#strategy

The latest 13F filing was done. Cap Management has $9.3B in Q2 in 2025 compared with over $10B in Q1 of 2024. Market has been up about 13.5% per annum since then. Is there a stated strategy to actually grow the AUM or is it mainly loss avoidance ?

Thoughts?

Anyone else questioning this rationale? A diversion from Model E losses or a move in the right direction for Ford?

Expecting some big announcements during GSX

The Oregon battery manufacturer formerly known as Powin plans to lay off another 25 employees, including nine in Oregon, after entering bankruptcy and selling most of its assets to a company in North Carolina.

https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/08/another-25-former-powin-employees-will-be-laid-off-after-bankruptcy-asset-sale.html

Does leadership have an AI backup plan? So many companies are realizing AI isn’t going to save them any money. It’s producing too low quality of code and is costing too much in compute. The biggest misconception for people is that AI is already an AGI. These models are LLMs and only know what patterns they’re trained to understand. They just don’t get a deep understanding of enterprise code.

AI is still awesome to have in the workplace. Its understanding of documents and Eliza features like proof of concept apps are cool. But let’s be realistic, it’s not replacing anyone. If it has, BNY might regret it later.

Does leadership see this at all? Or will they die on the AI hill since our senior leadership team and CEO talk about AI so publicly? I think they need to loosen their expectations.

Intel, as we know it is officially OVER.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMf0cKQN2VX/

Congratulations to the board for a fine pick! You can count on them to make the right decision at the right time.

Executive leadership could have made a significant difference with Cisco - when you look at Google, Microsoft, NVIDA, etc they have very smart technical CEOs and have been able communicate and lead their companies into new key technology trends - unlike Cisco which always seemed to be caught flat footed over the last 15 years. Having a CEO that has weak technical aptitude has been one of our Achilles heel for way too long… so many missteps… so many lost opportunities…. it’s just embarrassing and has cost us dearly over the years…..

It’s really amazing that we’re going to create another org filled with external executives that are not from telecom. She signed a lot of bad deals in supply chain.

With the Administration owning 10% of Intel (Phase 1), it's basically guaranteed that domestic companies who want to avoid tariffs and the Administration's ire will start sending business to IFS (Phase 2). Granted, it's unlikely going to be 18A, or even 14A anytime soon (but eventually)... but I think they'll test the waters with 14nm and 10nm... and packaging (heck, even Nvidia and Tesla signed on for packaging before this deal).

Phase 3 will be to arm twist TSMC into taking management of IFS, so it can be efficient and competitive. I am predicting that the Administration will entice TW by selling them more advanced we-pons, and make some more overt statements around TW's sovereignty.

Then finally, Phase 4, in five three to five years, IFS could be spun off as a working, profitable, stand alone company. Any sooner than that, they are just fooling themselves.

Letting people go to improve results is short-sighted and self-defeating. It doesn’t solve anything and just shifts the pressure onto those who remain, making everyone miserable and less productive.

Leadership seems completely focused on short-term gains, cutting costs wherever they can, and keeping stock prices up for the moment. Employees feel like replaceable parts, and it’s clear that long-term health of the company is an afterthought. There’s no sense of investment in people or the future here.

IMO we need the following to bring in more clients:

-“TIAA ETFs - some attractive ETFs that compete.

• Fidelity offers others’ annuities. Can’t they offer TIAA Traditional? Get that thing on other platforms!

• Expanded fund lineup. Where’s the sector funds? The specialized funds? Our lineup is so 1995. It’s ok to to risk some assets!

• A hot brokerage app. How can we compete with Schwab and Fidelity with a trading app that’s eh at best? Make it hot then market it. Name it something more memorable than TIAA. Then market it like crazy.

I feel we’re too conservative and this perceived safety is actually detrimental to growing assets over a long term.

Thoughts? What else should we do? Why don’t they ask us these things? How do your other firms compare?

Very strong focus on selling these days. From delivery partners to client partners: everyone has been asked to contribute to quarterly revenues. Looks like the old IBM days of shoving iron ( aka Z systems) down everyone’s throat and generate revenue.

The board has been working with a financial company for a year behind the scenes to prepare any and all parts or the whole for sale. Mark had FY25 to stop the bleed but also, simultaneously, start positioning business units to be lean and attractive to buyers .

Today's call was clear as stated by the board member that they have been working with FIN analysts and will continue to do so.

The fact is that a significant amount of preparation for sale has been in play for many months and we can expect and should be ready for a series if announcements when the new CEO comes on board before the start of Q2 in 6 weeks.

@be+1k2f42xsy makes an excellent point.

Is that the end goal?

After closing hundreds of branches through merger and project star, the latest bright idea to save the bank is to build hundreds of new branches lol. Analysts (particularly Mike Mayo) promptly p-o-p-o these plans as too little too late, pointing out the plan doesn’t actually solve for the banks primary issues.

Looking in my crystal ball, I can see in ~ 2 years time we will have new leaders whose “bold” idea to save the bank will be to consolidate/close branches.

That’s the only thing you can truly count on working here. So I’ve stopped getting invested. There’s no real career path, no long-term payoff, and definitely no sense of job security. I treat my role like a temp position now. I show up, get my required tasks done, and that’s it. No extra effort, no engagement beyond what’s necessary. When my number’s up I’ll be ready to walk away without regrets. It’s just how you have to approach this place if you want to stay sane.

We have serious organizational and leadership challenges that a headcount reduction alone can’t solve. Yes, there may be redundancies in some areas, but at the same time, we’re missing key roles that are critical to moving forward. What we need is competent leadership with a clear, thoughtful vision for where we’re headed and how we’re going to get there. Letting go of 30 people, seemingly at random, without a strategic plan to address the root problems won’t take us anywhere.

The Economist, Aug 21st 2025 | 6 min read

To survive, Intel must break itself apart

• And it should do so before it is too late

Intel once set the pace of technological progress. Gordon Moore, one of its founders, predicted in 1965 that chips would get faster and cheaper with metronomic consistency. Over the decades Intel brought Moore’s Law to life, designing and building the processors that powered servers and, later, personal computers. Today it makes headlines for its turmoil more than its technology. On August 7th President Donald Trump demanded the resignation of Lip-Bu Tan, Intel’s boss, citing his links to China, only to praise Mr Tan four days later after meeting him. Reports soon surfaced that the government was pursuing a 10% stake in the company, which would make it Intel’s largest shareholder. On August 18th SoftBank, a Japanese tech conglomerate, announced that it would invest $2bn in the company.

The drama has refocused attention on Intel’s plight. The company has missed nearly every big shift in its industry over the past two decades. It failed to profit from the rise of smartphones, was slow to adopt advanced lithography tools and has largely sat out the bo-m in artificial intelligence (AI). Between 2021 and 2024 revenue dropped by a third, from nearly $80bn to just over $50bn; last year it made a net loss of almost $20bn (see chart 1). Over the past five years its market value has fallen by roughly half, to around $100bn. TSMC, which has stolen Intel’s crown as the world’s leading chip manufacturer, is worth ten times as much.

Yet Intel still matters, as Mr Trump’s interest shows. The most advanced chips, vital for smartphones and AI, are now made almost entirely by TSMC. America’s tech giants depend on it. Such reliance on a single supplier—particularly one based in Taiwan—is risky. Intel is one of the few firms that could rival TSMC. But it will need more than government subsidies to do so. If it is to recover its chipmaking prowess, Intel will need to break itself apart.

Throughout its history Intel has designed and built its own chips. That integration let it use its manufacturing prowess to deliver better products even when its designs lagged behind. From the mid-2010s, however, repeated missteps in its manufacturing saw it fall behind TSMC. Deprived of that advantage, Intel’s processors became uncompetitive with those from AMD, a long-term rival which gave up on manufacturing long ago. In 2021 Intel, too, began outsourcing production of its most advanced chips to TSMC.

The erosion of Intel’s manufacturing leadership has coincided with fiercer competition in the market for designing processors. As recently as 2019 Intel controlled 84% of the global market for PC chips and 94% for servers. By 2024 those figures had fallen to 69% and 62%, respectively (see chart 2). AMD, using the x86 architecture pioneered by Intel, has developed better chips. Cloud giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which were once reliant on Intel, now design their own processors using outlines from Arm, a British company owned by SoftBank. In December Amazon said that half the server capacity it added in the preceding two years used its own silicon.

Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s boss from 2021 to 2024, tried to reverse the slide. He split design and manufacturing into two units, allowing the product arm to shop around for the best manufacturer while opening Intel’s chip factories, called “fabs”, to outsiders. To build a contract-chipmaking business, known as a “foundry”, Mr Gelsinger then set about splurging $90bn on new fabs in four American states. He tapped private equity and bagged nearly $8bn in subsidies under America’s CHIPS Act to fund his vision. But the plan was thrown into disarray by a combination of technical problems at the foundry, which deterred external customers, and falling sales at the design arm.

Pat on his back

Mr Tan, who took over in March after Mr Gelsinger was sacked, seems to have different priorities. He has rightly identified that the company is bloated; at the end of 2024 it employed 109,000 people, nearly as many as Nvidia, the leading designer of AI chips, and TSMC combined. Mr Tan plans to cut Intel’s workforce by a quarter by the end of this year. When it comes to AI, he believes that the firm should focus not on designing chips for training models, an area that Nvidia dominates, but on inference, the task of running them. As for the foundry, last month Mr Tan scrapped projects in Germany and Poland, and pushed construction of Intel’s advanced fabs in Ohio back to the early 2030s. He also hinted that the company might retreat from leading-edge manufacturing if it cannot secure external customers.

All that may help buy Intel time. Yet it lacks the boldness needed to save the company from fading into irrelevance. Evercore, an investment bank, reckons Intel’s design arm might be worth more than $100bn on its own. But it faces a crowded field and its products are no longer distinctive.

Mr Tan could sell the division to another fabless chipmaker such as Broadcom while it still holds value and focus solely on the foundry, which is troubled but holds more long-term promise. Its newest “18A” process incorporates transistors that are ahead of TSMC’s, as well as a novel way of feeding power through the back of the chip to save space and energy. SemiAnalysis, a consultancy, reckons Intel will need to invest a bit over $50bn between 2025 and 2027 to make it competitive in leading-edge manufacturing. A sale of the design division would more than cover that.

Parting with the design business would help in other ways, too. Foundries must serve many customers using the same process. To do so they provide “process design kits”—the blueprints chipmakers use to design their products. TSMC’s kits are broad and easy to use. Intel still tunes its kits for its own products first. One veteran designer who has used both says Intel “lacks the experience” of working with outsiders. Ian Cutress, a semiconductor analyst, notes that Intel sought to buy that expertise with its attempted acquisition of Tower Semiconductor, an Israeli foundry, but the deal collapsed after Chinese regulators withheld approval.

By making its foundry truly independent, Intel may be better able to persuade other chip designers to work with it. More customers would, in turn, make Intel a more compelling choice. Foundries live or die by yield—the share of chips that function as intended. New processes start buggy and improve only with volume. Foundries typically need yields above 70% to break even; the current rate for Intel’s 18A process is reportedly closer to 10%.

America’s tech giants would certainly welcome another alternative to TSMC. Samsung, the only other contender in leading-edge chipmaking, recently secured a $16.5bn contract from Tesla, a car company, to make AI chips at a new fab in Texas. But the South Korean company has a reputation for being difficult with customers and has faced technical challenges of its own. Indeed, if Intel’s shareholders would rather pocket the proceeds of a sale of the design arm, it is possible that a consortium of would-be foundry customers could be persuaded to invest instead. SoftBank has also reportedly expressed interest in acquiring Intel’s manufacturing business.

Intel faces a difficult choice. A foundry-only business would certainly be a gamble. But the longer it dithers, the lower the chance of success. Intel’s greatness once lay in doing everything. Its contribution in future may come from doing one thing well: making chips.

I've never been a part of a more confusing, meaningless, awful meeting.

There were recent layoffs and the only explanation was "streamlining" without any explanation of the actual business strategy around it (if there was one).

Managing committee low scores were blamed on middle managers when it's literally his score as the leadership team to contend with.

Recognition only means Best in Us cards when people literally said career development, salary, and workforce strategy.

We're supposed to define our own roles.

If we want to grow we should learn other disciplines but if we want to be a leader we should specialize?

Constant mention of mystery open roles coming after layoffs with zero explanation of what they are and what the business strategy for them is. Almost veiled threat that we should all be applying for them after layoffs.

Blamed a typo on his direct reports not catching it.

0/10 stars

This was ridiculous.

Anyone know how Amazon business is effecting WB B2b sales ?

The marketing person that came from Peloton. The new logo has been nothing short of spectacular and customer growth is at a record pace. Keep up the good work and don't ever leave.

Could big oil have to give up equity share to the government to pay back green energy and carbon capture grants given to them? This could lead to a national oil company which the administration would live to have.

Shell is shutting down Volta, the EV charging and media network it bought in 2023 for $169M. The company will dismantle more than 2,000 charging stations this year and lay off around 190 employees.

Volta’s model combined EV charging with ad screens to generate extra revenue, but it was losing about $140M annually and couldn’t meet sales targets. Shell reportedly tried to sell the business but found no buyer.

The decision marks a shift in Shell’s EV strategy toward high-speed charging at its own branded stations and hubs, rather than maintaining a separate ad-driven network.

https://share.google/fIXukQcWXjiR0vLTR

There doesn’t seem to have been any strategic assessment of ongoing projects or team structures. My team is literally falling apart, and it's only going to get worse. We've lost people who were critical to anything beyond routine backend tasks. What’s the point of such crude cuts? It feels like they’re more likely to create long-term problems than solve anything.

Did Jacob just accepted that Roche is a serious competitor? Never seen he accept or agree about a competitor before and losing train of thought and not looking confident is not good. Does Roche have something that’s really a threat to Illumina? He had a plan for Ultima but nothing for Roche.

Steve B is chasing low margin IT business rather than trying to be the market share leader in what is a high margin copier business. Although is a declining business it not disappearing and there should be a better balance of revenue and margin contribution. The deal with HCL has cost them a fortune in lost revenue and profit because HCL can’t bill timely and accurately. What shame for an iconic brand.

McKinsey’s strategy cycle is straightforward: design, mobilize, execute. It’s not rocket science. You decide what you are, you back it with resources, and you deliver with discipline.

Verizon had every chance to do this. The consultants were in the building. The frameworks were there. The slide decks were polished. But instead of running the cycle, the company cherry-picked the buzzwords and skipped the hard parts.

Design – What Are You, Really?

This is where the cracks showed first. Verizon never answered the basic question: are we a premium network, a media company, or a 5G pioneer? Instead of choosing, leadership tried to be all three. That’s how billions vanished into AOL and Yahoo while 5G was oversold as the silver bullet. A serious design step would have admitted the obvious — the real fight was with T-Mobile — and built around Verizon’s one true edge: the network.

Mobilize – Strategy Stuck in the Slides

Mobilization is about turning strategy into motion. Verizon never did. Money went into distractions instead of spectrum and customer value. Employees weren’t empowered. Decisions stayed locked in Basking Ridge PowerPoints. On paper, the strategy looked world-class. On the ground, nothing moved.

Execute – Where the Market Called the Bluff

Execution is the test, and Verizon failed it.
• The assumption that people would pay extra just for “5G” was never proven.
• T-Mobile stole the momentum and the growth narrative.
• Layoffs and outsourcing drained morale and capability.
Meanwhile, the “next big thing” — AI, fiber, customer experience — never got launched.

The Market’s Verdict

The stock says it all. Verizon hovers at $44 and might push $48, but that’s not growth — it’s dividend math. Wall Street treats it like a bond proxy because that’s what it has become. The growth stories — Oath, 5G, “the network of the future” — no longer convince anyone.

The Punchline

Verizon had the McKinsey playbook in hand. Hans and Sampath had the consultants, the frameworks, the binders. What they didn’t have was the discipline to use them.

And that’s why Verizon isn’t seen as a growth company anymore. It’s a dividend utility dressed up in strategy slides.

It's about time it was realized that, without wireline's monetary backing, the wireless ship would have never floated or even left port.
Without wireline's welfare-like subsidizing of any of their landline issues, that ship would not have stayed afloat so long, were the playing field leveled to competitors.
Yet these, so-called, wireless "management" bozos still thought they were superior strategists, yet they could never have realistically competed in a real world, one on a level playing field.
They needed to su-kle at the te-t of their landline counterparts, their benefactors, all the while viewing their intellectual, experienced superiors with disdain and always biting the lone hand that allowed for their existence. Like a spoiled, wet behind the ears, teen who thinks they know everything.

Stock is up almost 6% after hours.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/softbank-group-intel-corporation-sign-231000755.html

Be honest, how many of the corporate initiatives you’ve been asked to work on are pointless? Reflecting back on the last few years, I’m embarrassed at the amount of work I’ve put into corporate initiatives that are either completely pointless, or totally ineffective. Most of these have either been quietly abandoned or performatively kept alive. For me, it’s nearly all of them. And frankly, it’s affects how I approach current initiatives. I do as I’m told, but don’t really care about the actual quality, since I know it’ll be dead in 12-18 months any way.

New outside C level who seems sharp, a new AI strategy that finally makes sense, new initiatives to actually standardize how opportunities work and take a logical approach to account mapping and strategy. Good vibe from leadership. All good progress.

I'm not in ISG but layoffs always seem to obliterate them quarter after quarter. Layoff after layoff. idk, wouldn't you be better off finding a new job, lining it up, then hope to get laid off? idk but, if my dept and/or org was continusously mu---red I'd be out.

It’s initially good. Because of this change there might be new trust into the company strategy and boost sales/confidence/stocks from external peers.

However medium/long term we will see what the new CEOs strategy is. If they will downsize the company or what. Layoffs won’t stop so don’t get cushiony. However there’s a chance with new external confidence in leadership lowering the frequency or amount of restructuring.

Agree, @a1+1k2cdja1v. No place for too much optimism.

David Lancefield
Helping to create extraordinary organizations and leaders - as a catalyst, strategist and coach. Speaker and Board advisor.
London, England, United Kingdom

www.davidlancefield.com
linkedin.com/in/davidclancefield

What would I tell myself about a major transition?

It's been just over a year since I left PwC where I'd been a partner for 14 years. What would I tell myself at the age of 46? Whilst it's personal to me I hope it's of use to anyone else considering or making a similar transition.

★ Build your personal brand. Going solo is another level compared with anything you've done before. People want to know your value, not your (previous) title.

★ Adopt the mindset of an apprentice. Get over yourself. Dig in. Graft. Ask silly questions.

★ Reach out, don't wait. Your inbox will shrink rapidly, but so will your meeting schedule; use the time to network.

★ Work out why a client should come to me (afresh). What makes me special or different?

★ Do things you enjoy. Focus on what you want to do, not what you used to do, or others think you should do.

★ Remember what you're doing this for; use it as a guide and anchor as you explore.

★ Manage the chatter in your head. You're on your own, with fewer interactions; use silence and space wisely.

★ Spend time with people who show genuine interest in you as a person, not just your brand, expertise or black book.

★ Be patient. Transitions take time; don't compare yourself to people who've been doing what you want to do for years.

★ Be kind to yourself. Get comfortable with the messiness, uncertainty, loss, new found curiosity. It tests your emotions.

★ Recognize that you will lose contact with people. You're less relevant when you're out of their "bubble" and without a corporate brand.

★ Focus on momentum, experimenting with new practices, propositions, but remember it's not a race. Check your limiting assumptions.

I've loved the last year and I'm so grateful to those who've provided counsel, interest and ideas. You know who you are. There's been so much learning, and fun.

#strategy #leadership #transitions #careers