Your strategy deck says innovation is critical. Your bonus structure says efficiency is king.

Guess which one your organization believes?

Walk into any leadership meeting. Innovation gets discussed for 45 minutes. Efficiency concerns kill it in 5. The budget? Goes to operational optimization. The promotions? Go to people who hit their efficiency targets.

In 1992, Husqvarna faced the same choice. A robotic lawn mower proposal challenged everything—manufacturing, dealers, margins. Every efficiency metric said kill it. Leadership funded it anyway. Three decades later: 3.5 million units installed globally.

The difference? They changed what they rewarded. Not just what they talked about.

Senior engineers are retiring. Younger ones aren't replacing them. So leadership teams hire harder, raise compensation, sharpen the employer brand.

It should work. But it doesn't.

The issue isn't effort. It's diagnosis.

You can't pay your way out of a design problem. When engineers find themselves three layers removed from real customer problems, measured on efficiency rather than outcomes, the work becomes abstract. Ownership thins out. Learning slows down.

A senior engineer at a Nordic components manufacturer told us: "I used to spend my days fixing drawings. Now I talk to customers twice a week and decide what we build next. The work is harder. But I'm not looking for another job."

Redesign the work. Then hiring starts to work again.

Your sustainability agenda is probably busy right now. CSRD deadlines are closing in. Reporting structures are being built. Data gaps are being chased.

But while most manufacturers optimise compliance, a smaller group optimises positioning. That difference is already showing up in tenders, preferred supplier lists, and market share.

Research from Bain & Company shows sustainability is now one of the top three B2B purchasing criteria. Half of B2B buyers plan to drop suppliers that don't meet sustainability criteria over the next three years.

Compliance keeps you eligible. Positioning helps you win.

You know the pattern. A product you were certain would land… doesn't. A customer you thought was solid suddenly drifts. A competitor makes a move you should have seen coming.

The truth sits somewhere your dashboards can't reach. It lives in service vans, on factory floors, in conversations your organization never captures.

Your frontline already knows what the market is doing. They see the workarounds customers never mention. They hear the frustration before your systems show anything unusual. They know why deals are really won or lost.

A technician told us once: "If leadership sat in my van for two days, the strategy deck would look different."

He's right. It would.

When margins tighten, most leadership teams do something predictable: they add more. More initiatives. More strategic projects. More parallel transformations. The instinct makes sense in the room - if the market gets tougher, push harder.

But out in the organization, all that activity behaves like heavy weather. Teams lean into the wind, working harder and harder, while the overall pace barely changes.

What trips organizations up isn't choosing badly. It's trying to make twelve priorities behave like three. And here's the uncomfortable part: the real work of strategy isn't choosing what to pursue - it's choosing what to stop.

Manufacturers spent many, many years mastering efficiency. The results? Impressive. Waste is down, productivity is up, product portfolios are leaner, development cycles are faster.

But efficiency alone stopped being a competitive advantage somewhere around 2020. Now it's just the entry fee.

What separates winners from survivors isn't how well you develop and produce products - it's how quickly you adapt to what customers actually value.

Efficiency keeps you running. Relevance keeps you winning.

Your distributor just launched a customer portal. Looks great. Except now they own the relationship you built.

Manufacturers keeping direct customer access grow 2-3x faster. Not through better production—through staying connected to who actually buys.

You can't win by being the most efficient producer in someone else's system.

Whoever owns the relationship owns the future.

The moment is massive. Automation, AI, nearshoring - manufacturing's biggest opportunity in decades.

Yet margins keep shrinking.

Here's why: You're fighting on price while customers buy outcomes. Optimizing production while they optimize performance. Selling products when they need solutions.

Price competition isn't the wrong answer. It's the wrong game entirely.

The next advantage isn't what you make. It's how fast you learn.

Innovation is like parenting – a long-term commitment where endurance and grit are as important as creativity, capability and analytics. Through all phases - from birth of an idea to market launch and phase out.

Leaders operating on Collective Insights are more effective and inspiring than others. But to get there some Holy Cows needs to get out of the way.

As markets evolve at an unprecedented rate, distinguishing between mere costs and valuable investments in explorative and experimental work is increasingly challenging. Viewing these endeavors solely as expenses might cause us to overlook groundbreaking innovations that could lead industries tomorrow.

In today's world, where technology evolves at lightning speed and customer expectations shift continually, agility is crucial. Experimentation isn't just helpful; it is fundamentally necessary.

In the trenches of business, it’s all too common to hear leaders write off explorative work as a costly endeavor without immediate perks. But what if we shifted gears?

In the intricate dance of business success, the rhythm is set by a company's ability to align commercial aspirations with operational capabilities. The harmony of this alignment plays a pivotal role in driving profitability. Yet, the secret to maintaining this harmony is often found in the twin concepts of market and customer centricity, which are the lifeblood of contemporary business strategy.

Positioning is not just a marketing buzzword; it's the strategic cornerstone that businesses should adopt and practice for every attempt to increase sales. Curious? Check out this article.

Customer and market centricity is vital for any business that wants to succeed in a competitive and dynamic environment which is more or less the reality in all industries. How can businesses become more customer- & market centric?

Customer and market centricity is vital for any business that wants to succeed in today's competitive and dynamic environment. But what is it and why is it important?

Are you facing a challenge or decision that you are not sure how to handle? Have you ever felt stuck or blocked in your thinking? Or are you just feeling overwhelmed or stressed? Perhaps reading this article will be the first step in becoming a better leader.

Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Bezos all have one thing in common (on top of being successful). Find out more.