Services Industries Insights About Careers Contact us
Insights

Thinking we'd bill for, free.

No gated PDFs. No webinar funnels. Just the arguments we make to clients, written down.

Strategy
June 2026 · 6 min read
By the Strategy & Management practice
[ chart: program failure ]

The transformation graveyard: why 70% of programs quietly fail

The failure isn't the plan. It's the eighteen months after the plan.

Every large transformation starts the same way: a compelling deck, an energized steering committee, a kickoff with catering. Somewhere around month six, the sponsors get promoted, the budget gets "rephased," and the program becomes a status meeting that nobody wants to cancel first.

The industry's dirty secret is that this outcome is priced in. Firms staff for the diagnosis because that's where the margin is; execution is somebody else's problem, usually yours. The strategy was never wrong — it was just never owned by anyone with the authority to be fired over it.

Our fix is boring and unfashionable: smaller programs, named owners, quarterly kill criteria, and a rule that no recommendation leaves the room without a first ninety days attached. Boring is what shipping looks like.

Technology
May 2026 · 5 min read
By the Digital & Technology practice
[ chart: pilot-to-production ]

AI pilots are the new innovation theater

If it hasn't touched a P&L line in two quarters, it isn't a pilot. It's a demo.

Most enterprises now have an AI portfolio the way they once had an innovation lab: photogenic, well-funded, and structurally incapable of changing how the company makes money. Pilots multiply because pilots are safe — nobody's forecast depends on one.

The test we apply is simple. Name the line item. Which cost drops, which revenue rises, and who signed up for that number? If the answer is "engagement metrics," the project is theater, however good the model is.

The companies getting real returns run fewer initiatives with uglier scopes: claims triage, invoice matching, demand forecasting. Unsexy workflows, measured in dollars, owned by an operator — not a lab.

Insurance
April 2026 · 7 min read
By the Insurance Solutions practice
[ chart: claims NPS vs retention ]

Claims is your brand. Everything else is advertising.

Carriers spend millions on acquisition and pennies on the only moment that matters.

A policyholder interacts with their carrier's marketing hundreds of times and with claims maybe twice in a lifetime. Yet those two interactions determine renewal, referral, and whether your brand is a promise or a punchline. The math on where to invest is not subtle.

Claims transformation keeps failing because it's run as a cost program wearing a customer-experience costume. Cycle-time targets get hit while satisfaction craters, because the fastest way to close a claim is rarely the fairest one.

The carriers winning retention treat claims as a product with its own roadmap: transparent status, fewer handoffs, adjusters with real authority. Loss ratios held. Retention moved. The advertising budget didn't.

Operations
March 2026 · 5 min read
By the Operations & Logistics practice
[ chart: resilience vs cost ]

Your supply chain was optimized for a world that's gone

A decade of cost-first design bought efficiency and sold off resilience. The bill has arrived.

Most networks in operation today were designed for cheap freight, stable trade policy, and predictable demand. None of those conditions exist anymore, but the network is still there — a monument to assumptions nobody would make today.

The reflexive answers — reshore everything, hold more inventory — trade one blunt bet for another. Resilience isn't a stockpile; it's optionality: dual sources you've actually qualified, capacity you can flex, and visibility deep enough to act in days rather than quarters.

Start with the question executives skip: which disruptions can you afford, and which would kill you? Design for the second list. Pay for it with everything the first list doesn't need.

Disagree with any of it?
Even better.

Argue with us
Services Industries Insights About Careers Contact
© 2026 Courier Consulting. All rights reserved. Strategy, delivered.