A few personal and business news...

It's been a while since I had time to give proper news about our consulting business. But as the end of the year approaches quite fast, let me try to preemptively wrap up a few things to share in no specific order:

• Personally, the year has been weird. 2026 marked my final return to France in Toulouse. Long story short, I still miss the Netherlands, although Toulouse is a lovely town.
• Relocation's never-ending chaos is now over (it took me 14 months for the French administration to reconnect all the dots with me – although recreating the company here only took me 2 weeks, thanks to Qonto).
• Back in France, it's quite apparent the social model of the country is exhausted, and all the lack of investment over the last ten years is now fully apparent (a round of applause for the fiscal administration that wasn't using generalized double authentication for its remote workers and got a large chunk of our data stolen in August).

On the business side:

• We still have very happy customers that year after year keep calling back and asking for help on exciting missions. I think I did less than a dozen days of 'sales' until now this year, and the business kept rolling in.
• In any case, I'm always nervous about not putting enough work into sales, and I guess I will have to adjust this for 2027 (getting some local customers in Toulouse would be a plus).
• As always, it's difficult for me to sort out what I can explain or not, as everything is wrapped under various types of NDA, but I got to work on rebuilding two different portfolio strategies for a +€20B and a +€50B customer, train 80 international top execs on organic growth innovation strategies, and review two large industrial innovation programs, helping them reposition their value add within the company.
• I'm still running several startup training camps, mostly remotely, with 4 different startup programs in Europe via our webschool, and preparing a new version of this one for early 2027 (both in French and English).
• Happy also to report that Anne just joined the extended team.
• And I finally caved in, and after several customers' requests, had to put Maze on the roster as well.

MBA trainings:

• After +15 years, I still enjoy training junior and senior execs in Kedge's MBA programs, and next year I finally accepted an invitation to go back and teach in China (unless geopolitics decides otherwise again).
• I still think we should 100% scratch and reboot the way MBAs are designed and executed, not because they don't have value, but because, closing in on 20230, we should be able to do so much better. ; )

AI:

• My intuition from two years ago that AI's ROI would be vastly difficult to see has been fully validated in the field with all my industrial customers.
• Meanwhile, Claude and, to some extent, Lovable have been two wonderful tools for my personal practice. This deserves a separate article, but I started to share a few things in last week's article (sorry, the full doc is for paying subscribers; everything else is fully accessible).
• What everyone was saying about junior consultants who won't be able to develop their skills because they've been replaced by AI seems pretty on point, as far as I'm concerned. Most of what I'm asking AI to do is exactly junior consulting work: collecting data, consolidating reports, brainstorming ideas with me... and my key value-add is my vast experience in innovation. Nothing that an LLM can reproduce (yet?).
• The way I use AI is also much more interesting than what I was doing only a year ago. An example I find telling: when I ask an LLM to play different personas, like a CFO vs. a CTO, it's much more productive to ask it to embody specific, well-known people (with key constraints and extra guidance) than a generic CFO or CTO persona. I think we tend to underestimate, on the business side, how these tools are anything but Excel-like. They are way more art than science.

I'll try to get into more interesting things that happened in 2026 by the end of the year... Stay tuned.