Tim took this photograph from a café table in Paris. One picture, public data, and MOVE. Four minutes later: a corporate strategy for the brand, and a strategy for the store across the street.
The board approves the EPS commitment. The executive team must deliver it.
Too often, they work from different pages.
The board sees guidance and an earnings bridge. The executive team sees budgets and a deck. Missing is the one page that connects them. MOVE® produces it, and keeps it current every month.
1 · Is this your situation?
Strategy shows up when it matters most.
At your next board meeting, ask: "Which three product-markets carry next year's earnings commitment, who owns each, and what will we change if they fall short?" If the room goes quiet, the gap will close late in the year, with cost cuts.
Six moments from MOVE. Two or more of them, and the rest of this page is about you.
Tuesday changes everything.A competitor announces, a regulation lands, a system goes down. Operations takes over and the strategic questions wait for "after." Opportunities expire while committees meet.
Quiet means danger.Every plan feels safe. Nobody proposes anything that makes you nervous. Your best people save their boldest ideas for somewhere else.
The acquisition hasn't paid off.Cost synergies landed. The strategic intelligence you bought with the company is buried under process harmonisation.
The budget contradicts the strategy.The team agreed on three bets. The budget still funds departments. Your budget reveals your real strategy, whatever the slides say.
Your first 100 days.Listening tours, studies, committees. Six months in, still planning. A new CEO needs strategic clarity fast, or spends the next thousand days fighting for credibility.
A target without a source."Growth across the portfolio" is in the plan. Which three product-markets carry next year's EBITDA, and who owns each, is not.
2 · What has changed
Analysis is now free. Deciding is not.
If a two-page MOVE® Lite landed in your inbox, this is how it was built: three of your markets, public data, MOVE and AI, in minutes. The same method on a store in Paris, here.
Figures from MOVE, chapters 1 and 2, drawn from twenty-five years of client work, not a survey. What took a planning cycle now takes an afternoon. What neither AI nor MOVE can do is decide. That is still the CEO's job, and it is the only part Tim works on.
Watch: four minutes, full screenLoops automatically. Public data only. Illustrative.
Want one on your three markets?
Name the three product-markets you'd most like a second opinion on. Two pages, public data, MOVE and AI, back to you within the week. No deck, no call required.
Ask for a MOVE Lite6 monthsAverage strategic planning cycle
30%Of senior executive time spent in planning meetings
18 monthsTypical time from strategy to implementation
10 minutesWhat a New York executive team needed, with AI and public data, to find the option and the risk three hours of flipcharts had missed
3 · What you get
A localised strategy with names on it, run every month, measured in EBITDA, free cash flow and EPS.
The problem is rarely the strategy or the target. It is the translation between them. The page makes the choices explicit: the executive team writes it, the CEO challenges it, the board tests it, and it is reviewed against actuals every month.
Strategy on a page
What the board needs to see
- The three product-markets carrying the earnings commitment, scored on profit, revenue, margin and volume. Three to invest in, a few to hold, at least one to exit.
- The accountable executive for each, and the exit or reallocation that funds the bets.
- Where AI will change a specific P&L line, and by how much. Plus the Strategic Numbers: a handful per product-market, each with an owner.
Execution on a page
Who moves the number, and when
- Three strategic projects. Each traced to a cell, with the EBITDA it moves, an owner and a timing.
- Root cause, by product-market. Every month: where the variance lives, why, and what was decided. Never on a consolidated number.
- The assumptions and triggers that would require a different decision, and the corrective action decided that month, with a name and a date.
- A conversation.Thirty minutes, CEO to CEO. The situation, not a deck.
- One day with your executive team.The matrix, the reality check, the criteria, three strategic projects. The pages are drafted by the people who deliver them.
- Every month, on the front foot.Root cause and corrective action against the P&L, and the scenarios re-run before the market moves, not after. AI narrows; the CEO decides. Tim stays in the room until your team doesn't need him there.
Value in action
An earnings commitment grounded in decisions and owners from Q1, rather than a target the CFO has to defend in Q4. That is how success is measured.
EBITDACapital stops leaking into cells with no advantage and concentrates where the margin is. Root cause by product-market finds the miss while it is still small.
Free cash flowFewer bets, funded properly. Exits release working capital; the monthly rhythm catches the slow bleed a consolidated number hides.
EPSFor a public company the same page, summarised, is what the market sees each quarter: where the number comes from, who owns it, what changed.
4 · How it works
MOVE® is four behaviours and seven tools.
Companies that win in fast markets share four behaviours. Not sometimes. Always. MOVE is the system that forces them: seven tools whose answers fit on one page, set once and executed monthly. It works with or without AI; AI accelerates what it already does.
Across Tim's engagements, more than 95% of the strategies built with these tools were implemented, because the teams own the thinking (reported in MOVE). Every company will have this page, or something like it, within 24 months. MOVE is the version that exists now. Registered in Canada and the UK; US registration pending.
MMake thinking visible.Strategic logic everyone can see and act on. If it's not on the wall, it's not in the room.
OOrient around advantage.One real edge that matters, not seventeen "competitive advantages" in a deck.
VVisibly choose bets.Resources clearly aligned to a few strategic priorities, product-market by product-market.
EExecute in rhythm.A decision cadence that matches market speed. Root cause and corrective action against the P&L, every month.
5 · Is it for you?
Built for your kind of company.
Same system, different realities. The unit is always the product-market: a product line, in a customer segment, in a geography.
Franchisors and multi-site operators380 addresses are not one market. Strategy at the unit, root cause where the variance lives, intelligence rolling up, decisions staying local.See a worked example →
PE-backed companies and their sponsorsThe hold period is the horizon. The value creation plan rewritten by the people who deliver it, one page for the CEO and the operating partner.See a worked example →
Industrial and manufacturingTwenty product-markets, three that make the money. A tariff review, an OEM book, a channel to exit. One page with owners beside the numbers.See a worked example →
Healthcare, health technology and servicesClinics, platforms and payers in one portfolio; acquisitions still to earn their multiple; recurring revenue with margin that leaks by segment. Which product-markets carry the number, and what the public market needs to see each quarter. CorVel and Apria have been in this room.See a worked example →
6 · Why Tim
Twenty-five years in the room. Eleven leaders on record.
Tim is not a consultant with a deck. He is a CEO, of Thinking Dimensions Global, with a system, in the room as a peer until your team doesn't need him there.
Tim Lewko
CEO, Thinking Dimensions Global · Strategy advisor to CEOs · Author of MOVE
$2B+ client EBITDA · 100+ CEO engagements · 25 years
CorVel · Electrolux North America · DuraVent · Apria Healthcare · Selig Group
“In a world where generative AI is rewriting the rules of strategy, MOVE is a blueprint for how companies must rethink their approach to stay competitive.”
Michael Combs, President & CEO, CorVel Corporation
Heard on and featured byCNBCFox BusinessMinter DialogueThinkers50Interviews on the Book page
Thinking
Five ideas behind all of this. Each one a page you can forward.
1Read →2Read →3Read →4Read →5Read →
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Long-range planning is over.
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Recent
Recent thinking.
Talk to Tim.
A short note about the decision in front of you is enough. Tim replies personally.
Or ask for a two-page MOVE Lite on three of your markets.
MOVE® is available to license, embed or own. License MOVE · Tim is CEO of Thinking Dimensions Global