Strategy Advisory · Hamburg · DACH
You already know what your problem is. You’re just not sure the answer is in what everybody’s trying to sell you.
Robert Daniel · Photo: Benicio DanielFour questions I get asked in private
More than the noise suggests, less than you’d like. Most of the activity you’re watching is theatre, some of it isn’t, and the difference is invisible from outside. The question underneath is the one worth your morning: is what we do still relevant, and would a customer still choose us if they had a better-informed alternative?
Read: The Elephant in the Room →Usually because the thing was never the problem. A Canadian client came to me with a website that had become impossible to maintain. Nine months later the website was the smallest part of what had changed — the product data, the operating model and who decided what all moved first.
See what actually changed →Reasonable. Everyone selling you an answer has a commercial interest in which answer you pick, and I am on that list too. The only defence I know is evidence you can check: what everyone else was doing at the time, what my client did instead, and what happened to the number afterwards.
How I work, and what it has cost people →Yes — and you should be, because it is a business decision wearing a technical costume. I have spent thirty years as the least fluent person in the room on the technology and the most useful one on the decision. The judgement you already have is the part that doesn’t transfer.
Where that came from →Then ask it. It goes straight to me, in your words, and I answer it myself.
Some of it worked
Everyone else was treating digital as somewhere to advertise. Allianz launched sixteen products through it in twelve months.
2016Everyone else was harmonising two acquired portfolios on paper. ContiTech rebuilt the commercial logic underneath them.
2017Everyone else would have rebuilt the website. We rebuilt what the website was failing to describe.
2025 →The next step
Bring the one thing that costs you time or patience every single week. An actual task, not an AI strategy. We build the fix live, and you keep it in writing so your team can use it without me in the room.
Worth it, or it’s on me.
Or just write and tell me what’s pressing hardest: hallo@robertdaniel.consulting
