Ep 38 - The Bellhop and the Sardines
Most strategy activation programs fail for a counterintuitive reason: employees don't lack information, they lack rehearsed judgment. Town halls, PDFs, and cascaded briefings transmit content, but the moment that matters — an employee facing an ambiguous tradeoff with no manager present — receives no training at all.
Preview - Interview with Angelo Romasanta - "Trendslop" Author
Seven different AI models, asked the same corporate strategy question across 15,000 trials, gave the identical recommendation 96% of the time. Researcher Angelo Romasanta calls the pattern "trendslop" — and it's already inside your consultants' workflow.
Testing AI in Corporate Strategy
McKinsey told AT&T in the 1980s that global mobile subscribers would top 900,000 by 2000. The actual number was 100 million – a miss by two orders of magnitude. That forecast was polished, confident, and built entirely on past data: trendslop, long before AI. Today's LLMs produce the same flaw on demand: confident output that sounds insightful until you inspect it.
The One Diagnostic Step: Every Failed AI Rollout Skipped
Boards read rushed AI rollouts and frozen AI paralysis as opposite failures—recklessness versus caution. They are the same failure wearing two costumes. Both CEOs consistently skip an identical diagnostic step: mapping, stress-testing, and redesigning the underlying process before any tool gets selected.