B+W Insights
Notes on strategy, leadership, and the businesses rooted in the places they serve.
Let's begin with the word itself. Strategy, at its root, is the art of leadership — making decisions, planning, and problem solving. Tracing back to ancient Greece, strategia — or generalship — referred to the art of leading an army. That same work — making consequential decisions with limited information and finite resources — sits at the heart of running any business.
And yet the tools and frameworks built around this work have mostly served large corporations. Brown + Wheaten Strategy Lab serves a different audience — the small and mid-sized businesses, the founder-led firms, the community-rooted organizations where decisions get made directly and the consequences are personal.
The Lab's founding principles come from a career spent in corporate strategy and management consulting, working alongside leaders on enterprise-scale initiatives. The thinking shared here isn't separate from the work — it's where the work begins.
Empathy as Strategy: Seeing Through Your Customer’s Eyes
"Customer-focused" rings hollow when it's just a metric. Real empathy — knowing your customers and adapting to what matters most to them — is something big businesses struggle to copy, and one of the smartest ways small businesses can grow.
Doing Well and Doing Good
You've heard it before: you can make money or do good — not both. But small businesses prove that wrong every day, and building with people in mind isn't charity, it's one of the smartest long-term strategies there is.