The Real Business-Strategy Frameworks Behind the "AI Skills" Lists
A recent wave of "AI skills for business strategy" content is really just named consulting methodologies, decades old in most cases, repackaged as slash commands -- worth knowing the actual frameworks regardless of what you call them.
When a decision stalls, the usual cause is not a lack of analysis but nobody actually owning the call. Bain and Company's RAPID framework names five distinct roles on any decision -- who Recommends, who must Agree, who will Perform the resulting work, who provides Input without a veto, and who actually Decides -- specifically to stop a decision from being re-litigated by everyone who was ever consulted on it. Prioritizing under real constraint has its own named tools rather than gut feel: RICE, originated at the software company Intercom, scores each option on Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort to produce one comparable number instead of an argument about whose priority matters more, and a simple impact-versus-effort grid does the same job with less precision but far less setup time.
Making a recommendation that survives scrutiny is its own discipline. Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle, developed at McKinsey and still taught there, argues for stating the actual recommendation first and the supporting logic after, rather than building up to a conclusion the way a mystery novel would -- a senior audience wants the answer before the reasoning, not after it. The situation-complication-resolution structure underneath it organizes that supporting logic into what's true now, what's broken about it, and what to do -- a shape that holds up whether the recommendation is one paragraph or a full deck. None of this substitutes for real numbers: a business case built on a defensible net-present-value calculation and a stated sensitivity range holds up under questioning in a way that a purely narrative pitch does not.
Getting the room to actually agree is the last piece, and it borrows from negotiation theory rather than strategy consulting. The zone of possible agreement, a concept from Roger Fisher and William Ury's Getting to Yes, is the overlap between what each side would actually accept -- naming it explicitly, including your own walk-away point, before a negotiation starts prevents anchoring on a number nobody was ever going to accept. War-gaming a competitor's likely response before committing to a strategy borrows the same adversarial-thinking discipline as red-teaming a plan for its own weaknesses -- assign someone the job of playing the rival's best countermove, rather than assuming they will not react at all.
Drawing on Bain and Company's RAPID framework, Intercom's RICE prioritization method, Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle (McKinsey), and Roger Fisher and William Ury's Getting to Yes.
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