work across industries, she outlines a practical, results-focused view of how digital can be embedded into the operating core, not treated as a parallel initiative or buzzword. Kate Smaje…
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Why Western Benchmarks Are Failing: Global Leadership Shifts Executives Must Understand
Are You Leading For The World We Have …Or The World We Had? As you know, within StrategyTraining.com, we’ve been tracking global trends for a long time. And you and I have always known the West wouldn’t hold a lead forever. But when you spend time on the ground in different parts of the world the shift…
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Improve Your Cognitive Performance with Herbs (with Rachelle Robinett)
Rachelle Robinett, founder of Pharmakon Supernatural and educator in holistic health, offers a clear, science-aware framework for supporting energy, focus, and stress regulation, without defaulting to pharmaceuticals or overstimulation. In this episode, she explores how plant-based medicine, nutrition, and daily practices can be woven into practical, long-term routines that support resilience and cognitive clarity. Robinett…
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Rebuilding Your Career After Immigration: 5 Hard Resets Across 3 Continents
What It Means to Rebuild from Ground Zero, Again My first consulting engagement. Traveling internationally with the head of practice and another consultant, presenting to CEOs. Summer of 2007. This is my fifth restart. Not metaphorical. Not optional. Real-life ground zero. Again. I started over 4 times before. Across 3 continents. Across what it feels…
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Multi-Award-Winning Researcher Vanessa Druskat on Team Emotional Intelligence
Vanessa Druskat, organizational psychologist and professor at the University of New Hampshire, discusses team emotional intelligence (EI) as a predictor of sustained performance. Building on her foundational work with Daniel Goleman, Druskat focuses not on individual EQ, but on the group-level norms and practices that distinguish effective teams, particularly in complex, high-stakes environments. Druskat identifies…
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Former Biotech CEO and Harvard Medical School Faculty Member Margaret Moore on the Science of Good Leadership
Margaret Moore, faculty member at Harvard Medical School and former biotech CEO, brings decades of experience at the intersection of science, strategy, and human development to this conversation. In this episode, she unpacks The Science of Leadership, the forthcoming book she co-authored after reviewing hundreds of meta-analyses and large-scale studies, ultimately synthesizing leadership science into…
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How to Stop Oversharing at Work and Rebuild Your Executive Presence
Executive Presence Coaching to Prevent Oversharing Say the Wrong Thing Once, and People May… …Look at You Differently Forever. There’s a pattern I’ve seen over and over again, across industries, nationalities, and geographies. I’ve lived and worked in four countries this year alone, and we advise clients worldwide. Someone does well. They’re smart. Driven. They…