Think First, Then Expand

For years I advised American companies that wanted to expand into Europe. The patterns were always the same. They came with their data, their structures, their playbooks. They had a system that worked in the US. And they wanted to transplant it to Europe. One to one.

Black Friday. Discount wars. Centralized marketing. One voice, one strategy, one rollout for the entire continent.

Europe is not a continent in the way Americans imagine a continent. Europe is a patchwork. Every country has its own laws, its own trade structures, its own consumer habits, its own languages. What works in France fails in Germany. What works in Germany is irrelevant in Italy. There are almost no transfers you can simply push from one market to the next.

My job was to explain exactly that. The interesting part wasn’t that the information was missing. It was that the decision had already been made before anyone looked at Europe. The expansion was approved. The budget was released. The timelines were set. The consulting wasn’t supposed to examine the assumption. It was supposed to support the execution.

The pattern repeated reliably. You form a picture and believe in it. You sort the data so it confirms the picture. Data from other territories that contradicts the picture gets treated as an exception. The thought “Think first, adapt the strategy, then roll out” doesn’t occur, because it would challenge the underlying assumption.

The actual intent behind these decisions was rarely expansion in the true sense. It was control. The mentality: We have a working system. We set the rules. Everyone else falls in line. That’s not a business strategy. That’s an attitude. And it’s blind.

What I learned: The quality of a decision doesn’t depend on the data you have. It depends on whether you’re willing to examine your assumptions. Data confirms what you want to see, if you sort it in the right direction. The real work isn’t the analysis. The real work is the question: Is the intent behind the decision sound?

In architecture, there’s a word for this: structural integrity. Before a building is built, someone checks whether the foundation can bear the load. A small miscalculation in the foundation brings the entire tower down. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the facade is.

In corporate leadership, the opposite happens. You build the facade first. You check the business plan, the market analysis, the cost structure. What nobody checks is the motivation behind it. Why this decision? Why now? Why this way?

If the answer is: Because we can, then that’s not a foundation. That’s hubris with budget approval.

The problem in these projects wasn’t the argumentation. The numbers were there. The risks nameable. The cultural differences explainable. The problem was that the decision wasn’t based on arguments. It was based on a conviction, and convictions can’t be refuted with data. If the intent behind a decision isn’t understanding but enforcement, then consulting is decoration.

This isn’t just an American problem. It’s a human one. But in American business culture it’s particularly visible because success in the home market gets interpreted as proof of universal validity. What works in Texas works everywhere. That’s the belief. And the belief is stronger than the facts.

The question I took from those years goes beyond business consulting. How many decisions in politics, business, and our own lives are based not on what we know but on what we want to believe? And how many of them fail not because of insufficient data but because of the refusal to honestly examine the underlying intent?

If you don’t examine your assumptions, you export your failure. Whether to Europe or into the next quarterly forecast.