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The Brilliance & Breakdown when Scaling
Leo S. Maranz was one of the earliest and most successful franchisers in American business. A mechanical engineer by training, he invented an automatic ice-cream freezer that could produce soft ice cream continuously—technology that didn’t just make dessert; it made a new kind of business possible. From the start, Maranz knew what he wanted and…
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Realistic Timelines Enable Unrealistic Complexity
The word realistic is used often within business discussions. “Is that realistic?” “Are we being realistic?” “This sounds really good on paper but perhaps we need to be MORE realistic.” Realistic suggests the reasonableness of the timeline and therefore guarantees success. Realistic timelines are often a hiding place for organizational drift, where inefficiency and mediocrity…
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Scarcity isn’t about Economics
I’ve always had some kind of morning ritual, from as far back as I can remember. My current ritual is reading a chapter of Proverbs, reading a Daily Stoic entry, and reading an thinking on a card from a deck by Esther and Jerry Hicks about money. The card I’m pondering today says that the…
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The Consulting Crash We Were Warned About
In 2005, Martin Kihn cracked open a world that, until then, largely operated behind frosted-glass conference rooms and perfectly bound slide decks.His memoir, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, was part confession, part dark comedy, and part industry autopsy. Kihn wrote from the inside. As a…
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Building from Brilliance
Some communities have developed recognizable economic signatures. Jewish merchants, shaped by centuries of restrictions on land ownership, mastered literacy and finance, creating networks of trade and professional services. Indian diaspora families, carrying memories of colonial merchant roles and extended kin systems, now own large shares of global hotel and corner-shop markets. Ethnic Chinese networks, long…
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When your Gift Becomes a Cage
Scott Clary, in his Saturday Strategy Sessions newsletter, asked a powerful question: What if the thing you’re best at is the thing that’s killing you? He used the example of Josh Waitzkin — chess prodigy, national champion, International Master, and the inspiration for Searching for Bobby Fischer. By all external measures, Josh was destined for…
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The Hidden Tax of Influence and the Real Cost of Outsourcing Transformation
In a recent New York Times Magazine interview, [you can listen to the interview here], Brené Brown named something rare that and also costly. She described the “care tax”—the hidden toll of being treated as a national therapist, expected not only to share ideas but to absorb people’s deepest stories of pain and trauma. After…
Clarity BEFORE Execution. Structure BEFORE Speed
If you could better understand one thing about your business right now….
Most costly decisions begin with
an inaccurate understanding of the situation.
I help leaders understand what is actually happening before major decisions are made or
resources are invested in solving the wrong problem.
Giselle Hudson | Pre-Decision Diagnostic Advisor | Sensemaking for high-stakes business decisions 