# Simulen Insights > Articles on strategy, transformation, and how modern organisations build > lasting capability — from the Simulen team. 15 published > articles, newest first. Published by Simulen Single Member P.C. (https://simulen.com). Quoting and citing these articles is welcome; please attribute the author and link the article URL. Most recent article: 2026-06-22 Categories: Strategy (3), Leadership (5), Data (3), People (2), Delivery (2) Other views of the same content: - Index only, one entry per article: https://simulen.com/insights/llms.txt - RSS 2.0 feed with full content: https://simulen.com/insights/rss.xml - Article URLs with publication dates: https://simulen.com/insights/sitemap.xml - Human-readable listing with filters: https://simulen.com/insights/ - Site guide for agents: https://simulen.com/llms.txt ## Articles - [S is for Sovereignty](https://simulen.com/insights/s-is-for-sovereignty/) (Akis Tsekouras · Strategy · 2026-06-22): Surviving the AI singularity is no longer a matter of political pride for Europe; reclaiming sovereignty over models, data, and silicon is a matter of survival. - [You either win or you lose (learning optional)](https://simulen.com/insights/you-either-win-or-you-lose-learning-optional/) (Akis Tsekouras · Leadership · 2026-06-09): More often than not, you plainly lose and learn precisely nothing. - [From punch cards to tell-n-code](https://simulen.com/insights/from-punch-cards-to-tell-n-code/) (Akis Tsekouras · Data · 2026-05-29): From punch cards to BASIC to a small army of coding agents: every step made the human-machine interface a little kinder. The latest jump is astonishing — but it is evolution, not revolution, and it still needs an engineer behind it. - [More is different: my useless PhD just became relevant](https://simulen.com/insights/my-useless-phd-just-became-relevant/) (Akis Tsekouras · Data · 2026-05-22): Twenty years after a doctorate in complex-systems modelling stopped being good dinner-party conversation, the word at its heart — emergence — has become the word of the decade in AI. - [Some of your people must hate you](https://simulen.com/insights/some-of-your-people-must-hate-you/) (Akis Tsekouras · Leadership · 2026-05-15): If everyone finds you great, you are not actually managing. - [The mortal sin](https://simulen.com/insights/the-mortal-sin/) (Akis Tsekouras · Leadership · 2026-05-06): Dotted reporting lines should not exist. Ever. - [The pay transparency directive nobody seems to be reading](https://simulen.com/insights/the-pay-transparency-directive-nobody-seems-to-be-reading/) (Akis Tsekouras · People · 2026-05-06): The EU Pay Transparency Directive becomes binding on 7 June 2026, and most employers are nowhere near ready. - [Traditional consulting will die by PowerPoint](https://simulen.com/insights/traditional-consulting-will-die-by-powerpoint/) (Akis Tsekouras · Strategy · 2026-05-05): AI will not kill consulting; PowerPoint is already taking care of that. - [The surprising road to better decisions: unconditional transparency](https://simulen.com/insights/the-surprising-road-to-better-decisions-unconditional-transparency/) (Akis Tsekouras · Leadership · 2020-06-27): Why leaders should share by default, withhold only when necessary, and use transparency to improve decisions. - [How to fix a Ferrari engine on the run](https://simulen.com/insights/how-to-fix-a-ferrari-engine-on-the-run/) (Akis Tsekouras · Delivery · 2017-06-06): A practical view of distressed project recovery when the project cannot simply stop. - [The People manifesto](https://simulen.com/insights/the-people-manifesto/) (Akis Tsekouras · People · 2016-11-13): A manifesto for graceful workplaces that put people before structures and processes. - [The Planning Fallacy](https://simulen.com/insights/the-planning-fallacy/) (Akis Tsekouras · Delivery · 2015-08-31): Why deterministic planning fails in uncertain systems, and how practitioners can plan with humility. - [Big data and the bottom-up malevolence](https://simulen.com/insights/big-data-and-the-bottom-up-malevolence/) (Akis Tsekouras · Data · 2014-10-10): Big data creates value only when it starts with the business problem, not the dataset. - [Playful leadership: The fun way to effectiveness](https://simulen.com/insights/playful-leadership-the-fun-way-to-effectiveness/) (Akis Tsekouras · Leadership · 2014-08-04): What parenting can teach leaders about playfulness, trust, and healthier teams. - [The Lost Art of Business Symbiosis](https://simulen.com/insights/the-lost-art-of-business-symbiosis/) (Akis Tsekouras · Strategy · 2014-07-26): How interconnected business ecosystems make collaborative value creation more powerful than local optimisation. ## Full text Every article below is the author's Markdown source, unabridged. --- ### S is for Sovereignty URL: https://simulen.com/insights/s-is-for-sovereignty/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Strategy Published: 2026-06-22 Reading time: 2 min # S is for Sovereignty I have the very special privilege of being Greek, born and raised in the country where Western Civilisation was also born and raised. For most of my life, the West meant one thing: a settled alliance between Europe and the United States, so stable that my generation grew up treating it as a universal constant. Then, over the past couple of years, the romance ended. A US administration turned inward and decided Europe was the mother of all evil. It went so far as to float the idea of annexing Greenland from a sitting ally. And this would make for interesting times for Europe, even if we were not living in an exponential era. But we are: our species is attempting its largest techno-developmental leap yet, an AI-driven singularity, and Europe is dependent for nearly all of it. Dependent on an openly hostile United States not only for its frontier models, but even for the dull office software running every ministry and mid-sized firm on the continent. Dependent, most importantly though, for the silicon and the datacentres that decide who competes and who watches. If that sounds abstract, look at this month. On a Friday evening, a single letter from the US government barred every foreign national on Earth from Mythos-class, Anthropic's frontier models—the company's own non-American staff included. Unable to filter the planet by passport, Anthropic switched these models off for everyone, worldwide, within hours. No warning and no appeal. A frontier tool vanished from every desk that relied on it, with a pretty terrifying off-switch openly demonstrated. If Europe is to survive the AI singularity, we need to urgently restore our sovereignty across a number of domains: * **AI frontier models:** Invest heavily in open source, even if it means building upon the Chinese open-weights frontier models. They are not Mythos-class, but they are no more than 6 months behind. * **Strategic data infrastructure:** Create sovereign solutions to offset the full operational dependence in key strategic areas such as the military, energy infrastructure, and payments. * **Silicon and datacentres:** Urgently increase on-soil datacentre capacity and seek alternative or complementary channels for actual silicon across the board (CPU / GPU / RAM). Sovereignty for Europe is no longer a matter of political pride. It is a matter of actual survival. --- ### You either win or you lose (learning optional) URL: https://simulen.com/insights/you-either-win-or-you-lose-learning-optional/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Leadership Published: 2026-06-09 Reading time: 2 min # You either win or you lose (learning optional) *"I never lose; I either win or I learn."* - cliché alert. More often than not, **you plainly lose, and you learn precisely nothing.** Nada. Null. **Winning is excellent.** It is the validation that your cognitive model maps nicely onto the world, it increases our dopamine and, as such, it feels good. Actually, winning is designed to feel good since the winning posture constituted a major evolutionary advantage. **Losing, conversely, is plain painful.** The corporate reflex to a loss is the post-mortem. A small army of managers trying to magically transform losing into some kind of golden knowledge for the future, a lesson learned. The **hidden ultra-powerful hypothesis** here is that business is a clean laboratory where **"root cause" exists and can be found**. This silently assumes a linear causality where action A causes disaster B. Nonlinear dynamics have shown that this is fantasy: all interesting nonlinear systems (which pretty much include all human-touched systems) are deeply geared towards **multi-causality**, where multiple different causes trigger multiple different effects, sometimes with interesting feedback loops between causes and effects. Essentially reality, or at least any **meaningfully juicy part of reality**, is kind of **resistant to simple root cause analysis.** Therefore, humans being the relentless pattern-seeking engines that we are, **we are seeing patterns even when there are none**. And the **lesson you extract is many times the wrong one**: you decide you lost the bid because the presentation lacked technical depth while, sometimes, you actually lost because the buyer plays paddle with your competitor. So you over-complicate the next pitch for no reason. Some reflection after a small or big loss is by all means necessary, as well as processing the sheer pain (and ego slap) of loss. However, **over-analyzing,** or even worse, **romanticizing loss, is plain useless.** And, sometimes, it leads to **over-correcting on fully inconsequential variables**, throwing good money after bad money. **We either win or we lose, and sometimes we get useful lessons out of both. Sometimes not.** --- ### From punch cards to tell-n-code URL: https://simulen.com/insights/from-punch-cards-to-tell-n-code/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Data Published: 2026-05-29 Reading time: 3 min # From punch cards to tell-n-code Just one generation of scientific computing people before me had the genuine, almost magical experience of punch cards. Each command typed onto a stiff paper card; the cards stacked into a deck; the deck fed to a machine that read the holes and, some hours later, told you whether you had fumbled card number forty-three. Miss a single column, and you queued for the next slot to try again. I missed that era by a hair. My own start was an Amstrad CPC 464: a green screen, a tape recorder for storage, and my first program, written in BASIC. You typed a line, the machine ran it, and if it broke it told you so on the spot. After the punch-card stories I had grown up on, this felt like science fiction. Then came the rest. Fortran 77, then Fortran 90, then C, then C++, then Java, then Objective C, then you name it. Every step in that sequence did the same quiet thing: it made the interface between human and machine a little less cumbersome, a little more intuitive, and a little more focused on the actual problem I was trying to solve, rather than on describing that problem in terms the machine could digest. With each language, the machine met me a bit closer to where I already stood. Today I am writing a new schema-free SaaS platform, Metasentio, with a small army of Claude Code and OpenAI Codex agents, coordinated through a proprietary architecture and conventions framework, and project managed through Linear. I describe what I want; the agents write, test, and revise; I decide, correct, and steer. Call it tell-n-code: the point of contact has moved almost entirely onto my side of the table. Is it different? You bet. Is it revolutionary? Here I will disappoint the headline writers. The jump in raw productivity sits somewhere between a hundredfold and a thousandfold, and yet I would still call this an amazingly potent evolution rather than a revolution. For anyone who once wrote assembly and then discovered that C existed (and then Java, and then you name it), the shock was much the same in kind, if not in size. We have been here before. We just keep arriving faster. What we are holding now is, in my view, the most capable human-machine interface ever built. Does it make work on complex code faster? Absolutely. Does it let anyone write a proper piece of software? Absolutely not. The "vibe coding" mania is, for now, plain fantasy. Unless you understand how complex architectures fit together, unless you can stand up a properly secured Linux VM, unless you can make the project decisions that actually hold up over time, what comes out the other end is a toy. A toy carrying an astonishing amount of technical debt, and one that will die on its first real push to production. Period. So yes, AI is transforming how software engineers work, in frankly world-altering ways. But the engineers will survive. Their mode of thinking, their grasp of how multi-layered systems behave under real load, their ability to instruct an LLM precisely enough to get something real: none of that is replaceable. The interface has changed beyond recognition. The need for someone who understands what sits behind it has not. At least for now. --- ### More is different: my useless PhD just became relevant URL: https://simulen.com/insights/my-useless-phd-just-became-relevant/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Data Published: 2026-05-22 Reading time: 6 min # More is different: my useless PhD just became relevant For the better part of twenty years, my PhD was the most beautiful useless thing I owned. It surfaced at dinner parties, occasionally, when someone made the mistake of asking what I had studied. I would watch the eyes glaze over somewhere around the third sentence, and we would both agree, silently and with some relief, to talk about something else instead. A doctorate in the kind of complex-systems modelling that has no obvious application to anything is a conversational cul-de-sac; a line on a CV that makes people assume you are either very clever or faintly unemployable, and often both. Here, roughly, is what it was about. Take a unit so stupid it barely deserves the name. It obeys three rules and three rules only: it eats B, it is eaten by C, and it leaves A alone. That is the entire intelligence of the thing. Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper beats rock; cyclic dominance, in the jargon. No memory. No strategy. No idea that anything exists beyond its immediate neighbours. Then you take a few million of these idiots, scatter them across a grid, and let them eat one another for a few million rounds. And here is the part that kept me up at night, in the good way. What comes out is not noise. What comes out is order: gorgeous, rotating spiral waves, structure nested inside structure, patterns that hold their logic at whatever scale you choose to zoom into. Nothing in the recipe mentions spirals. Nobody wrote "form a spiral" into the rules; there is no line of code, no instruction, no plan anywhere that contains the word. The spirals are simply there, the moment the population is large enough, as though several million brainless dots had quietly agreed on a shape none of them was ever told about. Let me get it out there: **what I spent those years watching is the single most unsettling idea I have ever worked with, and it has a name: emergence. Behaviour that is nowhere in the parts, yet unavoidable in the whole.** The word is honest about itself. *Emerge* comes from the Latin *emergere*, to rise out of, to come up out of something you were submerged in. That is exactly the sensation of watching it happen: order rising out of the soup, uninvited, fully formed. And it is not a fringe idea, nor a recent one. In 1972, the physicist Philip Anderson, who would go on to a Nobel, wrote a short and now famous essay with a title that says the whole thing in three words: *More Is Different*. His point was deceptively simple. A large amount of some simple thing is not merely more of that thing; past a certain scale, it becomes something else entirely, governed by laws you could never have read off the behaviour of a single part. Water is not a wet molecule. A brain is not a clever neuron. The whole knows things the pieces never encoded. That is the territory my useless PhD lived in. ## Then the word turned up in my feed I had made my peace with the irrelevance. I had moved on to organisations, to people, to projects that fail at two hundred miles an hour. And then, over the last couple of years, I started seeing my old word everywhere, in a field I had nothing to do with. In 2022, a group of researchers led by Jason Wei published a paper titled, almost cheekily, *Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models*. The claim was that as you scale these models up, certain abilities that are simply absent in the smaller versions appear, more or less suddenly, in the larger ones: multi-step arithmetic, following instructions in languages the small models flailed at, chains of reasoning nobody had explicitly trained. Below some size, nothing. Above it, the ability is just there. And, tellingly, they reached straight back to Anderson for their definition. Same word. Same 1972 essay. Quantitative change tipping into qualitative change. More is different. I will admit I felt a small, petty thrill. My cul-de-sac had an exit after all. ## The honest part, before the exciting part Now, the voice in my head that spent years in seminar rooms is obliged to say something inconvenient, because the story is not as clean as the headlines made it. In 2023, a team from Stanford published a sharp reply with an even cheekier title: *Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?* Their argument was that the dramatic, cliff-edge jumps were partly an artefact of how we measure. Score a task all-or-nothing, and gradual underlying progress looks like a sudden miracle; score it more gently, and the cliff flattens into a ramp. The claim landed hard enough that a US congressional committee cheerfully wrote that emergence had been "debunked". It had not. Two things are worth keeping in view. First, the original authors had already conceded, in print, that harsh metrics can dress up steady gains as sudden leaps; the critique was anticipated, not fatal. Second, and more importantly, the smooth, well-behaved metrics were found *after* the capabilities showed up, never before. Which leaves the genuinely frightening question entirely untouched: can anyone tell you, in advance, what a system of the next size up will be able to do? The answer remains a confident, well-funded no. And here is where the physicist in me gets stubborn. Anderson's emergence was never a claim about the sharpness of the jump. A cliff and a ramp are an argument about the shape of a graph. The thing that matters, the thing that has frightened me since I was twenty-six, is the *novelty*: a capability that was not in the recipe, that you could not have deduced from the parts, arriving simply because the system got big enough. Whether it arrives in a leap or a long climb is a footnote. More is different either way. ## Why this is worse than what I already believed A while back I wrote that planning, for the most part, does not work; that complex systems are chaotic, and that no amount of detail about the starting conditions lets you forecast where such a system will end up. Heisenberg, Poincaré, the stubbornly unforecastable weather. I stand by every word. Emergence is the more disturbing cousin of that idea, and I had rather hoped to keep it on a lattice where it belonged. Chaos tells you that you cannot predict the *path* a complex system will take. Emergence tells you that you cannot predict its *repertoire*: not merely where it will go, but what kinds of things it will turn out to be able to do at all. Not the trajectory; the inventory. With my spirals, that was a delight, because the worst an unexpected pattern could do was sit there being beautiful and crash my simulation overnight. We are now building systems vastly larger and vastly less legible than anything I ever simulated, wiring them into the middle of everything, and discovering their repertoire the way I discovered my spirals: by running the thing and seeing what shows up. So, after twenty years, my useless PhD is finally, unmistakably relevant. The dinner-party cul-de-sac opened onto the main road of the decade. I am, I confess, quite thrilled about this. I am also, for the first time since I left the lab, a little afraid of my own subject. Excited. And scared. Mostly scared. --- ### Some of your people must hate you URL: https://simulen.com/insights/some-of-your-people-must-hate-you/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Leadership Published: 2026-05-15 Reading time: 2 min # Some of your people must hate you I have managed a few hundred people over the last two decades. Some love me and would work with me anytime, anyplace. Some are fine with me. And some hate my guts and, genuinely, think I am the worst of the worst. In the beginning, that last group was devastating. I was working hard to be a good manager, I cared about my teams and I was pretty sure that, with enough effort and thought, everyone would come around. They did not. Then, as the teams I ran got larger and more complex, the obvious finally dawned: it is not only acceptable for some of your people to hate you, it is necessary. Because, the awkward truth of the matter is that if everyone finds you great, you are not actually managing. You are not taking the hard calls, or you do not have a solid set of principles, or you are not following them consistently. The universally loved manager is, almost by definition, the inconsequential manager. Real decisions cost something to someone. Promoting John means not promoting Anne. Killing a project means disappointing the people who built it. Holding the line on quality means saying "no" to the colleague who wanted a shortcut. Keeping equity and meritocracy means sometimes letting people go. Every one of these decisions earns you people who will resent you, sometimes for years. And that is fine because that is the job. So stop optimising for being liked. Do what you think is right, aligned with your values, consistently. The people who matter, the ones you actually want with you, will follow. The rest will not, and this is fine. Being a manager is, unfortunately, not a congeniality award. If you really want to make everyone happy all the time, you should probably be selling ice cream. --- ### The mortal sin URL: https://simulen.com/insights/the-mortal-sin/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Leadership Published: 2026-05-06 Reading time: 2 min # The mortal sin Twenty years of organisational design work, in companies large and small, across more geographies than I care to count, and I have developed one clear allergy: **dotted reporting lines**. I consider them the mortal sin of org design. Dotted lines should not exist. **Ever**. I know the temptation. You have a global function (compliance / finance / IT) that needs some grip on local teams; a project leader who needs to direct people from other departments; a centre of excellence that wants influence without owning headcount. The dotted line feels like a clever compromise: not quite a boss, but more than a colleague. It is a compromise alright; just not a clever one. Here is what dotted reporting actually does, despite all the good intentions of those who reach for it: - **It creates confusion.** Two managers, two priorities, two sets of expectations; the unfortunate person at the bottom of the dotted line ends up spending more energy on internal politics than on the actual work. - **It diffuses accountability.** When two managers are responsible, no manager is responsible; performance issues quietly slip between the cracks, and so do the people working under them. - **It kills the internal client / service provider model.** A dotted line pretends to formalise a relationship that should, in healthy organisations, be governed by clear service expectations. Instead of a clean provider-customer dynamic, you get a muddled hybrid that satisfies no one. - **It adds unnecessary layers of management and friction.** Every dotted line is a meeting that wasn't needed, an alignment exercise nobody asked for, a status update sent to one manager too many. So, what to do instead? If a role genuinely serves the "dotted manager's" organisation, treat it as exactly that: a service relationship. Set clear expectations, define the deliverables, agree on KPIs and SLAs, and let the solid line do its job. The internal client gets what they need; the service provider has one boss; everyone knows where they stand. If you cannot articulate the service expectations clearly enough to write them down, the dotted line was never the answer; you had a fuzzy thinking problem disguised as an org design problem. Next time you sit down to design an organisation, set design principle number one: no dotted lines allowed here. The rest will follow. --- ### The pay transparency directive nobody seems to be reading URL: https://simulen.com/insights/the-pay-transparency-directive-nobody-seems-to-be-reading/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: People Published: 2026-05-06 Reading time: 6 min # The pay transparency directive nobody seems to be reading You run a company in Europe. Or you sit on the board of one. Or you lead HR for it. You have probably heard, somewhere in the lower-priority corner of your inbox, that the EU is doing something about pay transparency. Sometime. Probably. There is a directive, you think, with a deadline, you think, in some month that is not the current one. Your HR head sent you a note about it last year. Or maybe it was the year before. If that is, more or less, where you are, this article is for you. Let me get it out there: **the EU Pay Transparency Directive becomes binding on 7 June 2026, applies to virtually every employer with employees in the EU regardless of size, and the vast majority of companies are nowhere near ready.** That date is, depending on when you read this, a few weeks away or already behind you. ### What it actually says Directive (EU) 2023/970 was adopted in 2023, and EU member states have until 7 June 2026 to transpose it into national legislation. Some countries will make it; several openly will not, with Estonia signalling delay, the Netherlands aiming for January 2027, and France struggling to land a draft bill in time. None of this delay buys you anything; the European Commission has reaffirmed that all member states, including those running late, are expected to comply by the June deadline, and the directive applies as soon as your local law is in force. The headline obligations are reporting ones, and they kick in at one hundred employees. Employers with two hundred and fifty or more must report annually from 7 June 2027; those with one hundred and fifty to two hundred and forty-nine report every three years from the same date; those with one hundred to one hundred and forty-nine report every three years starting in 2031. If a pay gap of five per cent or more is identified that cannot be justified by objective, gender-neutral criteria, the employer must take remedial action; if not resolved within six months, a joint pay assessment with employee representatives is mandatory. Penalties include fines and uncapped compensation for workers who suffer damage as a result of an infringement. So far, so manageable, you might think; we have ninety-eight employees, we are exempt, we move on. You would be wrong. The transparency obligations apply to every employer regardless of size: salary ranges must be disclosed in job advertisements or before interview, gender-neutral job titles and recruitment processes are required, asking candidates about pay history is prohibited, pay secrecy clauses are banned, and employees have a right to information about their pay and that of colleagues doing comparable work. And then there is the bit almost nobody is talking about: where an employer has failed to comply with pay transparency obligations, the burden of proof shifts to the employer to prove there was no discrimination, unless the breach was manifestly unintentional and minor. Not to the employee to prove there was. To you to prove there was not. ### Why this has been underestimated Three reasons, mostly. - **The threshold delusion.** Companies under one hundred employees are reading the reporting threshold and concluding that the directive does not concern them. It does. The transparency, recruitment, pay structure and burden-of-proof rules apply in full. A fifty-person company with long-tenured staff, a few aggressive negotiators in senior roles, and pay decisions made over coffee with the founder, has an enormous problem. They just have not realised it yet. - **Pay archaeology.** In most companies I have worked with, pay is not a system. It is a sediment. An employee hired in 2019 earns less than one hired in 2023 because the labour market shifted and nobody re-baselined. Someone who pushed hard at the offer stage earns fifteen per cent more than a colleague doing identical work who did not. Promotions that should have come with full re-banding came with five per cent and a friendly handshake. Multiply this across a few hundred people, and you have a pay structure that no objective, gender-neutral set of criteria can justify after the fact, because there were no criteria. There were just decisions. - **The HR-issue framing.** Boards have been treating this as a compliance matter, alongside GDPR refreshers and code-of-conduct trainings. It is not. Once your salary bands are public, your competitors see them. Once your gender pay gap is public, your candidates see it. Once your pay criteria are documented, every promotion becomes a defensible or indefensible act on the record. This is not a checkbox; it is a shift in how the company is run. ### What to do, starting now - **Run a trial pay gap analysis before June.** You do not have time to do it well after the fact. You have one payroll cycle, and you need to know where the indefensible gaps are while you can still remediate them quietly. The aim is not to publish a perfect number; it is to find out what your actual number is and what story it tells. - **Build an actual job architecture.** Roles, levels, salary bands, defined criteria for movement between them. Not a beautiful document; a real, used, navigable structure. If your current pay logic cannot be drawn on a single page and explained to a sceptical employee in ten minutes, it is not a structure. It is a sediment. - **Document the criteria, then live by them.** Skills, responsibility, working conditions, performance dimensions; every euro of pay difference traceable to one of them. This is the hard part. Not writing the criteria; following them when the next senior hire walks in and demands fifteen per cent over the band. - **Train your managers.** Every line manager will, within a year, face a question they have never faced before: "Can you tell me how my pay was decided, and how it compares to others doing the same work?". If the answer is a panicked email to HR, you have a problem. - **Map the legal exposure jurisdiction by jurisdiction.** This is not one law; it is twenty-seven. Local thresholds, response timelines, definitions of pay, reporting formats and penalty regimes already differ meaningfully between member states. If you operate in three countries, you have three problems. This is the kind of work we have been quietly preparing for at Simulen. Not because we love directives, but because we believe pay transparency is one of those rare regulatory shifts that, done well, leaves a company better than it found it. Better job architecture, better hiring, better retention, fewer of the conversations no manager wants to have. Done badly, it leaves you with fines, litigation, and a workforce that has just discovered, in detail, why they are paid less than the person at the next desk. If you want to know roughly where you stand, we have built a free readiness assessment at [https://ptd.simulen.com](https://ptd.simulen.com). It will not solve your problem; it will tell you, honestly, how big it is. The rest is work, and the rest is interesting. The deadline is in June. The clock has not stopped ticking just because you have not been listening. --- ### Traditional consulting will die by PowerPoint URL: https://simulen.com/insights/traditional-consulting-will-die-by-powerpoint/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Strategy Published: 2026-05-05 Reading time: 5 min # Traditional consulting will die by PowerPoint You are running a team. Or a project. Or, God help you, a full-blown transformation programme. A familiar procession arrives. Senior partners for the courtship. Clever slides for the seduction. Then a small army of bright, exhausted twenty-somethings to do the actual work. The deck lands with the satisfying thud of corporate inevitability. There are boxes. There are arrows. There is a maturity curve. Possibly a North Star (because, apparently, we are all sailors now). Then the consultants leave. And your team inherits a plan they did not build, cannot run, and do not particularly believe in. Let me get it out there: **traditional consulting will not be killed by AI because AI is smarter than consultants; it will be killed because AI exposes how much of traditional consulting was theatre.** That sounds harsh. Good. It should. For decades, consulting firms sold scarcity: access to smart people, structured thinking, benchmarks, persuasive communication, and the mystical art of turning messy business problems into 37 slides of highly billable inevitability. Some of that was valuable. Some still is. But a humongous chunk of the model relied on the simple fact that clients could not produce the artefacts themselves. Now they can. AI writes "consulteese" better than most consultants. It can generate a market scan, structure the options, invent a perfectly defensible operating model, produce an implementation roadmap, and add the obligatory "key considerations" slide in the time it takes a senior associate to locate last quarter's template. Is it always right? Alas, no. Is it good enough to destroy the pricing power of generic PowerPoint? Absolutely. Generic slides are now cheap. Suspiciously cheap. Almost offensively cheap. And when the wrapper becomes cheap, the value has to move somewhere else. ### The old pyramid is wobbling The traditional consulting model was built like a medieval castle: a few nobles at the top, many labourers at the bottom, and a moat made of brand, jargon, and procurement inertia. The pyramid made economic sense when analysis was manual, information was fragmented, and formatting slides at 2am was considered a rite of passage rather than a labour-rights documentary waiting to happen. AI breaks that bargain. You no longer need ten juniors to produce the first draft of the work. You need one experienced person who knows which questions matter, which assumptions are nonsense, and where the bodies are buried. The value shifts from "can you produce output?" to "can you judge which output matters?". That is a completely different game. There are, of course, exceptions. Regulated work. Deep technical domains. Sensitive restructurings. Board-level conflicts. Moments where independence, discretion, and hard-won pattern recognition matter. Consulting *per se* is not dead. But the old machine is. The machine that sells senior trust and delivers junior effort. The machine that charges premium fees for reheated frameworks. The machine that behaves as if a beautifully animated deck is a proxy for actual change. It is not. It never was. We simply had fewer alternatives. ### What clients will stop paying for The next few years will be uncomfortable for firms that confuse activity with value. The "deck economy" (my term; ugly, but useful) is being repriced in real time. Clients will still pay; they will just pay for different things. - **Judgement, not synthesis.** AI can summarise almost anything; it can also summarise gibberish with impressive confidence, which is, frankly, very consultant-like. What clients need is someone who can say: "this is the answer; this part is noise; this assumption will fail by week three." Judgement comes from experience, scars, and having been wrong often enough to spot danger early. - **Implementation, not performance.** A strategy that cannot survive contact with your finance team, your sales incentives, your data quality, or your middle management is not a strategy; it is decorative stationery. The Greek word *praxis* means action, practice, doing. Consulting needs more *praxis* and less theatre: people who build the dashboard, fix the governance, train the managers, reset the cadence, and stay in the room when the trade-offs get awkward. - **Capability transfer, not dependency.** The worst consulting engagements create learned helplessness. The consultant becomes the priesthood; the client becomes a spectator in her own organisation. Good work leaves the client stronger. Your team should understand the model, own the process, and be able to run the thing without summoning another expensive ritual every quarter. - **Expert networks, not standing armies.** High-skilled professionals are increasingly choosing independence. Former partners, operators, data scientists, HR specialists, sales leaders, programme directors; they do not all want the big-firm machine anymore. They form loose networks, team up for larger pieces of work, then disperse. Like jazz musicians. Less payroll cathedral; more expert ensemble. - **Accountability, not advice.** Advice without accountability is just a recommendation wearing a tie. Clients are tired of paying fees regardless of whether the work lands. They want partners who stay close enough to feel the consequences; people willing to put some skin in the game, not point at a roadmap from a safe distance. This is the paradox: AI makes advice abundant, so humans must become more useful. Not more polished. Not more fluent. More *useful*. The consulting firm of the future will be smaller, sharper, and closer to the work. It will look less like an army and more like a surgical team: a few core people who understand the whole case, plus the exact specialists needed at the exact moment. No bench to feed. No pyramid to justify. No incentive to turn every problem into a six-month mobilisation. That, more or less, is the bet behind Simulen: a small core team that does the actual work, augmented by 20+ international subject-matter experts who plug in when their expertise is needed and step out when it is not. Consulting beyond the deck: think, build, run. The deck is not dead. But as a business model? Good riddance. --- ### The surprising road to better decisions: unconditional transparency URL: https://simulen.com/insights/the-surprising-road-to-better-decisions-unconditional-transparency/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Leadership Published: 2020-06-27 Reading time: 3 min # The surprising road to better decisions: unconditional transparency You are running a team. Or a project. You have one level of staff reporting to you. Or several. And clients / partners / providers. And you share information with them. Or withhold information. Because you have heard that "information is power". And you believed it. Or (hopefully) not. If you are there, or have been there, wondering how much to share with the team, I would like to welcome you to the wonderful world of unconditional transparency. Let me get it out there: you should share (almost) everything with (almost) everyone. There, I wrote it. Before I explain the why and how, let me explain the "almost" - you should share everything with everyone, unless: - There is a legal / contractual / regulatory reason not to; non-disclosure agreements, anti-trust legislation, HR constraints are some of the cases where non-disclosure of specific pieces of information is mandatory. - The information is closely related to the intellectual property of your organization and sharing it with people outside the organization's "circle of trust" could jeopardize critical assets. - Sharing the information could potentially harm specific individuals. These exceptions, generic as they might seem, fortunately apply only to a tiny part of the information we handle during our everyday work. How should we handle the vast majority of information that flows through our hands and is not filtered through the above cases? Well, share it. Here are some tips: - Establish unconditional transparency as a team value and norm; promise to be fully transparent with everyone and ask your team members to commit to that as well. - Explain up-front the exceptions to this rule as described above. - Don't sugarcoat - always be polite and professional but give the facts as they are; I usually say to people up-front that "I can either be sweet or useful, it's extremely hard to be both at the same time"; surprisingly, most people will opt for useful. - For every significant decision that you make, explain the rationale to the team and provide all relevant facts that led to the decision. - Give full permission to the team to challenge your decisions based on facts; go one step further by following the McKinsey example of promoting this "permission to dissent" to an "obligation to dissent". - Whenever you circulate a document to a select group of people, challenge yourself on why the rest of the team "does not need to know"; a typical example is the status reports we produce for the senior stakeholders of a project - unless there are sensitive information, why shouldn't we communicate to the whole team? Even if there are pieces of the report that are restricted (e.g. sensitive financials), why can't you share a sanitized version of the report? - Always think "information asymmetry"; how can you ever expect to have meaningful problem solving and decision discussions with your team if you don't share the same fact base? A manager being "in the know" talking with a team being "in the dark" is an obvious recipe for disastrous group thinking. - There is nothing indicating trust more than full transparency; people really appreciate the trust and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, react amazingly to it. So, next time that you think "hold back information", think again. Instead, try switching your default posture to "share by default, only hold back when absolutely necessary" and good things will happen to you and your teams. --- ### How to fix a Ferrari engine on the run URL: https://simulen.com/insights/how-to-fix-a-ferrari-engine-on-the-run/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Delivery Published: 2017-06-06 Reading time: 5 min # How to fix a Ferrari engine on the run Sometimes people ask me what we do at Simulen. And I say, well, what we do is pretty straightforward: we fix engines. Of Ferraris. While they are running in the final lap of the world championship. At 200 mph. And in essence, this is exactly what we do. We fix high stakes projects that are facing distress. And of course, we have no idea what is wrong with the project beforehand and we don't have the luxury of freezing the project in order to diagnose it. And it needs to be fixed yesterday. So, when is a project in distress? There is a very wide range of definitions in the relevant literature but, in our view, a project is in distress when one (or usually several) of the following conditions exist: - The project has material deviations (usually of 20% or more) in schedule and / or budget execution or material deviations in scope / velocity when employing agile methods. - The project has missed, or is in the process of missing, one or more key milestones. - Although there has been one or more re-definitions of the schedule baseline, the project is still drifting. - The project sponsor, or other key business stakeholders, are markedly dissatisfied with the progress of the project. - The team morale and the team expectations from the project outcome are unusually low. Let's suppose that you are the sponsor of a project or program that meets these criteria. In this case, and especially if the project is mission-critical, it constitutes a concern that most probably keeps you up at night. What should you do? - **Align with the key stakeholders:** The first essential step is to ensure that all key stakeholders understand that the project is in distress and are willing to take bold actions to recover it. In some cases, it might surface that the project no longer serves its initial purpose and, given its state, the business might decide to terminate it. - **Bring in some help:** Against common wisdom, even senior and capable people within the organization cannot effectively recover a distressed project. The main reason is that a project in distress carries a heavy emotional baggage that can lead to unnecessary and harmful blame games. Furthermore, to bring the project back to normalcy, a number of decisions might need to be taken that could have significant political implications within the organization. For both reasons, an external recovery team is always preferable since it can bring in a neutral view, experience from other recovery efforts and the analytical rigor required for an evidence-based analysis. - **Once you start, act quickly:** Once the diagnosis and recovery effort is underway, projects tend to come to a halt, with everyone involved waiting for the inevitable restructuring. Therefore, once the project is marked as "under recovery" the diagnosis and the recovery roadmap should be completed as soon as reasonably possible. In our experience, this time should not exceed two weeks. - **Empower the recovery team:** The recovery effort should have the most senior sponsorship possible, typically the manager of the project sponsor of the project in distress. This is necessary in order to facilitate difficult decision making and to ensure that the recovery effort gains the visibility and priority required. - **Balance "emergency mode" and "planned delivery":** In time critical projects, especially distressed ones, time is of the essence. Therefore, even a 2 week cease of the planned project activities might be fatal. In that sense, the recovery team, along with the tactical project management team, need to ensure that all planned project activities are performed while the situation is being accessed. - **Help the team score:** Among the numerous signs that a project is failing, the most prominent is team morale. When you get into a team room of a distressed project, you typically see a distressed team: overworked, disappointed, losing 3-0 at half time although they have given it all. The recovery team needs to do one thing right: give the project members a win, something to celebrate. Pick one important and troublesome item, be it a piece of requirements, a difficult test, a hard decision, and focus all the effort to get it done right within the two weeks of the diagnostic. This is the only way to build trust and a winning momentum; you will need them both going forward. - **Take a holistic view of the project status:** When you try to diagnose the root causes of the project distress, you need to take a holistic view. In Simulen, we try to understand the project under three different views: the Project Management and Governance View, the Project Content View and the Organizational Environment View. The first gives us an overview of what we can improve in terms of management, efficiency and effectiveness. The second shows any deficiencies in the actual delivery capabilities while the third unveils improvement opportunities in the overall organizational universe within which the project operates. - **Sometimes it is perfectly ok to quit:** In many cultures, we are brought up with the motto "real men don't quit". Well, sometimes, it is ok to be a not-so-real man and quit. The number one question that the recovery team needs to answer, usually within the first week of the engagement, is "should we move on with the project or not?". Sometimes, more often than one would imagine, the unemotional answer is a plain no. No, the business environment has changed, nobody really wants this project anymore and we just try to move on with it out of pure caprice and the notorious sunk cost bias. So, yes, you might want to quit now. If you have a project or program that keeps you up at night, talk to Simulen. We might be able to help. --- ### The People manifesto URL: https://simulen.com/insights/the-people-manifesto/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: People Published: 2016-11-13 Reading time: 3 min # The People manifesto In Simulen, we live the belief that our People are not "human resources" and they deserve a graceful workplace. Here is our manifesto that drives both our work and our organizational consulting practice: - **Right to a vision:** People have a right to a vision that is articulated in a clear and consistent narrative. People invest a significant part of their time and energy in their work and they need to be working towards a vision that they understand and find meaningful and aligned to their personal system of values. - **Driven by a moral compass:** Organizations have a soul and, as such, they need a moral compass. People in an organization need to have a common set of values and common cultural norms that they all respect. The leaders have the obligation to relentlessly live by, preach, teach and enforce the moral norms of their organization. - **Respect for People:** People are more important than organizations and they always take precedence. We do not believe in "client first" but in "our People first". People that are respectfully treated will give their very best both to the organization and to our clients. We respect and care for our People the exact same way we respect and care for our families. - **Our business is hiring:** The first and most important priority of our business is to identify, recruit, on-board and delight the right People. The right People are those that, first and foremost, share our values and vision; we hire for character and develop skill. - **Unconditional fairness:** Fairness is not optional, circumstantial or negotiable; fairness should be an unconditional cornerstone of our business. Fairness should be practiced towards our People, our clients, our providers and all our community. - **Full transparency:** All the inner workings of our organization should be fully transparent to all our People. Especially decisions that have impact on the values, vision and the well-being of our People should be made as openly and transparently as possible. If we hire People that we cannot endorse with our full trust, then our hiring practice is wrong. - **Liberty to perform:** Our People are mature and confident adults that should be supported to perform at their best, free from any artificial constrain. Fixed working schedules, mandatory office presence, strict organizational structures and audit-focused HR practices are examples of the industrial-age logic that is nowadays obsolete and ineffective. - **Once with us, always with us:** We invest our energy to recruit and work with the best People that we treat as family. Our People are talented individuals that work with us as part of their ongoing professional and personal journeys - as such, we actively encourage them to seek relevant opportunities for their development within and outside our organization, actively maintain strong relationships with them after graduating from our organization and actively welcome them back in any role that is relevant and useful to both them and the organization. If you feel that these principles resonate with your own values, we can help you build a humane workplace for your own People. --- ### The Planning Fallacy URL: https://simulen.com/insights/the-planning-fallacy/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Delivery Published: 2015-08-31 Reading time: 6 min # The Planning Fallacy If you are one of the business crowd, and especially at the senior level, you spend a monumental amount of your time involved in "planning" exercises: business planning, sales planning, production planning, project planning. And, as you very well know, it is time not well spent. Why? Because planning does not work - it is just a huge fallacy based on a whole complex of human psychological biases and misplaced assumptions! The good news is that we can indeed plan but we should always keep in mind the limited applicability of planning and adjust accordingly. ## Determinism and the faith in planning Whether we realize it or not, the thinking patterns of the Western civilization as we know them today, have been established during Renaissance by the likes of Isaac Newton, René Descartes and Pierre-Simon Laplace. These titanic figures of philosophy and science were the first to resurrect the Aristotelian image of a deterministic universe, firmly governed by a "cause-and-effect" discipline. So far reaching was the causality revelation, that it has not only dominated science for more than 300 years but it has also extended its dominance over everyday thinking and practice. One of the most significant implications of a deterministic way of thinking, is that the world is treated as a fully predictable game, where an exact knowledge of the initial conditions and the dynamics of the game at hand, would allow us to predict the future of the system and thus plan at any level of detail and for any time horizon. This assumption, which at first sounds familiar and common sense, is plain wrong - this is what we call the planning fallacy. ## Quanta, chaos and other daemons Determinism was first established by physicists and it was also first demolished by physicists. First strike came in 1927 by Werner Heisenberg through his "uncertainty principle". In essence, the uncertainty principle states that at the micro-level, the information required to locate a specific particle can never be fully obtained. This in turn means that, even if the dynamics of a microscopic system are fully understood, our inherent inability to establish the initial conditions will never allows us to truly predict its future. This principle has been the cornerstone of one of the most revolutionary scientific theories, commonly known as quantum mechanics. The second, and even heavier hit for determinism, came from the study of dynamical systems and particularly a very interesting class of dynamical systems called chaotic. Chaotic systems are non-linear systems where a small variation in the initial conditions leads to an exponentially diverging result over time. The first glimpse of such systems came in 1880 from Henry Poincare and, especially in the second half of the 20th century, chaotic systems came into focus in every practical domain of science - meteorology, astronomy, neuroscience, socials sciences, economics, chemistry and the list goes on and on. The key takeaway from chaos theory is that, even if we know the dynamics of a system, and even if we know the initial conditions with excellent accuracy, we can only forecast their behavior for very limited times, if at all. An excellent example is the weather whose forecast is so notoriously inaccurate, especially for larger time scales. ## Implications for project and business planning The above analysis only gives a background to the fact that every single planning practitioner understands: Planning, for the most part, does not work. We have all spent months of our lives trying to build the perfect project plan or the perfect business plan model, only to realize, unfortunately ex-post, that our well-engineered model failed to depict the future. Usually, it fails big time. How come? Well, both project and business planning are exercises that try to model and forecast real-world systems that are highly non-linear and, to a large extent, inherently unpredictable. On the other hand, there are certain activities, such as production planning, that are much more linear and their planning works in a much better way. Especially in project management, planning has been proven so difficult and fruitless, that we try to plan in a rolling or just-in-time manner (wave rolling planning / progressive elaboration). Even bolder approaches have also emerged such as extreme project management, a discipline that typically acknowledges the shortcomings of project planning and focuses on achieving value rather than trying to run a prescribed project recipe. ## Tips for practitioners In Simulen, through our everyday work with senior managers, we have distilled some good practices both for project and for business planning. ### #1 Identify the moving parts Whenever we are facing a business or project planning exercise, the first thing to do is identify the parts of the system to be modeled. For example, when we are preparing the business plan for a new venture, we would need to model sales revenue, production cost, sales cost, fixed / administrative cost. For each of these components, we would need to understand the level of detail that our model can dive into - typically, the revenue of a new business is really hard to forecast and the sales forecasts should be treated as "sales targets" / "sales aspirations". On the other hand, the cost side is, for most cases, much easier and much more linear to model. ### #2 Create scenarios for the high uncertainty parts For the moving parts of a model that are inherently less predictable, it makes sense to prepare scenarios instead of forecasts. So, when we enter a new market with a new product, it is virtually impossible to get any reasonable estimation of the sales - what we present is our best guess or, even more, the projection of our wishful thinking. It is thus much more useful to understand the different scenarios (best case, worst case) and to have a clear view of the critical numbers such as break-even points. ### #3 Communicate numbers for what they are When a startup reaches out for funding, they tend to show a superhuman confidence concerning their revenue forecasts. In our view, a clear communication strategy is much more beneficial - pinpointing the high risk / high uncertainty parts of a plan along with the alternatives for the different scenarios only shows a mature management team. ### #4 Perform cost-benefit analysis for the planning exercise It is not uncommon, especially in larger organizations, to see a policy for exhaustive business cases and for ultra-detailed implementation plans. Furthermore, the exhaustiveness of these planning artifacts is fully enforced even for initiatives of low risk / investment. It is thus very important for senior executives, to weigh carefully the effort involved in planning / forecasting. ### #5 Understand where planning / disciplined execution makes sense (and where it does not) When we are facing a problem that has been tackled before and that the solution can be clearly described, then rigorous planning and disciplined execution might be appropriate. However, when we are facing new problems, or disruptive solutions to long standing problems, then traditional wisdom might not make sense. For these cases, the manager should consider adding to his arsenal new tools such as the Lean Startup methodology when it comes to business planning or the Extreme Project management methodology when it comes to project management. These methodologies, along with the various agile IT development methodologies that are their natural development counterparties, have become the de facto standard in the bold new world of technology startups. Although the traditional corporate world shouldn't run and adopt them, we should definitely be aware of their merits. You can learn more about Simulen and how we help our clients through our insights and services. --- ### Big data and the bottom-up malevolence URL: https://simulen.com/insights/big-data-and-the-bottom-up-malevolence/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Data Published: 2014-10-10 Reading time: 2 min # Big data and the bottom-up malevolence I am kind of bored, even borderline annoyed, by the constant flux of big data gibberish and clichés coming our way - allegedly, big data is the new panacea that will help us automagically solve all the problems of every single business, not to mention mankind as a whole. Allegedly. It is true that data today is produced at an ever accelerating pace, and that these huge datasets are being handled by algorithms and systems of unprecedented sophistication. Surprisingly enough though, in most cases, big data brings very little actual business value. This is mainly due to what I call the "bottom-up malevolence". People solve problems in two ways: top-down or bottom-up. In the former, the problem solver constructs hypotheses, collects data-points that would confirm or invalidate these hypotheses and then reforms the hypotheses according to the evidence. In bottom-up thinking though, the problem solver attempts to construct the answer based solely on analysing the detailed evidence. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of corporate leaders fall into the ranks of top-down (or "big picture") thinkers. I believe that extracting value from big data is so notoriously challenging due to the mode of thinking of their operators and gatekeepers: data scientists, as well as their supporting technologists, are in most cases bottom-up thinkers. Their default mode of perceiving reality is through the analysis of details and the quest for recognising patterns within these details. However, useful as it might be, exploratory data analysis cannot really focus on business priorities or solve the problems that are truly important to the top management and the business at large. Therefore, whenever our clients come to us to help them "tame big data", we politely re-route the discussion to "what business problem are you trying to solve?". It is frustratingly common that, at the end of the discussion, we all realise that the data required to solve the actual business problem are not "big" at all! So, here is how can we fight the bottom-up malevolence: - Set actionable business targets; use the right data to serve these targets. - Collect only data that are meaningful; establishing a humongous data warehouse with all kinds of irrelevant data sets has never helped. - The head of analytics is primarily a business role; use a senior business executive with strong acumen and, ideally, a good understanding of technology and developed numeracy. - When it comes to hiring external help, work with firms that understand your business and have expertise in your particular industry; the myth of the "generalist consultant" that can solve all kinds of business / data problems is, in our view, just a myth. Big data are, indeed, the future of business - we just need the right leaders to help us figure them out. Akis Tsekouras is the managing director of Simulen, a consulting firm that helps companies around the world succeed. --- ### Playful leadership: The fun way to effectiveness URL: https://simulen.com/insights/playful-leadership-the-fun-way-to-effectiveness/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Leadership Published: 2014-08-04 Reading time: 3 min # Playful leadership: The fun way to effectiveness As a brand new parent, and a scientist at heart, I have spent the past year avidly reading parenting books, browsing parenting fora and, in general, diving into all parenting sources man has invented. During this exercise, I have come across a fantastic book titled "Playful Parenting" by Lawrence Cohen. In the author's words: Playful Parenting means joining children in their world of play, focusing on connection and confidence, giggling and roughhousing, and following your child's lead. This book beautifully advocates playfulness as a way to approach our children, make less and less use of our parenting authority, help children resolve their own internal conflicts and lead them to the desired behaviours. At the same time, the parent has the unique opportunity to re-discover his long forgotten playfulness and have sheer fun! As a management consultant, I could not help myself from drawing analogies to the management practices. One of the leadership types, considered an anathema for most managers, is the "paternalistic leader"; a paternalistic leader is typically a strong Type-A male that tightly controls and manages his team, "protecting" them from the outside world while, at the same time, expecting blind obedience and full conformity to his line of thinking. So, how can this dystopian paternalistic leader turn into a utopian playful leader? - **Join our teams in play:** Any team, and especially those that handle stressful projects, need a time-out, a clear outlet to dissipate heat and tension. In many organisational settings, these time-outs are pre-designed as "team bonding events", "team outings" and other formal occasions. We can however embed these moments of playfulness and relaxation into our everyday practice, making much more powerful use of them. Arrange morning coffees with the team outside the office premises, have lunch in nice places, chat about your weekends, share a joke as often as you can - encourage a playful, albeit professional, environment. - **Care about the team:** A playful leader truly cares about his team both as professionals and, most importantly, as human beings. The paternalistic principle of "taking care of our team" can foster trust and smooth out sources of conflict within a team. - **Give them a safe space to experiment:** The same way toddlers need a safe space to play and experiment with the world, so do our teams. In order for each individual to build on his or her skills and to develop a healthy self-confidence, the leader needs to provide plenty of opportunities for "getting out of the comfort zone" as well as enough tolerance to failure and encouragement for taking calculated risks. - **Re-discover your own playfulness:** The key ingredient to building a playful environment is for the leader to re-discover his own playfulness. Managing a team usually imposes an automatic premium on self-importance and on taking ourselves way too seriously. Therefore, a first step is to lighten up, allow space and time for being more silly than usual, take ourselves far less seriously than we do. It is a common misconception that being more relaxed with your team will lead to internal anarchy, chaos, inefficiency and, potentially, the end of civilisation as we know it! Well, it's not true. From my experience, our most successful projects where we did fantastic work that our client really loved, were projects performed with great teammates, in exotic cities and with our memories stamped with jokes, great dinners and the occasional drinks. So, when in doubt, lighten up! Akis Tsekouras is the managing director of Simulen, a consulting firm that helps companies around the world succeed. --- ### The Lost Art of Business Symbiosis URL: https://simulen.com/insights/the-lost-art-of-business-symbiosis/ Author: Akis Tsekouras Category: Strategy Published: 2014-07-26 Reading time: 11 min # The Lost Art of Business Symbiosis In recent years, and under the influence of a complexity explosion of business and technology, as well as the imperative for efficiency and competitiveness imposed by the ongoing financial crisis, we are witnessing a new powerful trend: The rise of symbiotic ecosystems of companies. These ecosystems are leveraging on both strategic and opportunistic synergies to improve their collective competitiveness, engaging in a new model of collaborative value co-creation. ## The Shareholder Value Maximisation Dogma If we were to single out one guiding principle that bears the most influence upon managers, especially top level ones, that would be the “shareholder value maximisation” principle. The shareholder value maximisation is, by law and substance, the “raison d’être” of any corporation. It requires from every corporate officer to act in such a way that her actions will maximise the “shareholder value”. Although this principle seems obvious, and to most managers self-evident, it is not. In fact, and counter-intuitive as that might sound, working towards shareholder value maximisation can, in many cases, lead to the exactly opposite result: destruction of value. ## The Industrial World vs. The Interconnected World To shed more light into the paradox of shareholder value maximization, we need to understand the contextual assumptions behind it. In a typical Industrial-age framework, each corporation is a self-contained entity that interacts with other entities, be it physical persons or other legal entities, and aims to maximize its short-term and long-term profitability and thus its own shareholder value. In that setting, optimizing the shareholder value can be very successfully achieved by “squeezing” the value appropriated by the other entities with which the corporation is interacting: customers, suppliers, even employees. Increasing the margin in sales, decreasing the labour cost, decreasing the margin of the suppliers: all these are effective tactics in the Industrial World where “shareholder value maximization” is king. In our post-industrial era, a lot of long-lived and glorified rules are swiftly becoming less and less relevant and, in certain cases, even flat misleading. This is the case for the shareholder value maximization as well. In the Industrial World, maximizing shareholder value could be performed within the insulated micro-environment of the company and the “side effects” of this maximization, be it on employees, suppliers or customers, were easily contained and managed. However, in the Interconnected World, the key assumption of “isolation” is no longer valid; thus, optimizing for value becomes a much larger and more complicated problem. ## Network connectivity The key characteristic of the era, the one that re-defines the business rulebook, is the concept of “connectivity”. In effect, companies are now operating in a complex network where each node is connected to a large number of other nodes, a property know as high connectivity. Moreover, the role of each connection is no longer static and well defined: a company that is our supplier in one project might very well be our partner in another or even our client in a third one. Furthermore, even the traditional role of the “employee” is now extended to include outsourcers, freelancers, near-shorers, off-shorers and the likes. This high connectivity, that is increasing exponentially along with the complexity of the social, financial and technological environment, is turning the idea of localized value maximization obsolete. In simple terms, trying to maximize value for one single node in an open and strongly interconnected system is next to impossible. Squeezing business value from the “neighbouring” nodes, through an essentially competitive process, creates unpredictable non-linear phenomena that, more often than not, lead to value destruction both at the node level and at the network level. ## Business symbiosis A fascinating way to create and appropriate value in our highly networked world is by embracing the concept of “business symbiosis”. The world symbiosis comes from Greek “συν-”, that denotes “with”, and “βίος” meaning “life”. Symbiosis is a term extensively used in ecology to describe two or more organisms that “live closely together” in a way that is typically advantageous to both counter-parties. Although symbiotic organisms tend to stick together, they can easily walk their separate ways if and when the need arises. Business symbiosis should not be considered a synonym for “strategic alliance”: strategic alliances are an old trick of the trade, as old as doing business itself, and is a key component or sub-category of symbiosis. However, the term “business symbiosis” encompasses a much larger and wider repertoire of business strategies and tactics. In essence, business symbiosis is about creating an environment of active collaboration with all the neighbouring nodes within our business network. This collaborative business neighbourhood should include our customers, our suppliers, our employees and, under certain conditions, even our most fierce competitors. The explicit aim of this symbiotic environment, is to jointly and collaboratively create more business value for all the nodes involved. In what follows we will explain how the idea of competition and conflict of interests can be smoothly accommodated within this framework. ## The “Split the pizza” vs. “Grow the pizza” dilemma Imagine a group of hungry people, with no special emotional ties between them, that are left with one medium sized pizza to eat. Social etiquette aside, all of them will try to secure for themselves the largest piece possible, alas leaving their colleagues with the smallest ones. This situation is the epitome of a competitive landscape and a setup that will produce conflict “by design”. The conflict in the above case rises from the description of the problem per se: in essence, we have a fixed amount of food that needs to be partitioned to the different parties. This in game theory is known as a “zero sum game”: the only way I can gain something is if you lose the exact same something. Fortunately, the business reality is much more juicy than the zero sum game just described. The pizza is not finite, although it definitely appears like that at times. By actively collaborating with the other players / nodes in our local business ecosystem we can extend our pizza, almost indefinitely! ## Characteristics of a high value symbiotic ecosystem The key characteristics of a successful business symbiotic ecosystem are: - **Multiple parties with different roles:** A symbiotic ecosystems thrives on diversity - you can typically collaborate with good suppliers, with customers, with employees, with providers of supplementary services or products. Even competitors can be candidates for collaboration assuming that you have some areas of product / service complementarity or operate in different geographies or can create meaningful joint ventures, usually aiming to mutual cost reduction. - **Flexibility on tactics:** Although strategic synergies are always welcome, symbiosis can also be promoted through a structured pursuit of opportunistic value co-creation. Also, all parties should be clear to the multitude of different roles that they can enact: for example, Company A can act as a supplier for Company B and, at the same time, Company B can act as a sales channel for Company A in order to promote its product / service. Labelling our collaborators with a priori roles can be limiting since we fail to see other opportunities with them thus leaving significant value on the table. - **Openness:** One of the most crucial success factors for a strong symbiotic ecosystem is openness. This does not mean full disclosure or transparency, especially when dealing with potential competitors. It means establishing a clear set of rules for the collaboration framework and following these rules in good faith. Even an opportunistic collaboration with a traditional competitor can prove surprisingly fruitful when embedded in a structured and open framework. - **The role of the employee:** Considering employees and contractors as “human resources”, essentially as static company assets, is obsolete and ineffective. Nowadays, the employee is building her own career and the concept of loyalty is limited. Therefore, we should engage with employees and contractors within the overall concept of the ecosystem, always seeking strategic and tactical opportunities for mutual benefit and value co-creation. This thinking should be also driving our evaluation and recruiting systems: we are looking for people that are able to create value for the company and we acknowledge that these people are ultimately trying to build value for themselves. - **Negotiation-driven collaboration:** A symbiotic business ecosystem is dynamic, ever changing and thus based on constant negotiation between its parties. As the business environment evolves, so should the relationships and interactions between the different constituents of the ecosystem. Every parameter of the collaboration, even the very roles of the companies within it, are constantly open to negotiation and optimisation. It is therefore becoming a strong imperative for every manager to build strong skills in advanced negotiation, as this can be a “make-or-break” attribute in the symbiotic environment. ## Implementing a symbiotic ecosystem Having analysed the theoretical framework behind business symbiosis, we will now deal with the practical tips for a real-life implementation. ### Rule #1: Re-frame all interactions The most important step for a manager is to re-frame all the interactions of his company, even the ones pertaining to its own employees, into a symbiotic mind frame and semantics. Some practical examples: - Forget about sales and treat your customers as your natural allies. Especially in professional services, turning the sales pitch into a joint problem solving session with the client can prove invaluable. Let the client express her real objectives and jointly explore the potential for value co-creation. Talk on value and not on products / services / offerings. - When it comes to recruiting, forget about “job profiles” and recruit for value. Try to explore with the candidate ways to move your company forward while also promoting the candidate’s career. Don’t investigate too hard into “job hopping” since it is the new norm; instead, try to ensure that your candidate will provide maximum value while on the job. Be open to discuss any form of collaboration and be creative about it; remember that your objective is to recruit the best talent money can buy and not to merely fill the “senior accountant” position. - The same applies to employee performance management: focus all your scorecards and evaluation criteria to real value provided and not to adherence to corporate etiquette. Be open to negotiate any arrangement that makes sense for the company and for the employee; remember that the aim is to create value. ### Rule #2: Negotiate The single most important rule: everything is open for creative negotiation. Negotiation is not about appropriating a disproportionate value for you or your organisation; good negotiation is about problem solving and extending the solution space in order to create more value for all involved parties. In the pizza example, a good negotiator is someone who can figure out the recipe for creating the largest pizza given the available materials and not the one that can trick or bully the others into accepting smaller pieces. Also, realise that the business dynamics are changing constantly and, therefore, re-negotiating and revisiting already negotiated agreements is only natural and beneficial. If you have not done so already, do take negotiation trainings and classes. Ask your team to do the same. The importance of having skilled negotiators in any organisation cannot be overstated. ### Rule #3: Be good Establish a set of ethical rules that will guide your behaviour and that of your team. Be firm about these ethical rules and firmly decline to interact with any individual or organisation that does not respect them. No matter how good a business opportunity might seem, it is not worth compromising your business values. This rule is particularly important since it establishes a fantastic platform for building your symbiotic ecosystem: you are willing to discuss and negotiate a value co-creation formula with any business or individual that shares your ethical rules and values. ### Rule #4: Reach out Having said all the above, the most important part of building, or participating, in a business ecosystem is reaching out. Set aside a significant part of your time for meetings with other people, within and outside your organisation, and for jointly brainstorming with them on potential synergies. Make that a habit and a high priority task for yourself and all senior members of your team. ## Further reading - Stout, Lynn A. The shareholder value myth: How putting shareholders first harms investors, corporations, and the public. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012. - Stevens, Cleve W. The Best in Us: People, Profit, and the Remaking of Modern Leadership. Beaufort Books, 2012. - Ireland, R. Duane, Michael A. Hitt, and Deepa Vaidyanath. “Alliance management as a source of competitive advantage.” Journal of management 28.3 (2002): 413-446. - Mizik, Natalie, and Robert Jacobson. “Trading off between value creation and value appropriation: The financial implications of shifts in strategic emphasis.” Journal of Marketing (2003): 63-76. - Diamond, Stuart. Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life, Three Rivers Press, 2010. Akis Tsekouras is the managing director of Simulen, a consulting firm that helps companies around the world succeed.