Insights
Short pieces about things we keep being wrong about.
Written by the partner who did the work, published when there is something to say rather than to a content calendar. No gated downloads and no e-mail capture in exchange for a PDF.
Most of these start as an argument between two partners that neither of them wins.
The cost that comes back
Two thirds of cost reduction programmes are reversed within three years. The ones that hold have a structural change underneath them, not a target cascaded downwards.
Your discount policy is whatever your sales force does
Written policy and observed behaviour diverge within about eighteen months of the last review. What to measure to find out how far.
Value tracking, or activity tracking with a better name
A delivery office that reports milestones is reporting effort. What a board should insist on seeing instead, and what it costs to produce.
The segments you eliminate are the decision
Entry cases fail on what was never ruled out. A short method for taking a candidate list from eleven to three without a six-month study.
Nine decisions is usually the whole strategy
If the top team cannot list the decisions the strategy actually makes, the countries will each make their own. A test you can run in an afternoon.
Go and stand in the plant
Half of what a manufacturing client believes about its own constraints is a habit that has outlived the equipment. It does not show up in the data room.
Why there is no newsletter
If it is worth reading it is worth putting on the open web.
Registration walls exist to build a list, not to protect anything. Everything the firm publishes is on this page in full, and the partner who wrote it will argue about it with you by e-mail.
Press and speaking enquiries go to press@north-and-vale.com.
We do not pay for placement and we do not accept it, which is the same rule that keeps the advice independent.