Latest / Best of LinkedIn: Strategy, M&A & Investments / Best of LinkedIn: Strategy & Consulting CW 04/ 05

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Best of LinkedIn: Strategy & Consulting CW 04/ 05 · Best of LinkedIn: Strategy, M&A & Investments

• 0:00
  Speaker 0: provided by Thomas Elguyer and Frennus, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about strategy and consulting from CW four and five.
• 0:08
  Speaker 0: Frennus specializes in B to B market research for strategy and consulting teams with a focus on tech and ICT.
• 0:15
  Speaker 0: Okay, so we've got a massive stack of research on the desk today.
• 0:19
  Speaker 0: And looking through these posts from the last two weeks, Honestly, it feels a little bit like the hangover after the party.
• 0:26
  Speaker 0: That
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  Speaker 1: is the perfect way to put it.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: You know, for the last year, LinkedIn has been this breathless echo chamber of AI is magic and everything is changing forever.
• 0:34
  Speaker 0: Right, lots of rocket ship emojis.
• 0:36
  Speaker 0: Exactly,
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  Speaker 1: and now the lights are on, the music stopped, and well, the bill has arrived.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: If I had to put a bumper sticker on the mood for weeks four and five, it would be, the party is over, the real work.
• 0:47
  Speaker 0: Which sounds a bit depressing, but that's actually where the money is made, right?
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Precisely.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: We are shifting from ambition, what we could do, to execution.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: How do we actually govern this stuff, pay for it, and, you know, fix it?
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: We're seeing a huge pivot to financial accountability, the gritty reality of operationalizing AI, and some very, very serious geopolitical headwinds.
• 1:07
  Speaker 0: And we're going to talk about the token economy, which blew my mind, by the way.
• 1:12
  Speaker 0: We've got a potential breakup of the big four consulting firms and we need to talk about why your personal strategy is probably failing you.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: It's a dense landscape, no doubt.
• 1:21
  Speaker 0: Let's dive in.
• 1:22
  Speaker 0: Let's start with that real work theme.
• 1:24
  Speaker 0: For so long, AI was the shiny toy for the CIO or, you know, the CTO.
• 1:29
  Speaker 0: But looking at the sources, particularly a post from Kristach Heiser at BCG, he is waiting a huge red flag here.
• 1:36
  Speaker 0: He's basically saying that area is over.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: It's completely dead.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: Weiser's point is that AI has graduated.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: It's no longer just a tech initiative.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: It is now a core pillar of corporate strategy.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: And that means the leadership of AI is moving decisively to the CEO.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Which
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  Speaker 0: makes sense in theory, but practically CEOs are already swamped.
• 1:56
  Speaker 0: Can they actually own this?
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: They have to.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: They have to own it because the differentiator is no longer who is experimenting.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Everyone is running a pilot program somewhere.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: The real winner is the company that scales with discipline.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: And you just can't scale across silos, across marketing, supply chain, HR without a mandate from the very top.
• 2:12
  Speaker 0: But Mike Evans raised a counterpoint that I thought was really sharp.
• 2:16
  Speaker 0: He argues that ownership right now is a complete mess.
• 2:19
  Speaker 0: You've got the CIO, the CDO, the CTO.
• 2:22
  Speaker 0: It's like a game of musical chairs.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: And when everyone owns it, nobody owns it.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Evan suggests we might see the rise of a chief AI transformation officer.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Someone whose sole job is to bridge that gap between the technical ambition and the business reality.
• 2:38
  Speaker 0: Because right now, those two things are just not talking to each other.
• 2:42
  Speaker 0: Speaking of that gap, I have to bring up this analogy from Valentino Koster.
• 2:46
  Speaker 0: I think this explains why so many boards are frustrated.
• 2:48
  Speaker 0: The
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: orchestra analogy?
• 2:49
  Speaker 0: Yes.
• 2:50
  Speaker 0: He says, everyone bought into AI expecting a symphony.
• 2:53
  Speaker 0: They thought they'd flip a switch and have this fully formed orchestra playing perfect harmony.
• 2:57
  Speaker 0: And instead?
• 2:58
  Speaker 0: Instead they got a guy with a tuba.
• 2:59
  Speaker 0: Right.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: They got one strong instrument.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's a great chatbot or a great coding assistant, but it is not a symphony.
• 3:06
  Speaker 0: And the natural reaction is disappointment.
• 3:09
  Speaker 0: Yeah, you know, you fired up the program expecting Beethoven and you got a solo.
• 3:13
  Speaker 0: But Coaster's advice is don't fire the tuba player because he isn't an orchestra.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: That's such a crucial mindset shift.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: You have to build the section first.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: You start with the one use case, the one player, and you perfect that before you try to conduct the whole show.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: It's about patience and execution, which is... pretty rare these days.
• 3:31
  Speaker 0: And it connects to the infrastructure question too.
• 3:33
  Speaker 0: Vikas Ghul had a very sharp analysis of the Apple and Google Gemini partnership.
• 3:38
  Speaker 0: Oh,
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: this is the debate about tracks versus rails.
• 3:40
  Speaker 0: Okay.
• 3:41
  Speaker 0: Break that down for me, because to me, tracks and rails, they sound like the same thing.
• 3:45
  Speaker 0: So
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: think of the tracks as the heavy infrastructure, the massive foundational models, the billions of dollars in data centers.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: That's becoming a public utility.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: Goal argues that for most companies, trying to build your own track, your own foundational brain, is just an unjustifiable expense.
• 4:03
  Speaker 0: So don't build your own LLM from scratch.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: The value is in the rails.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: The rails are the user experience, the sensors, the customer.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: That's where Apple lives.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: The advice is to focus on the experience layer, not the plumbing.
• 4:16
  Speaker 0: But, and there's always a but, you can't build a great experience on a shaky foundation.
• 4:22
  Speaker 0: So Rashidi had a post that really resonated.
• 4:25
  Speaker 0: She argues that companies are buying furniture before building the house.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: That is a classic problem in digital transformation, but it's just so much worse with AI.
• 4:35
  Speaker 0: So the furniture is the flashy AI use case.
• 4:38
  Speaker 0: the chatbot.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Look at our cool generative design tool.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: But the
• 4:42
  Speaker 0: house,
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: the data architecture underneath is a mess.
• 4:46
  Speaker 0: Full of termites.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: The data is siloed.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: It's dirty.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: It's unstructured.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: So you buy this expensive furniture, you put it on a rotting floor, and then you wonder why the initiative collapses.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Rashidi is saying, stop buying furniture.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: Fix the floor.
• 5:00
  Speaker 0: And even if the floor is solid, the people walking on it might not be ready.
• 5:04
  Speaker 0: Kabil Beraja shared some takeaways from Davos, and he noted that the bottleneck isn't the technology anymore.
• 5:09
  Speaker 0: It's speed and talent adaptation.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: We are just moving faster than our people can learn, and that leaves to friction.
• 5:15
  Speaker 0: Which is a perfect segue to the economics of all this.
• 5:18
  Speaker 0: Because if we are scaling, we need to know what it costs.
• 5:21
  Speaker 0: And this is where it gets really interesting.
• 5:23
  Speaker 0: We are seeing a whole new economic unit emerge.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: The token.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 5:27
  Speaker 0: Stuart Scott is from Deloitte is calling the token the new unit of economic value.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: It's a fundamental shift.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: We really need to understand this.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: The last twenty years we've lived in the sauce era.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: you pay a flat fee per user say fifty bucks a month for a seat and that person can use the software as much as they want.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: It's predictable.
• 5:47
  Speaker 0: It's a buffer.
• 5:48
  Speaker 0: The CFO knows exactly what the bill will be in December.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: But AI is moving us to a consumption model.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: You pay for the compute.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: You pay per token generated.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: It's like your water bill or your electric bill.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: The more you leave the tap running, the more you pay.
• 6:02
  Speaker 0: And this is where SCOTUS brings up.
• 6:04
  Speaker 0: Jeven's Paradox.
• 6:05
  Speaker 0: Can we just unpack that for a second?
• 6:07
  Speaker 0: Because it sounds really counterintuitive.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: Jeven's Paradox is an economic theory from the nineteenth century.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: It was originally about coal.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: That says, as technology becomes more efficient and cheaper, you don't actually save resources, you end up consuming
• 6:20
  Speaker 0: more.
• 6:21
  Speaker 0: Because it's cheaper, so you just stop worrying about using it.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Precisely.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: Think about LED light bulbs.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: They're incredibly efficient compared to the old incandescent bulbs.
• 6:30
  Speaker 0: Did our electricity bills go down?
• 6:32
  Speaker 0: No.
• 6:32
  Speaker 0: We just started putting lights everywhere.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: So as AI gets cheaper per token, we aren't going to save budget.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: We're just going to inject AI into every single email, report, and meeting.
• 6:42
  Speaker 0: And the bill will skyrocket.
• 6:44
  Speaker 0: That is what is keeping CFOs up at night, because suddenly your IT cost isn't fixed.
• 6:49
  Speaker 0: It's variable, and it can scale infinitely.
• 6:52
  Speaker 0: Evan Benjamin asked the million dollar question.
• 6:55
  Speaker 0: Is there such a thing as predictable AI ROI?
• 6:58
  Speaker 0: I'm guessing the answer is not yet.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: It's difficult.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: Benjamin highlights the need for AI fine ops.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: You need a dedicated function just to track cost per million tokens.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: You have to ensure that every dollar spent actually translates to business impact.
• 7:12
  Speaker 0: And Nicholas Fundrini took that even higher, right?
• 7:15
  Speaker 0: to the board level.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: So Andrea argues that fine ops isn't just about operational cost control anymore.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: It's about economic governance and strategic risk.
• 7:24
  Speaker 0: Strategic
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: risk.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: Think about it.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: If your operational costs are variable based on how chatty your AI agent is, that is a board level risk issue.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: If an agent goes rogue and starts having million token conversations with customers, you could blow your quarterly budget in a week.
• 7:40
  Speaker 0: Wow.
• 7:41
  Speaker 0: It's wild to think that a chatty agent could be a budget risk.
• 7:45
  Speaker 0: Okay, but let's pivot to the people running these budgets.
• 7:48
  Speaker 0: theme three is about the human element Because with all this automation people are asking so what is my job now?
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: Neha Cabra shared some really striking data from McKinsey.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: They found that two-thirds of U.S.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: work hours require non-physical capabilities.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Those are exactly the hours ripe for AI agents.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: That
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  Speaker 0: sounds terrifying.
• 8:07
  Speaker 0: Two-thirds.
• 8:08
  Speaker 0: That's basically the entire white-collar workforce.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: It does sound scary, but Cabra asks the so-what question.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: If the AI does the processing, what stays stubbornly human?
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: And her answer is trust.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: judgment, escalation, care, and orchestration.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: The
• 8:21
  Speaker 0: human backbone.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: That's it.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: The AI can generate the report, but a human has to decide if it's true, if it matters, and who needs to see it.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: That judgment layer becomes more valuable, not less.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: But you have to pivot your skills toward it.
• 8:33
  Speaker 0: I think this connects to a post by Reshma Ramachandran that I absolutely loved.
• 8:37
  Speaker 0: She flipped the script.
• 8:38
  Speaker 0: She said companies spend billions on strategy market signals, positioning portfolios, but individuals.
• 8:45
  Speaker 0: We rarely have a strategy for our own lives.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: That is such a powerful insight.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Most people just drift.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: They take the next job that comes along.
• 8:52
  Speaker 0: And she advises treating your life like an organization.
• 8:56
  Speaker 0: What is your product?
• 8:57
  Speaker 0: How diversified is your portfolio?
• 9:00
  Speaker 0: If you lose your main client, your employer, Do you have a backup plan?
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: It's about viewing yourself as a business of one.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: And Maidiz Derivik added a really practical note to that, specifically about job searching.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: He says burnout comes from a lack of strategy, not just effort.
• 9:15
  Speaker 0: Oh, the sprinting into a brick wall feeling.
• 9:18
  Speaker 0: Precisely.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: You see candidates sending out hundreds of applications.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: That's effort.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: But if you don't have feedback loops, if you don't know why you aren't getting hired, you just keep trying harder at the wrong thing.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: That's a failure of personal strategy.
• 9:31
  Speaker 0: So don't just work hard.
• 9:32
  Speaker 0: Optimize.
• 9:33
  Speaker 0: Build a feedback loop.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: And even for those who have jobs, Mark D. Orlick warns leaders not to get complacent.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: He says low turnover does not equal engagement.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 9:44
  Speaker 0: Just because nobody is quitting doesn't mean everyone is happy.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: That's the paralysis factor.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: People might stay because the market is tough, not because they're inspired.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: The risk isn't the person who leaves, it's the person who stays but has stopped caring.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: That zombie workforce can just kill a company's execution speed.
• 10:01
  Speaker 0: That is a silent killer.
• 10:04
  Speaker 0: Okay, zooming out from the individual to a global stage, we really can't ignore the geopolitical landscape.
• 10:10
  Speaker 0: It feels like every week there's a new complication.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: It's the age of competition, as Shoaib Yusuf from BCG calls it.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: He argues that geopolitics is no longer just a backdrop.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: It's not something you watch on the news.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: It has to be a core corporate capability.
• 10:23
  Speaker 0: A muscle you have to build.
• 10:24
  Speaker 0: Yes,
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: you need to be able to sense and interpret these shifts.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: Andreas Pireschek mentioned the WEF global risks report, twenty twenty six.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: And the takeaway there is that compliance is no longer just defensive.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: It's a strategic asset for stability.
• 10:38
  Speaker 0: And there's a specific blind spot that Christian A. Rodriguez Schiffel pointed out that scared me a little bit.
• 10:44
  Speaker 0: Everyone is watching tariffs on goods, steel, cars, that sort of thing.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: The physical stuff we can see on a container ship.
• 10:51
  Speaker 0: But he says the bigger threat is restrictions on cross-border services.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: This is huge for the digital economy.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: We are seeing data localization rules and market access limits growing twice as fast as trade restrictions on goods.
• 11:04
  Speaker 0: Can you give me a concrete example?
• 11:05
  Speaker 0: Who does this hurt?
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: Well, imagine you are a global bank or a massive HR consultancy.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: You run a centralized model where your data sits in the cloud in the US, but you serve clients in Europe and Asia.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: Suddenly, a new regulation says German data cannot leave Germany.
• 11:23
  Speaker 0: And your entire centralized business model just breaks.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: Oh, overnight.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: You have to duplicate your infrastructure, duplicate your data governance.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: It becomes incredibly expensive and complex.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: If you aren't watching services trade restrictions, you are just flying blind.
• 11:39
  Speaker 0: Speaking of business models breaking, let's talk about the consulting industry itself.
• 11:44
  Speaker 0: James O'Dowd dropped a bit of a bombshell prediction regarding the Big Four.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: Yes, the potential separation of audit and consulting.
• 11:51
  Speaker 0: We've heard rumors of this for years.
• 11:53
  Speaker 0: Why does O'Dowd think it's actually inevitable now?
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: His reasoning is quite sound.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: He argues they are essentially incompatible operating systems.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: I mean, think about it.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: What is the job of an auditor?
• 12:06
  Speaker 0: Verification, safety, saying no.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: Audit requires restriction.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: You have to be conservative.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: You have to minimize risk.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: Now, what does a strategy consultant do?
• 12:15
  Speaker 0: They sell, yes, they sell innovation, speed, taking risks.
• 12:19
  Speaker 0: Right.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Audit sells trust, consulting sells optionality.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: Odoud argues that trying to house those two mindsets under one roof and under one conflict of interest policy is becoming impossible.
• 12:31
  Speaker 0: So the separation isn't a retreat, though.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: No.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: Odoud says it's a refocus for survival.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: Audit becomes simpler and safer.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: Consulting becomes faster and more meritocratic.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: It allows both sides to actually do their jobs.
• 12:42
  Speaker 0: It'll be fascinating to see if that happens.
• 12:44
  Speaker 0: Okay, moving on to our final theme.
• 12:46
  Speaker 0: Sustainability, energy, and ESG.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: And this is another area where optics are giving way to strategy.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: Calm Divine noted that sustainability is moving from being a PR exercise to the strategic backbone of value creation.
• 13:01
  Speaker 0: But Patrick Schmucky had a critique of how we report on this.
• 13:05
  Speaker 0: He says current reporting describes programs well.
• 13:07
  Speaker 0: Look at our nice solar panels, but it's terrible at describing fragility.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: That's the systemic risk.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: You can have a great sustainability report and still be incredibly vulnerable to a supply chain shock or a climate event.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: We just aren't measuring resilience well enough yet.
• 13:23
  Speaker 0: In talking about resilience, we have to talk about the grid.
• 13:26
  Speaker 0: Because all those tokens we talked about earlier, they run on electricity.
• 13:29
  Speaker 0: A
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: lot of electricity.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: Joseph Nogle had some insights from PowerGen, in twenty twenty six, connecting AI to energy.
• 13:35
  Speaker 0: He is a metaphor I loved.
• 13:36
  Speaker 0: He said we're trying to fit a gallon of water into a pint glass.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: The gallon is the AI power demand.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: The pint glass is our current grid capacity.
• 13:44
  Speaker 0: So what do we do?
• 13:44
  Speaker 0: Do we just stop building data centers?
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: We can't.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: The demand is exploding.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: Nogel suggests the solution isn't one magic technology.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: It involves hyperscale data centers, next-gen nuclear and sodium ion batteries.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: We need it all.
• 13:58
  Speaker 0: It's in all of the above strategy.
• 14:00
  Speaker 0: It
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: has to be, and I liked his framing.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: Extraordinary loads is extraordinary opportunity.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: This is forcing an industrialization of our infrastructure at a speed we haven't seen in decades.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: It's terrifying, but it's also a huge investment boom.
• 14:13
  Speaker 0: So... Bringing this all together.
• 14:15
  Speaker 0: We've covered a huge amount of ground from the CEO's office to the power grid from the token economy to our own resumes.
• 14:22
  Speaker 0: if you had to pull one thread that connects all of this, what would it be?
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: If I connect the dots, the theme is really about discipline.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: Whether it's Sol Rashidi telling you to fix your data foundation before buying AI furniture, or Maid Distarovich telling you to have a strategy for your job search, or the energy sector facing the physics of the grid.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: The
• 14:40
  Speaker 0: height is over.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: The era of move fast and break things seems to be transitioning into move intentionally and build things that last.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: It's about governance, resilience, and owning the outcome, not just the ambition.
• 14:52
  Speaker 0: I love that.
• 14:52
  Speaker 0: Move intentionally and build things at last.
• 14:54
  Speaker 0: That's a great note to end on.
• 14:56
  Speaker 0: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.
• 14:59
  Speaker 0: Also check out our other editions on Private Equity, Venture Capital, and M&A.
• 15:04
  Speaker 0: Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe.