(Writing)

Blog

Short notes on what I research, build and learn. Most start as LinkedIn posts.

• 26 Oct 2026SAP S/4HANA transformations: how to lead one that finishesPutting it together: the consulting approach I would recommend. Departments that talk every morning, a first wave that is smaller but done fully, and SAP's own method run in parallel with change management and clear leadership decisions.
• 26 Oct 2026SAP S/4HANA transformations: why people, not software, decide successA new ERP system only creates value when people use it the new way. Projects with excellent change management meet their objectives seven times more often. Here is what that means for training, for leaders and for the people who have to learn the system while running the business.
• 26 Oct 2026SAP S/4HANA transformations: why only 8% finish on timeAbout 35,000 companies must leave SAP's old ERP system, and most completed migrations miss their plan. I analysed the official numbers in Power BI. The surprise: five of the six biggest barriers have nothing to do with technology.
• 4 Oct 2026What I would tell a founder, an investor and a cantonThe final part: what the evidence means in practice for founders, SME owners, investors and cantons, plus an agile playbook that turns one big bet into many small, reversible ones.
• 4 Oct 2026Four scenarios for new Swiss companies to 2030Two forces will shape survival most: how fast AI spreads, and how turbulent tariffs, energy and the franc get. My base case is an AI shake-out, with costs as the wild card, plus the signposts to watch.
• 4 Oct 2026Hospitality and retail: the crisis that has nothing to do with AIThe sectors with the most closures fail on costs, demand and competition. A consultant's diagnosis of where restaurants and shops go wrong, and how they could move instead.
• 4 Oct 2026Five headlines that are not what they seemRecord foundings, record bankruptcies, 60% AI adoption: each headline is true, and each hides a definition that changes the story. How I audited the sources behind my study.
• 4 Oct 2026The hidden denominator: why AI success rates misleadFive well-known studies put AI success somewhere between 5% and 74%. The difference is not the technology. It is who was asked, what counted as success, over what time, and who published it.
• 4 Oct 2026AI in Swiss SMEs: who gains, who loses, and what gets droppedAfter ChatGPT, new Swiss companies fell in work AI can do and rose in consulting and marketing, the sectors that already close most often. Inside companies, most AI projects show no measurable return.
• 4 Oct 2026Money does not explain who survivesThe hypothesis I got wrong. Zug gets more venture capital per resident than Zurich and survives worst; Lucerne gets almost none and survives as well as Zurich. Where Swiss venture capital goes, and why it cannot fix survival.
• 4 Oct 2026Do not start alone: what company size at founding tells us about survivalOnly 49% of one-person starts survive five years, against 68% of companies that start with ten or more employees. The biggest jump comes from adding just one or two people. But the research on solo founders is more nuanced than the headline.
• 4 Oct 2026Health survives at 63%, hospitality at 38%: what separates themThe gap between the best and worst sector is five times the gap between cantons. A Five Forces view explains why: survival follows barriers to entry and stable demand, not hype.
• 4 Oct 2026Lucerne survives without venture capitalLucerne recorded a single venture capital round in 2025, yet its new companies survive as well as Zurich's, and it improved more than any other canton. What that says about how most Swiss companies are really built.
• 4 Oct 2026Zug founds the most companies and keeps the fewestZug creates 2.5 times more companies per resident than Zurich, yet it had the lowest five-year survival of the five cantons in every founding year from 2013 to 2018. I tested four common explanations and rejected three.
• 4 Oct 2026Half of new Swiss companies close within five years. Here is why.I followed every company founded in Switzerland in 2018 for five years. Half were gone by 2023. What separates the survivors is not where they are or how much money they raise, but how they start and which market they enter.