Business Strategy & Growth
Strategists, economists and entrepreneurs who help organisations identify opportunity and execute with conviction
Customer expectations don’t shift gradually – they reset when a leading business makes a move that becomes the new standard. Most organisations track their own customers too closely and the forces reshaping those customers not closely enough. The arrival of AI has made the problem acute: more signals, faster change, and a greater penalty for placing bets on the wrong ones.
Food and agribusiness companies tend to operate within one part of the value chain – retail, manufacturing, production, or inputs – and make strategic decisions based on a partial view. Consumer preferences, retail power dynamics and sustainability pressures are all shifting simultaneously, and their effects travel in both directions along the chain. A business that reads only its own segment will consistently misread both the timing and the scale of what is coming.
Western boards are making consequential decisions about China – on supply chains, investment exposure, and strategic partnerships – based on assumptions about how China’s government thinks and acts that are frequently wrong. Official data on the Chinese economy routinely understates the scale of structural risks. The gap between how China sees its own economic model and how the West interprets it is not a communications problem. It is a governance and risk problem, with material consequences.
Most organisations know creativity matters. Few have built the conditions that make it work reliably. Innovation initiatives generate ideas. They rarely generate the structural environment in which those ideas can become commercial output. The tension is between the discipline required to run an efficient organisation and the openness required to produce anything genuinely new.
Multinationals with exposure to Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, the CIS and the wider MEA region are making capital and hiring decisions against a political backdrop that resets every quarter. Most corporate planning cycles are not built for that speed, and most regional leadership teams are left translating macro headlines into practical guidance for headquarters on their own. The question on the table is rarely what is happening; it is what to do about it next quarter.
Europe’s economic strategy is being rewritten in real time. Leaders have to price in fragmenting trade, a defense spending shock, Chinese industrial competition, and a euro architecture still missing pieces a generation after launch. The hard question is not what is changing, but which shifts are structural and which will pass.
Most businesses facing digital disruption respond with better law, better lobbying, or better content controls. None of those work when the underlying consumer behaviour has already shifted. The harder problem is building a business model that makes the illegal alternative redundant – and then persuading the incumbents whose economics you are disrupting to help you do it.
Most strategy processes treat the future as uncertain and respond by hedging. That posture costs time and investment while competitors move on signals that were knowable in advance. Leadership teams need a disciplined way to separate the parts of the future that are already decided from the parts that are still open, and to act on each differently.
The rules governing global trade and investment were built for a world that no longer exists. Companies that structured supply chains, workforce strategies, and growth plans around open borders now face governments actively rewiring those rules. The tension is not between globalisation and its critics – it is between the legitimate demands of domestic politics and the logic of integrated markets, and most organisations are caught in the middle with no framework for navigating it.
Successful companies are the ones least equipped to respond to disruption. Their existing business model – the source of their competitive advantage – creates structural conflicts with any new model they try to adopt. The question is not whether to respond, but which response will not destroy what already works.
Most high-performance organisations are built for the conditions that produced them, not for what follows. When the rules change, rivals surge, or key people leave, leaders discover whether what they built was a system or a moment. Rebuilding performance from a competitive deficit – without losing the culture that produced the first run – is a different kind of leadership problem.
Most leadership teams have more information about emerging technology than they have clarity about what to do with it. Platform launches and AI announcements arrive daily, and most will be irrelevant within a year. The question that matters is which signals to trust, and which to filter out before committing budget.