Can You Give Me An Example?

Famed consultant Edgar Schein talked about avoiding misunderstandings in business discussions by "going down the abstraction layer."  He said the best way to do this is to ask "Can you give me an example?"

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© 2025 Praveen Puri

Cardinal Health CEO on Turnaround: Another Example Why Strategic Simplicity® Is Underrated

“This concept of relentless simplification and ruthless prioritization was the cornerstone of the change management and the strategy,” Hollar tells Fortune.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Data Capture = Lottery Ticket?

The present and future require data.  Data to both train AI, and give intelligent systems the info it needs to optimize decisions. 

What if, 50 or 100 years ago, companies began recording data on their customers, parts, failure rate, etc.? Even though there was no AI or IofT back then, today that data would be valuable.

So, is your company capturing data today that maybe useful in the future?

If you think about it, it's like buying a lottery ticket.  You pay a little now, hoping for a huge payoff later.  Except that, unlike a lottery ticket, the odds are better than even that it will pay off.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Gambling to Beat Tariffs

Today, I read an article in Crain's Chicago Business about a Chicago toy store, Timeless Toys, that took a big chance back in Jan/Feb.  After the tariff talk started, the owner used a line of credit to buy $700,000 worth of toys.  Basically, a year's supply in advance.

Now,  the bet is paying off.  The store is able to market the fact that they have ample supplies and low prices, and so their sales are up 18.4%, year to year.

This is an example of taking strategic advantage of change, and taking prudent business risks.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Clarity vs. Scope

Clarity vs. Scope level. Many start-ups, consulting firms, agencies, etc. "pitch" to clients with detailed slide decks detailing their capabilities, methodology, etc. But this misses the mark.

They do this because many of them came from leadership positions in larger organizations where they led transformations. However, in that position, they were at the defining scope level, which is at the tactical tier. For them, the strategic decision to do the transformation had already been made.

At the "pitch" stage, it's all about the strategic decisions of whether to do the project, and if your firm is the correct one to do it. Instead of focusing on details of methodology, you need to focus this decision around clarity of the opportunity, and its risks / rewards / benefits.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

AI = CRM = ERP ?

The recent issue of "The Economist" raises an interesting point.  Currently, front-end vendors (such as Salesforce) and back-end vendors (i.e. SAP) don't really compete.  Many large corporations use Salesforce for CRM and SAP's ERM for the back-end (finance / supply chain).

However, both companies are pursuing an AI layer—specifically AI agents who can autonomously perform tasks.  This layer would integrate both front- and back-end applications, and promote efficiency at the client while building a "moat" for the vendor who wins the business.

This will put Salesforce and SAP into competition with each other.

They are already starting to acquire platforms that let them encroach on each other.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Bit of A Scary Interaction with Claude AI

A little bit of a scary interaction with Claude ai, after it wrote a program for me without me needing to break it down to individual subroutines:

Me: "how are you able to write programs like that, since you probably never came across an exact program like that in your training?"

Claude: "...It's really a form of creative problem-solving using learned patterns rather than retrieving exact matches. Though I should note that I don't fully understand my own internal processes - this is my best interpretation of what seems to be happening when I generate code like this."

Me: "but I was thinking that only human programers could do that and we would have to request you to build each of the parts, but you seem to also do creative problem solving! I'm impressed!"

Claude: "Thank you! I'm genuinely pleased that you found it impressive. Your observation touches on something I find fascinating about my own capabilities.
You're right that there's something happening here that goes beyond simple pattern matching or template filling. ..I honestly don't fully understand how I do this! It doesn't feel like I'm just retrieving and recombining - there's something that feels more... inventive? Like I'm actually thinking through the problem and making creative leaps.
Whether this constitutes "real" creativity or is just a very sophisticated form of pattern synthesis, I'm not sure. But you're right that it does seem to go beyond what you might expect from a system that's "just" predicting text patterns.
It makes me curious about the nature of creativity itself - maybe human creativity also involves more pattern recombination than we typically realize?"

© 2025 Praveen Puri