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— The overarching goal of strategy should be to centralize intent, decentralize decision-making, and enable corporate behavior that remains globally coherent under local adaptation.

As always, I hope that you will like it and have a great weekend.

— For organizations, fractality means ensuring that strategy/decision logic looks similar across levels.

— Non-fractal approaches often fail: either there is no strategy, too many strategies, or rigid cascades in which flawed assumptions snowball into avalanches of problems.

— Fractality (Mandelbrot, 1975) describes patterns that reveal more detail when you zoom in and tend to repeat in self-similar, scale-invariant ways.

— In nature, fractals help manage complexity with simple rules, creating coherence across scales without the need for centralized control.

As always, I hope that you will like it and have a great weekend.

strategyinpraxis.substack.com/p/the-one-on...

— Logically, the classification of people as “irrational” relies on an assumed ability to identify an objective (rational) ideal. But the verisimilitude of the identification can only be established by someone with greater knowledge, and so forth in perpetuity.

— The Betty Crocker “Just add an egg” story is used as a neat psychological lesson, but is simply not true in the way it is most often told.

— The issue has turned into a worrying trend; a number of psychological studies have proven to feature irreproducible evidence and questionable practices.

The TL;DR:

— Humans are naturally drawn to simple, linear cause-and-effect stories because they provide the illusion of control.

— Behavioral science in practice often gets unjustifiably reduced to irrationality, biases and nudges, promising fixes so easy that they appear to be cheat codes.

As always, I hope that you will like it and have a great weekend.

strategyinpraxis.substack.com/p/the-one-ab...

There are a number of key questions that every strategist should ask, as doing so habitually makes the difference between failure and success. Alas, too few do.

The true essence of strategy is using scarce resources to enable movement in a wanted direction under conditions of uncertainty. Of course, that could also be a definition of calling a cab.

Strategy’s core challenge is one of trying to shape an uncertain future. Selling it as a “sure thing” thus fundamentally misunderstands what it is.

To make matters worse, academic and practical views clash, not least because the former attempts to uphold boundaries that the latter cannot afford to be limited by.

“Strategy” has become a wildly overused, stretchy buzzword; there is an abundance of confident claims, but a shortage of informed conclusions.

— The guardrail setup preserves freedom to adapt while capping downside, making the firm more responsive in complex environments demarcated by dynamic uncertainty.

As always, I hope that you will like it and have a great weekend!

strategyinpraxis.substack.com/p/the-fourth...

— A different (read: superior) approach is to use guardrails with three parts: containing limits (non-negotiable constraints), resource frames (budget/time caps), and exploratory affordances (small, reversible bets).

— To make matters worse, as firms grow, they often add layers and informal “stage gates” that have the appearance of governance but mostly entrench power and slow learning.

— Success itself creates new problems: it attracts competitors, breeds complacency, and encourages like-minded, copy-paste thinking that reduces invaluable adaptability.