The ideas behind the big calls, explained plainly.

The shelves

6 ways into the subject. Each starts from a different question, so start from yours.

Narrower decisions, worked through their cases

Smaller than the 24 big calls in Strategic Decisions: a price increase, a spin-off, a product you retire. Each page takes one through the companies that faced it, and pairs with the Strategy Pack that runs it.

• Adjacent Market Expansion: How to Test What Actually TransfersAn adjacency is a claim that something you already own makes the new business cheaper or better for you than for an entrant. Test two things: does a specific asset transfer, and can you do the work? Then price everything that does not transfer at entrant prices, and price the exit before you go in.
• Company Reorganization: What It Costs and How Long It Must LastA reorganization costs a year: the one-time charge plus the drag of months in which management attends to the company instead of its customers. It pays only if the new structure changes enough each year, for enough years. Name the line you are redrawing, put a number on what it will change, and compare the years it must stand with how long the last structure stood.
• Competitive Moat Analysis: How to Test Whether Your Advantage Is RealA moat is the gap between what a challenger must spend to win your customer and what that customer is then worth to them. Name which of four sources produces the gap, compute it in the challenger's numbers rather than your own, and watch for the specific thing that erodes it.
• Corporate Crisis Response: What One More Quarter of Delay CostsA corporate crisis is priced on the gap between when somebody inside knew and when the company acted, not on the defect itself. Find the earliest internal date, cost what one more quarter of delay adds, and act before the expected penalty passes the cost of the fix.
• Cost Reduction Program: What a Cut Buys and What Reversing It CostsEvery cost cut buys a smaller capability, and only the saving reaches the paper. For each cut, divide what rebuilding the capability would cost by the annual saving to get the reversal price in years, and divide the saving by the profit running through what was cut to see how small a loss would cancel it.
• Expansion Plan: How Fast Can a Rollout Actually Go?Plans express themselves as destinations: two hundred stores, twelve countries. A destination cannot be wrong, only late. A rate can be checked, and most expansions fail because the rate was faster than the operation behind it could carry.
• Free Tier Strategy: When Does Freemium Pay for Itself?A free tier pays for itself when the share of free users who start paying each year clears the break-even conversion rate: what one free user costs a year, net of what they earn, divided by what one conversion is worth. The paying-over-total ratio in most decks is not that rate, and some free tiers are paid for by another side of the market or by a layer sold on top, not by converts.
• How to Respond to a New Competitor: Price Its Money, Not Its ProductSize a new competitor by its money, not its demo. Divide what it has for your market by what it costs it to take one of your customers, price what those customers would have earned you, and answer only if answering on every customer it reaches costs less than that.
• Make or Buy: How to Decide What Your Company Must OwnYou can outsource anything whose interface you can specify, and nothing you cannot. The test is whether a supplier who has never seen the work could quote from what you hold today; the number is the probability of having to buy the capability back.
• Post-Merger Integration: How to Tell Whether the Deal Is Paying for ItselfA synergy reported and a synergy in the ledger are different findings. An integration is working only when the promise reaches the accounts, net of the revenue the combination cost, before the year it stops paying for the premium.
• Price Increase Strategy: How Much Volume Can a Rise Afford to Lose?A price rise is decided by two numbers. The share of volume it can afford to lose is arithmetic on the rise and your contribution margin; the share it will lose comes from measuring your own last rise against the trend before it. Raise as far as the gap between them allows, net of what the field discounts away.
• Price War Response: When to Match a Rival's Price Cut, or HoldMatching a rival's cut costs the cut on every unit you sell; holding costs only the volume that leaves. Work out the share of volume you can lose before holding costs more than matching, compare it with how much of your volume the rival can actually reach, and price a guarantee that matches only where customers ask.
• Pricing Model Change: How to Move to Subscription or Usage PricingA pricing model change moves up to four layers at once: the unit you charge for, the shape of the cash, the buyer who signs, and the promise the customer relies on. Name which ones you are moving, size the trough against carrying on unchanged, and run the case again with the volume uplift set to zero.
• Product Bundling Strategy: When to Sell Together or ApartA bundle first hands its discount back to every customer already paying for both products, and earns only on the customers it adds and the extra years bundled customers stay. Match the two customer lists to size the handback, measure the retention gap, and solve for the deepest discount at which selling together still beats selling apart.
• Product Cannibalization: When to Launch the Product That Eats YoursA cannibalization decision holds two questions. Whether the substitution happens is a question about your customers, answered outside your building. Whether you should supply it is arithmetic: the share of switching customers you must win, set beside the best share your company has ever won.
• Product to Platform: When to Open Your Product to Third PartiesA product becomes a platform when a take rate exists that pays for the platform layer and still leaves a third party better off than building alone. Cost the layer on its own, ask a builder what it earns without you, and set the rate inside the corridor between those two numbers.
• Serial Acquisition Strategy: How to Price the Growth You BuyA serial acquirer's engine is the gap between what the market pays for its earnings and what it pays for somebody else's. Split the plan's growth into the part you will grow and the part you must buy, price each deal as a multiple of the earnings it brings, compare that with buying back your own shares, and state the year the balance sheet stops funding it.
• Should You Split the Company? How to Test a Spin-Off or DivestitureA separation changes nothing operational on the day it happens. The prize is a re-rating that nobody can check in advance, and the cost, a one-time bill plus a corporate center that now has to exist twice, can be counted to the dollar.
• Turnaround Plan: How to Tell a Real Turnaround from a Cost ProgramA turnaround that gives up nothing is a cost program wearing a turnaround's name. The test is what the plan surrenders, what each surrendered dollar has to come back as, and whether that happens inside the time the board, the lenders and the cash allow.
• When to Discontinue a Product: How to Price a Sunset Before You Announce ItEvery room knows what a product loses a year. Almost none knows what its customers spend with the company on everything else, or how many would leave with it. That second number decides whether retiring it saves money or costs it.