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Commercial Transformation Leader & Client Partner at smart/tasking With over 25 years of board-level leadership experience, Rob Bullen is a commercial transformation leader who excels at restoring performance and driving lasting results. Having worked across private equity-backed businesses, SMEs, and global corporations, Rob combines sharp commercial insight with deep expertise in business transformation, operational excellence, procurement, and commercial turnaround. As a C

By Niall Anderson Traditional strategy consultancies love to sell a beautiful, static blueprint, hand it over, and call it 100% of the value. But real, sustainable impact cannot be imposed from the outside - it has to be co-created. In this instalment of our 10 Lessons for 10 Years series, our co-founder and CEO Niall Anderson breaks down what true, embedded collaboration looks like on the ground. Sophie Pentony: Niall, this lesson stresses that real value must be co-cr

By Gary Gamp For the fifth lesson in our 10 Lessons for 10 Years series, Sophie Pentony sat down with our CXO, Gary Gamp, to discuss why managing expectations isn't a corporate cliché - it's the foundation of accountability. Because once the horse has bolted, every conversation starts to sound like blame. Bringing people on the journey Sophie: Gary, talk me through what this lesson means to you, and where it comes from. Gary: It goes back to why we started smart/tasking. Mo

By Niall Anderson Lesson four: Differentiate, disrupt and don't blend in If Lesson two, was about understanding your client, Lesson four is about making sure they remember you. In crowded markets, it's easy to become just another provider saying the same things, using the same language and offering the same solutions. According to Niall Anderson, that's exactly where businesses get into trouble. The organisations that win aren't always the biggest. They're often the ones will

By Gareth Greppellini An acquisition or transformation programme can reshape a business overnight. AI and automation redefine capability needs. Cost bases shift, customer expectations evolve, and executive leadership adjusts the strategy. None of this means your original operating model design was wrong. It simply means it was designed for a version of your organisation that no longer exists. Over time, this creates a dangerous strategy execution gap between boardroom ambitio

By Adam Young When we're brought into an organisation, there's usually already a view about what's wrong. There are too many layers, a team doesn't have enough capacity, a process isn't working as it should, or perhaps the structure simply needs to change. That's completely understandable. Leadership teams know their businesses well and, often, there's a good reason they've reached that conclusion. The only thing we'd caution against is assuming that the first answer is neces

By Chris Carlisle Most leadership teams can easily tell you what they spend on people, technology, and suppliers. What is much harder to calculate is how much of that investment is lost in the gap between strategic ambition and daily execution. Individually, routine hand-offs, duplicated tasks, and management layers don't look like a crisis. But across an enterprise, they add up to a substantial drain on capacity and margin, leaving you paying for a team setup that isn't bui

We worked with an organisation that needed to find £500k of EBITDA from its back-office operation. On paper, the numbers immediately pointed towards headcount. There were 45 people working across nine sub-functions, with 15 managers. It would have been very easy to look at that structure; decide it was too big and start cutting. But spending time with the teams told us a different story. There were good, capable people working hard across the business. The problem was that th