Delivers an expert perspective on strategic leadership and decision-making across all organizational levels. Discover practical management insights grounded in Oriol’s proven track record as a C-level executive, bridging the gap between high-level theory and effective corporate execution.
Market saturation is the reality: growing revenue has become an almost inevitable zero-sum game. The battle has always been in the margins. First came economies of scale, then platforms, then basic automation, and now applied AI. Today, as before, it all comes down to optimizing costs and managing margins.
Some organizations confuse participation with leadership and end up diluting responsibility in “democratic” processes where everyone gives an opinion and no one decides. Listening to multiple perspectives is valuable, but the decision must have a clear owner. Otherwise, focus is lost, execution stalls, and the role of the professionals hired to lead is undermined.
Setting prices in professional services is a fragile balance: we make promises before delivering anything. Perceived value can work in the client’s favor or against us as providers. Brand can reduce uncertainty, but it doesn’t eliminate the risk of a mismatch between price and expectations. Did someone say “balance”?
Nostalgia may not help us manage the past, but it does help us understand it. In strategy, looking back isn’t a melancholic gesture — it’s a way to recognize patterns that return under new names. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Incorporating that retrospective lens turns the SWOT into more than just a diagnosis: it becomes a tool for projecting with memory.
In many organizations, senior professionals anticipate risks and consequences thanks to their experience, yet they are not always heard. When their warnings are ignored, what they predicted inevitably happens. Experience cannot be transferred or replaced by technology; modeling scenarios and anticipating problems is a strategic asset that, if wasted, makes wisdom truly terrible.
Building a team without knowing what is truly needed is like going to the supermarket without a list: you might come back with good things, but you won’t be able to cook a coherent meal. Defining objectives, salary limits, and key roles—both internal and outsourced—is the manager’s responsibility. The question is: is everyone prepared for this? The rest is chance…and trusting that the bus driver will know how to steer the ship if the helm ever falls into their hands.
True development doesn’t come from giving orders but from sharing rationale. In a world flooded with “workslop”—superficial tasks amplified by AI’s polished yet empty outputs—what teams need is context, patterns, and critical thinking. Rationale turns assignments into learning, executors into professionals, and mere deliverables into growth.
Growth in sales often triggers an automatic increase in headcount. But not all growth is temporary; sometimes it’s structural and requires resizing the organization. The risk lies in the “accordion effect”: expanding staff in good times and contracting—through layoffs and costly inertia—when sales decline. The key is vision: identifying whether growth is real and sustainable, analyzing it methodically, and deciding with rigor before expanding structures.