CEO Strategy & Performance
Why 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 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 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…
Read MoreWhat AI Can’t Do: The Leadership Capabilities That Just Became Non-Negotiable
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy Everyone is talking about what AI can do. And fair enough—it’s remarkable. AI can analyze a decade of market data in seconds, generate competitive intelligence reports overnight, and draft communication that sounds eerily like it came from your best strategist. The speed is real. The scale is real.…
Read MoreYour Strategic Plan Isn’t Broken. It’s Incomplete. A New Take on Strategic Planning 2026.
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy Here’s something I almost never hear from the CEOs I work with: “My strategic plan is terrible.” What I hear instead is some version of: “The plan is fine. The goals make sense. But something’s off and I can’t put my finger on it.” They’re not wrong. And…
Read MoreCEO Strategy Coaching vs. Executive Coaching: What Senior Leaders Actually Need
7-8 Minute Read Forty percent of CEOs fail within their first eighteen months. Not because they lack intelligence. Not because they don’t work hard enough. They fail because they’re unprepared for the strategic challenges they face—and the kind of support they’re getting isn’t addressing the real problem. Most CEOs hire executive coaches to work on…
Read MoreAvoiding Transformation Fatigue Starts with Designing Better Strategy
Updated: Feb 24 Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy I was talking with a colleague last week about the non-stop change initiatives we were both seeing with our clients. She was working with a CEO who had just announced his organization’s third major transformation in five years. First came the digital transformation. Then the culture transformation.…
Read MoreMinding the Strategy Gap: Why Strategic Plans Fail
By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy If you’ve ever ridden the London Underground, you know the phrase. Mind the gap. It’s repeated at every stop, projected onto every platform, drilled into every commuter’s subconscious. The warning exists because the space between the train and the platform is exactly where people get hurt. Not on the…
Read More