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James Whitfield-Sterling
Chief Strategy Analyst
Decodes competitive moves, market positioning, and the chess games played in boardrooms.
5 articles published
The Empty Register: Why Nobody Is Incorporating a Management Consultancy Anymore
Companies House recorded zero new management consultancy incorporations in Q3 2026, a number so clean it looks like a rounding error. It is not a rounding error.
4 min read
The Consulting Shakeout: Why 8,586 New Firms Cannot All Survive the AI Restructuring of Corporate Advice
The strategy consulting market is simultaneously booming and collapsing, depending entirely on which stratum you inhabit. Our proprietary data on new firm formations, combined with fresh intelligence from the M&A and enterprise AI fronts, reveals a sector undergoing its most brutal structural sorting in thirty years.
5 min read
The Governance Paradox: As CEOs Seize AI Control, the Board Becomes a Bystander
New research reveals that boards are being structurally marginalised precisely when AI decision-making demands more oversight, not less. The CEOs acquiring that power may be walking their organisations into a governance vacuum.
5 min read
The AI Oversight Gap: Why Directors Are Failing Their Most Critical Test
While boards obsess over succession planning and M&A metrics, they are sleepwalking through the governance challenge that will define corporate value creation for the next decade. The numbers are damning.
3 min read
Abel's Opening Gambit: The Strategic Orthodoxy Behind Berkshire's Housing Play
Greg Abel's first major acquisition as CEO reveals Berkshire's commitment to the tangible over the virtual. A $6.8 billion homebuilder purchase signals how capital supremacy still trumps technology in America's most fundamental market.
3 min read