Posts by Erin Sedor
Your Strategy Signals What You Believe About Your Organization: Setting Strategic Leadership Expectations
In 1963, two researchers conducted a now-famous experiment in a California elementary school. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told teachers that a group of students had been identified — through rigorous testing — as having exceptional potential for academic growth. The researchers predicted these students would show dramatic intellectual gains over the coming year. What…
Read MoreQuantum Intelligent Leadership: The Practice That Makes Conscious Strategy Possible
The youngest person in the room often has the most accurate read on it. Not because they’re smarter, but because they haven’t yet been trained to stop noticing. Quantum Intelligent Leadership isn’t a capacity that arrives with the corner office. It’s a practice that begins wherever it begins, and it’s the one that makes genuinely conscious strategy possible. Here’s what it is, how it shows up, and why it changes everything downstream — no matter what seat you’re in right now.
Read MoreWhy Even a $1M Consultant Won’t Fix Your Problem
You brought in the big firm. The one with the name everyone recognizes. They sent a partner and two senior associates to the pitch meeting, shook hands with your board, and promised a “comprehensive strategic roadmap” that would position your organization for the next five years. The proposal was polished. The fee was significant. The…
Read MoreStop Managing Risk. Start Building Strategic Resilience: Risk-Informed Decision Making for CEOs
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about enterprise risk management: the better you get at managing risk, the more vulnerable you become. That’s not a paradox. It’s a design flaw. And it’s hiding in plain sight inside every organization that treats risk as something to contain, control, and catalog rather than something to learn from, build through,…
Read MoreThe Four-Year Rule: Why Strategic Plans Fail Before the Best Ideas Ever Reach Them
I have a personal theory about how change actually moves through organizations. It’s not scientific. It’s not peer-reviewed. But it has been pressure-tested by thirty-plus years of watching really smart people try to introduce really good ideas into rooms that weren’t ready for them. I call it the Four-Year Rule, and it goes like this.…
Read MoreIf Your Team Can’t See It, They Can’t Build It: The Strategic Discipline of Shared Vision
Michael Phelps didn’t just train in the pool. Every night before sleep and every morning upon waking, his coach Bob Bowman would give him the same instruction: Put in the videotape. Not a real videotape. A mental one. Phelps would visualize every detail of the race he was about to swim — from the blocks…
Read MoreUnder Pressure, Every Strategy Reveals What It’s Built On
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy You can’t tell what an organization is actually built on by reading its website. You can’t tell from the annual report, the values statement posted in the lobby, or the strategic plan sitting in a three-ring binder on the CEO’s shelf. You find out when something tests it.…
Read MoreFrom Risk Register to Strategic Intelligence: A Framework for Risk-Informed Strategic Planning
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy There is a document sitting somewhere in your organization right now that contains more strategic intelligence than your last three board presentations combined. It’s not a market analysis. It’s not the latest consultant’s report. It’s your risk register. And nobody is reading it that way. In most organizations,…
Read MoreAI Won’t Make You Obsolete. Your Fear of It Might.
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy | 9 min read Every time I open my computer, I see stories about AI and what it is — or mostly is not — doing to advance humankind. It’s like a drumbeat that just keeps getting louder. AI is coming for your job. AI will replace you.…
Read MoreWhen Purpose Becomes Performance Theater: The Purpose-Driven Strategy Reality Check
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy Purpose has officially arrived. It’s on websites, annual reports, investor decks, and conference keynotes. It’s in the hiring language, the branding, the CEO’s LinkedIn posts. Every serious organization now claims a purpose beyond profit. And in most of them, it’s theater. Not because the words are insincere when…
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