The Operating Model Imperative: Why Strategy Fails Without Structure

Organizations rarely struggle because they lack strategic priorities. More often, the breakdown occurs between knowing what matters and organizing the business to deliver it.

A strategy can define where to compete, where to invest, and what must change. But unless those choices alter how decisions are made, resources are allocated, performance is measured, and teams work together, strategy remains largely an aspiration.

Four elements help close the gap:

Decision clarity
Start with the decisions the strategy requires. Who makes them? What information do they need? And where do unclear ownership or competing priorities slow progress?
Operating rhythm
Create a small number of planning and performance cadences that connect leadership priorities to what the organization is actually doing. More meetings aren’t the answer; better decision mechanisms are.
Accountability and visibility
Translate priorities into clear owners, outcomes, and leading indicators. Leadership needs enough visibility to identify where execution is diverging from strategy before results arrive.
Cross-functional alignment
Most strategic priorities cut across organizational boundaries. The operating model must establish how teams coordinate, resolve trade-offs, and make decisions when accountability is shared.

The principle: The objective isn’t more process. It’s the minimum structure required to make strategy executable.

A strong operating model turns strategic choices into decisions, decisions into coordinated action, and action into measurable outcomes.

STRATEGY | EXECUTION
Operating Model Design · Governance & Decision Rights · Performance Management · Cross-functional Execution

The Volume Question: What Replaces Pricing as CPG’s Growth Engine?

September 22, 2026 No Comments

For much of the recent inflationary cycle, pricing provided consumer companies with a powerful lever for protecting revenue growth against rising costs and softer demand. But as pricing normalizes and consumers remain increasingly value-conscious, the strategic equation is changing.

The next phase of CPG growth will require companies to answer a harder question:

If price can no longer do as much of the work, where will incremental volume come from?

The answer is unlikely to be a single growth lever. Instead, leadership teams will need to make sharper choices across portfolios, consumers, channels, and markets.

Reassess where the portfolio can genuinely grow

Not every category, brand, or geography deserves equal investment.

Mature categories may still offer attractive growth, but capturing it requires distinguishing businesses with structural growth potential from those being supported primarily by pricing, distribution expansion, or historical investment patterns.

The strategic question shifts from “How do we grow the portfolio?” to “Which parts of the portfolio can create disproportionate growth, and what should we stop funding to concentrate behind them?”

Treat value as more than price

A more value-conscious consumer doesn’t necessarily mean a race to the lowest price.

Companies can expand accessibility through price-pack architecture, assortment, channels, product formats, and innovation while protecting the economics and positioning of the core brand.

The opportunity is to understand which consumers are being excluded by the current proposition and what would need to change to reach them profitably.

Look beyond traditional sources of growth

Historical growth markets and channels may not produce the same returns over the next several years.

That creates a capital-allocation question: where are consumer demand, category development, distribution opportunity, and competitive position creating new pockets of attractive growth?

The companies that identify these shifts early can concentrate resources before opportunities become obvious.. and expensive.

Connect the growth thesis to the operating plan

A portfolio strategy only becomes meaningful when it changes investment.

If leadership identifies priority categories, markets, consumer segments, or channels, those choices should flow directly into resource allocation, innovation pipelines, commercial priorities, capabilities, and performance measures.

The operating plan should become the mechanism through which strategic choices become visible.

The signal

The transition from pricing-led growth to volume-led growth isn’t simply a commercial challenge. It is a portfolio and resource-allocation challenge.

Winning the next phase of CPG growth will require companies to become more explicit about where they will focus, what they will simplify, and where they will reinvest.

STRATEGY | INTELLIGENCE | EXECUTION
Portfolio Strategy · Consumer & Market Intelligence · Growth Strategy · Strategic Planning · Resource Allocation

TECHNOLOGY | AI ECONOMICS

May 21, 2026 No Comments

The AI Monetization Question: When Usage Grows Faster Than Value

Enterprise AI adoption is accelerating. But as organizations move from experimentation toward scaled deployment, a more difficult question is emerging: How should AI usage translate into economic value?

The issue is becoming increasingly important as AI changes the economics of software. Gartner projects worldwide spending on AI models and platforms to reach $64 billion in 2026, up 63% from 2025, while also noting increased enterprise scrutiny around usage efficiency, cost control, and measurable outcomes. Gartner

Traditional SaaS economics were comparatively straightforward. Customers purchased seats, subscriptions, or defined tiers of functionality. Revenue was relatively predictable, and increased product usage generally carried limited incremental cost.

AI complicates that equation.

More usage can generate greater customer value—but it can also generate greater inference and infrastructure costs. And consumption itself doesn’t necessarily tell a company whether customers are realizing meaningful business outcomes.

That creates three strategic questions.

What is the right measure of value?

Tokens, queries, API calls, and compute consumption may measure activity, but they do not necessarily measure customer value.

The more important question is what the customer accomplishes as a result: greater productivity, faster decisions, higher conversion, lower operating costs, better customer experiences, or entirely new capabilities.

Companies that understand that relationship can begin designing monetization around the value created rather than simply the technology consumed.

What does healthy adoption look like?

In traditional software, adoption often provides a useful leading indicator of retention and expansion. With AI, the picture can be more complicated.

Rapid consumption might indicate deepening product-market fit. It could also reflect inefficient workflows, experimentation that never scales, or usage whose economics are unattractive to either the customer or provider.

That makes segmentation increasingly important. Companies need to understand who is using the product, for what workflows, at what intensity, with what outcomes, and at what underlying cost.

How should the operating model change?

AI monetization is not solely a pricing decision.

Product determines how value is created. Finance needs visibility into unit economics. Sales must understand how usage translates into expansion. Customer Success needs signals indicating whether adoption is creating meaningful outcomes.

Those functions require a common view of the customer economics.

The Signal

The AI monetization challenge is ultimately about aligning three things:

Usage. Value. Economics.

The companies that establish a clear relationship among them will be better positioned to determine what customers should pay, where investment should be concentrated, and which forms of adoption actually create durable growth.

The objective isn’t simply to maximize AI consumption. It is to turn consumption into measurable customer and enterprise value.

MEDIA | STREAMING

May 21, 2026 No Comments

The Streaming Reset: When Subscriber Growth Is No Longer the Strategy

Streaming transformed media by changing how audiences access content. Its next transformation may be about something different: how media companies create economic value from the audiences they have already assembled.

For years, subscriber acquisition was the defining measure of streaming success. Scale mattered enormously, and companies invested aggressively in content and distribution to build it.

But the market is maturing.

Deloitte’s 2026 research describes streaming subscriber growth as stabilizing. Its consumer research also found average household streaming spending relatively flat year over year, while 61% of respondents said they would cancel their favorite service following a $5 monthly price increase. Meanwhile, ad-supported streaming participation has increased significantly. Deloitte

The strategic question therefore changes from How quickly can we acquire subscribers? to How much value can we create from each audience relationship?

Expand the monetization equation

Subscriptions remain important, but they are increasingly only one component of the economics.

Advertising, premium tiers, bundling, licensing, commerce, live experiences and franchise extensions can create additional value from the same underlying audience and intellectual property.

That requires companies to think about audiences as more than subscribers.

Engagement becomes strategic intelligence

A subscriber count tells leadership how many customers are paying. It says much less about the strength of the relationship.

What does the audience watch? What drives engagement? What makes someone stay? Which content generates broader franchise value? Which audiences are attractive to advertisers or potential partners?

These signals can help companies determine not simply what content is popular, but where additional economic value can be created.

Bundling moves from distribution to strategy

Bundling is also becoming more sophisticated. Deloitte reports that half of U.S. SVOD subscribers now have at least one paid streaming service through a bundle and points to opportunities for more targeted cross-category partnerships informed by audience intelligence. Deloitte

The implication is significant: the value of a media platform may increasingly depend on the broader ecosystem it can create around the customer.

The Signal

Streaming’s first chapter was about building scale. Its next chapter is about monetizing that scale more intelligently.

That shifts management attention from subscriber acquisition alone toward engagement, customer economics, advertising, partnerships, intellectual property and lifetime value.

Scale is an asset. Monetization determines what that asset is worth.

STRATEGY | INTELLIGENCE
Growth Strategy · Monetization · Audience Intelligence · Portfolio Strategy · Customer Economics

CONSUMER | PORTFOLIO STRATEGY

May 21, 2026 No Comments

The Portfolio Paradox: When More Brands Create Less Growth

For decades, scale was one of the defining advantages of large consumer companies. More brands, categories, geographies and SKUs could create broader distribution, purchasing leverage and greater access to consumers.

But scale can also create complexity.

As CPG companies confront slower category growth, value-conscious consumers and pressure on volume, an increasingly important strategic question is emerging:

Does every part of the portfolio still deserve to be there?

Recent industry activity suggests that many companies are asking precisely that question. McKinsey describes portfolio reshaping as a central theme in CPG, with companies divesting weaker-growth assets and reallocating capital toward core businesses and higher-growth categories. McKinsey & Company

The opportunity, however, isn’t simply to make the portfolio smaller.

Start with strategic fit

A portfolio review should begin with more than historical revenue.

Leadership needs to understand category attractiveness, consumer demand, competitive position, growth potential, margin structure and the company’s underlying right to win.

A large business in a structurally unattractive market may warrant a very different investment decision from a smaller business positioned in an expanding category.

Rationalization should create capacity

Removing brands or SKUs can reduce complexity and cost. But cost reduction alone doesn’t create a growth strategy.

The more important question is what the organization does with the resources it releases.

McKinsey’s 2026 food and beverage research, for example, highlights the potential operating benefits of SKU rationalization while arguing that portfolios need clear consumer value propositions and sharper choices about what should remain, be renovated, or exit. McKinsey & Company

Capital, marketing, innovation resources, supply-chain capacity and management attention can then be redirected toward opportunities with greater potential.

Concentration can become a growth advantage

Portfolio strategy therefore requires explicit choices:

Where should the company defend leadership?
Where should it accelerate investment?
Where can innovation expand the addressable market?
And where should it stop allocating resources simply because it always has?

Those choices become increasingly important when growth is harder to find.

The Signal

Portfolio simplification isn’t the strategy. Reallocation is.

The strategic objective is not to own fewer businesses or sell fewer products. It is to concentrate resources behind the categories, brands, markets and consumer propositions with the greatest potential to create future value.

In an environment where capital and consumer demand are both more contested, focus itself can become a source of growth.

STRATEGY | INTELLIGENCE
Portfolio Strategy · Resource Allocation · Market Intelligence · Growth Strategy · Strategic Planning

TECHNOLOGY | PLATFORM STRATEGY

May 21, 2026 No Comments

The Platform Trap: A Great Product Isn’t Always a Growth Strategy

Technology companies are built to create.

When growth slows, the natural response is often to create more: more features, more products, more solutions and more adjacencies.

But product expansion can produce an unintended consequence. The portfolio gets larger without the business becoming more strategically valuable.

That distinction matters as technology markets mature and products become easier to replicate. Gartner’s 2026 analysis of more than 1,100 enterprise growth investments found a significant shift toward monetization and platformization, with roughly 70% of the initiatives it examined centered on those strategies rather than new product and service innovation. Gartner

But adding products does not automatically create a platform.

A portfolio and a platform are different things

A product portfolio gives customers multiple things to buy.

A platform should make those products and the broader ecosystem around them, more valuable together than they would be independently.

That additional value might come from shared data, integrated workflows, common infrastructure, distribution, network effects, lower switching costs or a more complete customer experience.

Without those advantages, “platform” can become little more than a label attached to product proliferation.

Start with the customer architecture

The strategic question isn’t What else can we build?

It is What else does the customer need to accomplish?

That shifts platform strategy from an internal product roadmap toward an external view of customer workflows and value pools.

Where is friction occurring? Which adjacent activities matter? What data or capabilities become more valuable when connected? Where could partners extend the proposition more effectively than proprietary development?

Those questions can produce a very different growth agenda.

Monetization needs to follow integration

A successful platform also requires a clear economic model.

If customers adopt multiple capabilities but the company cannot translate deeper engagement into stronger retention, expansion, pricing power or new revenue streams, integration may be technically successful without creating sufficient economic value.

The commercial model therefore needs to evolve alongside the product architecture.

The Signal

The strategic test of a platform isn’t how many products sit on it.

It is whether participation in the ecosystem increases value for the customer and strengthens the economics of the business.

That requires companies to shift the question from What should we build next? toward What combination of capabilities creates a differentiated system customers have a reason to deepen their relationship with?

STRATEGY | EXECUTION
Platform Strategy · Product Portfolio · Monetization · Customer Value · Commercialization

MEDIA | ADVERTISING

May 21, 2026 No Comments

The Attention Economy Has a Measurement Problem

Media has never had more data.

Advertisers can measure impressions, reach, viewability, clicks, completion, engagement, watch time, conversion, sales and an expanding universe of audience signals.

Yet more measurement has not eliminated one of advertising’s oldest questions:

Which signals actually tell us whether the investment created value?

The challenge isn’t simply measurement accuracy. It’s decision usefulness.

Not every measurable activity is an outcome

Digital advertising created enormous visibility into consumer behavior. But visibility can also encourage organizations to optimize around the metrics that are easiest to observe.

An impression demonstrates exposure. A click demonstrates an action. Watch time indicates engagement.

None independently proves incremental business impact.

Even attention measurement, which is an increasingly important area for advertisers, is intended to complement rather than replace delivery and outcome metrics. The IAB’s cross-industry framework explicitly positions attention as one signal that should be connected with other measures of effectiveness. IAB

That distinction matters.

Measurement should begin with the decision

Instead of asking What can we measure?, leadership teams can begin with a more useful question:

What decision are we trying to make?

If the decision concerns creative effectiveness, one set of signals may matter. If it concerns media allocation, another will. Brand investment may require a different measurement horizon from performance marketing.

The KPI should follow the decision, not the other way around.

Connect leading indicators to economic outcomes

The strongest measurement systems create a hierarchy.

At the top are the outcomes the business ultimately cares about: revenue, incremental sales, customer acquisition, retention, brand growth or lifetime value.

Below them sit the leading indicators that help explain whether those outcomes are likely to occur.

The objective isn’t to eliminate intermediate metrics. It is to understand how they connect to business performance.

That also gives leadership a better way to allocate resources. When a metric changes, the organization should understand whether that movement is important enough to change a decision.

The Signal

The next advantage in media measurement may not come from collecting another signal.

It may come from becoming much more disciplined about which signals matter, how they connect to economic outcomes, and what decisions they should change.

In an attention economy overflowing with data, the scarce resource isn’t information.

It’s decision clarity.

INTELLIGENCE | STRATEGY
Advertising Strategy · Performance Measurement · Audience Intelligence · KPI Design · Resource Allocation