We must not constrict the universe in order to adapt it to the limits of our imagination, as humans have tended to do in the past. Rather, we must expand our knowledge so that it is able to grasp the image of the universe.

Francis Bacon, English philosopher

Recently, a student who is about to take his Master's exam shared an interesting observation with me: His father handed him the 1980s bestseller "In Search of Excellence" by Peters & Waterman from his library, which he read with great interest. But his question was justified: Why are most of the benchmark companies from this book no longer in existence today? What has happened? I expanded this question to include the perspective of why many once excellent companies, pioneers and market leaders, often fail so abruptly. The list is long, from Atari to Wang, and in more recent years includes names such as Kodak, Polaroid, Enron, Nokia, Toys "R" Us or Blockbuster, right up to the current WeWork or Signa.

In most cases, the reason is that these companies failed to reach the next corporate life cycle with viable business models and services. They missed the innovative boat because they ignored fundamental developments and made the wrong management decisions, often accompanied by the arrogance of past success.

How companies understand the world is how they lead. A common shortcoming on the way to making the wrong decisions is sticking to industry or product markets instead of focusing on the "Original Customer Need" (OC) and the resulting "Strategically Relevant Market" (SRM).

Companies do not survive because they are big or old. But because they are structurally viable.

Companies rarely fail due to the wrong products - but rather due to a lack of adaptability, structural contradictions or overlooked internal complexity. That's why it's no longer enough to think in terms of strategies. You have to anchor them systemically - and feed them back with intelligent technology. This is the new dimension of strategic leadership!

Why once excellent companies fail:

  • Missed innovation: Ignoring fundamental trends and disruptive technologies
  • Faulty management decisions: Driven by arrogance and past success
  • Life cycle blindness: replacing old business models with new ones is missing

StrategyAI combined:

1. The Schließmann Strategy Cube©

A model for holistic company analysis in 4 dimensions:

  • Leadership: management logic, governance, ethics
  • Structure: processes, resources, value creation
  • Communication: Stakeholders, market, culture
  • Performance: goals, value proposition, performance

The cube reveals how these fields are mutually dependent - and where imbalances and anomalies arise that are strategically dangerous.

2. with AI-supported complexity & resilience diagnostics

With Ontonix, we analyze your company like a systems biologist analyzes an organism:

  • How many degrees of freedom really control your company?
  • Where is your system structurally vulnerable?
  • What development could jeopardize your viability?

The result: an objective, visually comprehensible viability profile of your company - in real time.

3. implementation & transformation architecture

Insight is only the first step. StrategieAI provides the power for implementation.

We develop with you:

  • Effective control systems
  • Communication & decision architectures
  • Management formats for long-term stabilization
  • Early warning systems against structural failure

Who is StrategieAI made for?

  • Entrepreneurs and C-levels who want more than annual targets: Understanding & managing structural change, because complexity is not the problem, but the stuff of resilience
  • Strategy managers who want to work in a systemic, integrated and technology-supported way

What is the goal?

A company that has a robust, intelligent control system at every stage of its development.
Not perfect - but viable.
Not rigid - but adaptive.
Not reactive - but forward-looking.

From the product to the original customer need (OK)

Success comes to those companies that focus not on their product, but on the underlying customer need.

Strategically relevant market (SRM) instead of industry definition

Market boundaries are no longer defined by industry, technology or product, but by the systemic context and the OK. The SRM is determined by:

  • Customer intentions (conscious and unconscious)
  • System parameters that have a non-linear and dynamic effect

Key question: What is my "job to do" in order to fulfill the original intention of my customers better than all competitors?

Using complexity as an opportunity

Complexity does not mean complicated, but:

  • Many reciprocal parameters
  • Dynamic, often chaotic development

Using fuzzy logic and AI-supported complexity analysis, you can identify and control the few driving factors of your system - the basis for disruptive business models and digital simulations.

The future: Intuitive and iterative strategy

Linear planning is inadequate in dynamic markets. Modern strategic corporate management is based on:

  1. System orientation: Recognize control factors of the relevant environment
  2. Iterative approach: Understanding strategy as a continuous adaptation process
  3. Intuition: using unconscious experiential knowledge as an inner "autopilot"

Intuition in practice

Gerd Gigerenzer demonstrated with football players that top performers maintain a constant perspective instead of calculating rationally. Similarly, managers should rely on well-trained intuition in complex situations in order to make quick and correct decisions.

Strategic corporate management requires two core competencies:

  1. A fundamental orientation towards the control factors of the relevant system.
  2. The ability to understand and adapt strategy as an ongoing and iterative task.

The most important core competence for complexity-capable leadership is intuition. The more complex organizations become, the more important it is to use and integrate intuition into daily processes and decisions.

The more complex organizations become and the faster changes occur, the more important intuitive assessment strategies become. Intuition is a mixture of creative and mostly unconscious abilities, knowledge and an adaptive toolbox of instincts. It enables quick judgments, decisions and feelings, the origin of which is often unknown, but nevertheless strong enough to motivate action. Intuition is like an inner autopilot that knows what to do depending on the situation and unconsciously applies knowledge from experience and action. Intuition could also be described as "acting without thinking". The strength of intuition lies in its unconscious experiential knowledge. By continuously dealing with complex problems or topics, we gather conscious and even more unconscious knowledge that further develops our intuition.

Gut feelings or intuition are often based on little information and arise spontaneously. Intuition can ignore and filter information and recognize as correct what it considers relevant. Our brain has the ability to protect us from information overload by automatically sorting out information without our conscious intervention.

  • Gerd Gigerenzer made an interesting discovery in an experiment with football players: he investigated how players with a high success rate catch high balls. These players ran unerringly in the direction of the ball every time it flew and hit it exactly at the point where its trajectory reached them. What exactly was happening? The coach thought that the good players would think about where the ball might land and then run there to meet it. So he asked the players to start running even earlier so that they would have more time to make corrections at their destination. However, the catch rate dropped and often the players were not even at the right spot. The experiments showed that good players did not think at all about where the ball might land. They simply fixed their gaze on the ball as soon as it was kicked and intuitively adjusted their running speed and direction to the trajectory of the ball. The intuitive rule of thumb was simple: keep the angle of vision to the ball constant. The player could not rationally calculate the landing point, but thanks to the intuition of an inner, repeatedly trained experience program, he found it automatically.

Above all, this example also shows how important it is to allow and use intuition in the management of companies and people and to incorporate it into daily processes and decisions.

Contact form

Get in touch