Operator perspectives on the problems that matter now.

By The Convened There is a structural gap in how mid-market businesses access the hands-on operational support they need to flourish. On one hand, there are management consulting firms bringing strategy, frameworks, benchmarks, decks, and recommendations. Excellent at the strategic, distant from execution. On the other, there are agencies, bringing in some variation on temporary support. Excellent at quick resourcing, not equipped to drive transformation. In between these two models is where...

By Glenn Weeks — operating leader, multiple PE-backed businesses Most PE-backed CEOs start exit preparation 12-18 months before the process. By that point, the window to materially move the P&L story has closed. The numbers are what they are. The narrative is whatever the business has become along the way. The CEOs who maximize exit value start the day after closing. I have been the operating leader through multiple PE cycles, including a $1.3 billion packaging exit that closed at a 20%...

By Linda Cereda, former Global VP Marketing Data, Nike According to a 2025 MIT study, 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to produce measurable P&L impact. That number is not a rounding error. It represents the largest gap between investment and return in the recent history of enterprise technology, and it is getting harder to ignore. The instinctive explanation is technical. The models are not ready. The data infrastructure is not right. The use cases need refinement. Some of that is true. None...

By Linda Cereda, former Global VP Marketing Data, Nike Eighty percent of Google searches in 2026 now end without a single click. The query is asked, an AI engine answers, and the user moves on. They never visit your site. They may never know your brand was an option. That number has jumped from 60% in 2024. The acceleration is not slowing down. About 58% of consumers have already replaced traditional search with AI tools for product recommendations, up from 25% in 2023. AI-powered shopping...

By Joe Henwood — former VP Global Omni Channel Inventory Management, Levi Strauss & Co. Most retail and consumer businesses I talk to have spent the last two years building tariff scenarios. Few have built the capacity to act on them. That is the real exposure. The mistake I see most often is treating tariffs as a finance problem. They are not. They are an inventory problem, a sourcing problem, a pricing problem, and a planning problem — and they show up in margin twelve months after the...