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Many leaders look at payroll like it’s a number to defend or cut. That’s lazy thinking. Payroll is a wrapper. Inside it sits the real asset: time, talent, judgement, relationships, domain knowledge, customer trust, momentum. It’s all there, every month, paid for in full. And a lot of it is trapped. Not by laziness. Not by bad people. By workflows built for another era. Bottlenecks nobody owns. Friction everyone tolerates. Work that exists purely to move work around. Then th

The paradox is sitting right there in the same building. Inside the boardroom: a debate. Heated. Earnest. Expensive.Do we double down on the three-year platform programme we scoped back then? Back then when the assumptions were different. The stack was different. The cost curve was different. When “delivery” meant headcount, vendors, and waiting. Close to a million already sunk. Still no meaningful release. Still more money to burn. Still more months to lose. Now step outsid

Business physics are shifting weekly. What work costs. How fast it gets done. What customers will pay for. What a small team can now produce. None of it is stable. In that world, the leaders who wait for full evidence and board consensus don’t look responsible. They look late. This isn’t a technology adoption story. It’s an economics story. Old assumptions are breaking in real time: headcount no longer equals capability, process-heavy offers lose pricing power, customers self

Europe has already funded a huge pipeline of deep-tech, dual-use capability, and AI-relevant IP. Real prototypes. Real methods. Real teams. The problem is it’s trapped inside a slow machine. That’s the arbitrage in 2026: a 3–4 year grant clock colliding with a 3‑month AI clock . Projects designed for a long arc can now hit key technical milestones 18–24 months early . The assets are ready. The structure isn’t. And because Brussels won’t reform fast, the gap persists through

2026 is not a “new normal.” It’s a faster normal. And the biggest risk right now isn’t that you pick the wrong deal. It ’s that you keep using the same mental model that worked when the world moved slower. Here are the mistakes I keep seeing—smart people, serious funds, good operators—still making. And in 2026, these aren’t harmless. They’re expensive. 1) Believing last year’s moat still exists Too many investors still underwrite differentiation as if product advantage decay

Why Some Leadership Teams Unlock Stranded Capacity While Others Remain Prisoners of Annual Budget Cycles. Last night, an executive coach posed a question to a forum of leaders: "Can you recognize value you didn't expect or never experienced before, where there is no historical performance data to cling to?" The question matters because most companies are sitting on massive stranded capacity right now. You're paying for three to five times more productive capacity than you're

THE ICEBERG MOMENT For decades, we've understood OPEX through a simple equation: more growth requires more people (and other resource), more people require more budget, more budget requires board approval. This linear thinking has shaped every strategic planning session, every headcount request, every departmental expansion. But here's what's happening beneath the surface—the part of the iceberg you can't see from the boardroom: Some of your existing teams could already be op