Most marketing plans look impressive on paper. They contain polished slide decks, ambitious revenue projections, detailed media strategies, and highly creative campaign concepts. Yet in a volatile marketplace, plans often because leadership overlooked a hidden strategic fault line. When an organization experiences declining revenue, weakening customer loyalty, inefficient sales operations, or erosion of brand trust, the visible problem is often […]
The biggest strategic risk isn’t having no marketing plan. It’s executing a polished plan built on untested assumptions. During annual planning, executive teams routinely default to copy-pasting the past: last year’s sales become the new baseline, legacy customers retain top priority, and yesterday’s winning products receive automatic budget renewals. Except the market refuses to remain frozen in time. Consumers shift […]
Why understanding culture is one of the most overlooked competitive advantages in business Nearly two decades ago, we purchased our family dream home. The documents had been signed, the keys were in our hands, and everything was ready for us to move in. Yet we waited until Ghost Month had ended. To some, this may seem like an unusual decision. […]
This is my 12th year blogging. One thing I enjoy most is having conversations with people from all walks of life. Some of the best business insights come not from CEOs, but from ordinary people doing ordinary jobs. Recently, I spoke with a supermarket bagger about his job. I asked four simple questions. Here are his answers, exactly as he […]
On August 27, 2026, I will celebrate 12 years of blogging. When I started JosiahGo.com in 2014, my objective was simple: to share what I was learning and make practical business knowledge more accessible to students, entrepreneurs, managers and business owners in the Philippines. I did not realize then that blogging would also become a record of my own reinvention. […]
Many corporate executives talk about culture, but very few can seamlessly connect deep organizational values with hard, marketing strategy. Unilab President and CEO Sebastian “Backy” Baquiran belongs to that rare breed. In fact, Backy achieved a historic milestone in the Philippine business community by becoming a rare two-time Mansmith awardee. What makes his trajectory fascinating is the order of his […]
On paper, companies are logically consistent: Yet execution still breaks down. Not randomly, but predictably. Because between strategy and behavior sits a force most organizations underestimate: Incentives determine what people actually do when no one is watching. And when incentives conflict with strategy, incentives always win. Here are ten points to consider: 1. The Real Architecture of Execution Every organization operates […]
While visiting Bangkok with some old friends, we stopped by a popular shopping mall where one of them decided to get a suit made. The proposition stopped me in my tracks: One coat. One shirt. One pant. One tie. Custom-fitted. Ready in 24 hours for roughly US$137 (Baht 4,500, or Php 8,300). My friend ended up upgrading his raw material […]
When news broke that the United States government moved to close the $800 de minimisthreshold, the tariff-free customs exemption long leveraged by Chinese cross-border platforms Shein and Temu to ship direct-to-consumer parcels via air freight, industry observers treated it as a sudden geopolitical shock. But from a strategic auditing perspective, this outcome was not a surprise. It was a structural load […]
Why Systemic Alignment Across the Strategy Links Beats Isolated Tactics Every Time I walked into a Pop Mart store in Shanghai and saw something unexpected: a Chinese company had built a global consumer brand around something most businesses struggle to manufacture: emotion. The shelves were filled with collectible figures. Customers were examining boxes, anticipating what might be inside, comparing figures, […]