Posts by Erin Sedor
New CEO Challenges: Why Experience Alone Won’t Save Your Strategy
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy Being a CEO is tough stuff. That’s not a complaint. It’s a baseline reality that gets glossed over in most leadership conversations. We celebrate the title, the authority, the corner office—and then quietly wonder why so many leaders who look ready on paper end up stuck within the…
Read MoreStrategy Dies in the Space Between Your Senior Leaders
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy You’ve got the strategy. You’ve got the talent. You’ve done the offsite, built the plan, and set the targets. So why isn’t it working? Here’s what I know: strategy doesn’t die because it was poorly designed—although plenty of it is. And it doesn’t die because the people weren’t…
Read MoreWhy Your Leadership Team Isn’t Clicking, and What To Do About It
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy You’ve got smart people around your table. Accomplished people. People who’ve led teams, built programs, delivered results. Individually, they’re impressive. Collectively? Something isn’t clicking. Maybe it shows up as circular conversations that never land on a decision. Maybe it’s the side conversations after the meeting that matter more…
Read MoreQuantum Intelligence: the Leadership Attribute CEOs Can’t Afford to Ignore
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy There is no shortage of leadership frameworks in the world. Transformational. Servant. Adaptive. Systems. Complexity. Each one was developed with good intention and solid theory behind it. Each one has contributed something meaningful to how we think about leading organizations. And yet…. Despite decades of leadership research, 90%…
Read MorePurpose Drift: Why Your Strategy Fails Before It Reaches the Market
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy Here’s a pattern I see play out with almost every organization I work with: the strategy looks good on paper. The vision is polished. The mission statement reads well on the website. The growth targets are ambitious and the board is satisfied. And then nothing. It just kind…
Read MoreWhy Your Risk Program and Your Strategic Plan Don’t Talk to Each Other
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy Six in ten enterprise risk management programs report a connection to strategic planning. That sounds encouraging until you read the rest of the sentence. Most of those programs fail to connect ERM insights with actual strategic decision-making. This disconnect between your risk program and strategic plan is costing…
Read MoreRisk Appetite Is a Leadership Decision, Not a Compliance Exercise
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy You’ve already defined your risk appetite. You just didn’t do it on purpose. Every strategic decision you’ve made—every investment, every hire, every market you’ve entered or walked away from—carries a risk profile. Whether you articulated it or not, you were making a statement about how much risk your…
Read MoreWhat Quantum Physics Taught Me About Strategic Planning
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy I didn’t come to quantum physics through a textbook. I came to it through frustration and epiphany. After thirty-plus years of working in and with organizations on all things risk and strategy—tribal governments, publicly traded tech companies, non-profits, federal agencies, Alaska Native Corporations, universities—I kept running into the…
Read MoreThe AI Readiness Gap: Why Frontline Managers Are 3x More Worried Than You Are
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy There’s a conversation happening in your organization right now that you’re not part of. It’s happening in breakrooms and on Teams chats and in the fifteen minutes before a shift starts. It’s your frontline managers talking about AI—and what they’re saying should concern you. They’re worried. Not theoretically…
Read MorePerformance Beyond Productivity: What 74% of Leaders Say They Need to Measure Differently
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy Seventy-four percent of leaders say they need better ways to measure performance beyond traditional productivity metrics. Read that again. Not 74% of academics. Not 74% of consultants. Seventy-four percent of the people literally running these organizations are telling us that what they’re measuring isn’t giving them what they…
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