The Portfolio Map Canvas: A Way to Fix Organizational Complexity // GenAI and The End of Consulting as We Know it - with Louis-David Benyayer

Welcome back to our Boundaryless Dispatch, a fortnightly update in which we connect the trends we spot, the patterns we identify, and the research threads from our backstage.

This dispatch is also available as the opening of our official newsletter, The Rules of the Platform Game, where you can find about ten curated reads, videos, and podcasts with comments that you should really not miss every two weeks.

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The way businesses compete is changing, and readers of this newsletter know it very well.

The landscape is increasingly dynamic and unpredictable, and markets are moving towards modular products and ecosystem partnerships.

In this context, understanding your organization's core mission and core advantages, what products and capabilities are key to making a difference, and what should be optimized or outsourced is paramount to ensuring your ability to compete.

However, many companies are still organized in ways that slow them down, creating inefficiencies and internal competition. Due to unclear decision-making authority and ghost dependencies that slow everyone down, arguments and escalations consume much energy, resulting in multiple missed opportunities. People get annoyed.

The problems we see across industries

In our work with organizations of all sizes, we’ve seen common challenges that hold companies back:

• Too many disconnected products and services – Companies expand their offerings (often through M&A), but often without a clear strategy and architecture. As a result, teams work in silos, investments get duplicated, and opportunities for synergy are lost.
• Lack of alignment between business strategy and execution – Many organizations struggle to connect customer needs to high-level product strategy to actual business units, teams, and shared services; scaling becomes hard and ineffective.
• Inefficient shared functions – IT, compliance, finance, and other shared services often become bottlenecks because there’s no clear model for balancing autonomy and centralisation, and they end up behaving like monopolies with no skin in the game in the product unit’s success.
• Difficulty deciding where to invest or cut – Without a structured way to assess their portfolio, companies find it hard to prioritize developments into things that make a difference.

The Portfolio Map Canvas: A simple way to fix Complexity

These are the reasons why, a couple of years ago, we started prototyping the Portfolio Map Canvas, a tool designed to help businesses understand that their organizations are complex, interacting portfolio systems where customers, channels, products, teams, and infrastructures need to work in alignment and synergy to enable better strategic decisions.

By using the Portfolio Map Canvas with customers for more than two years now, we learned that mapping products, services, and internal capabilities allows leaders in an organization:

• Identify redundancies and overlaps that create inefficiencies
• Decide what should be modular, shared, or independent to improve performance
• Align teams and investments with real business priorities
• Create a structured path to scale without unnecessary complexity

If you want to explore how the Portfolio Map Canvas works, start here:

?? Read the launch blog.

Explore the newly released Portfolio Map Canvas

Discover a revolutionary tool – available in Creative Commons – for aligning organizational structure with portfolio strategy. Visualise and optimize your products and capabilities for growth, adaptability, and innovation.

Learn with Peers from leading European companies and Master Portfolio Strategy & Platform Organizations in a Live Training in Madrid (April 29-30) with our partners at Kelea

If you’re looking for an immersive learning experience, we are hosting a one and half-day training in Madrid, covering:

• Deep-dive sessions on portfolio strategy, mapping techniques, and organizational design.
• Hands-on exercises to practice applying the Portfolio Map Canvas in real-world scenarios.
• Networking opportunities with peers and experts in platform strategy and portfolio management.

Grab your Tickets

Other ways of engaging with the new Portfolio Map Canvas:

In this initial phase of community adoption, Boundaryless provides two ways to engage with Simone Cicero and the Boundaryless team: a streamlined 10-hour workshop (in 4 sessions) and hourly coaching calls. Both are available at promotional launch price.

?????Podcast

GenAI and The End of Consulting as We Know it - with Louis-David Benyayer

As AI reshapes industries at an unprecedented pace, Louis-David Benyayer , associate professor at ESCP Business School and a leading researcher and strategist at the intersection of AI, digital transformation, and knowledge work, joins us on this podcast to discuss what it means for the consulting, education, and knowledge work industries.

In this episode, Louis helps us explore how Generative AI has the potential to go much beyond automating tasks and fundamentally shifting business models in two very key industries: Consulting and Professional Education.

He emphasizes that "AI will likely not replace human expertise but amplify the best experts."

He also states that hybridizing humans and technology allows for deeper insights and more significant impact. ?

Key highlights: ?

?? AI is transforming consulting and education, not just by automating tasks but by reshaping business models.

?? Expertise is more valuable than ever, as AI commoditises basic knowledge. The best consultants and educators will leverage AI as a tool to enhance their impact.

?? Having a framework isn’t enough - expertise matters. The Blue Ocean Strategy, for example, has been around for decades, but applying it effectively in real business scenarios requires deep expertise. Similarly, AI can generate insights, but knowing how to act on them is what creates value.

?? Human decision-making remains critical in strategy, as AI can optimize known processes but cannot redefine markets, make trade-offs, or drive transformative change.

?? Universities must rethink their core value, as knowledge becomes freely available. The future of education lies in curated learning, human interaction, and critical thinking.

?? Soft skills will be the true differentiator in a world where AI can handle hard skills. Emotional intelligence, facilitation, relationship-building, and navigating human dynamics will become even more essential in consulting and education.

?? The future of knowledge work is hybrid, blending AI-powered efficiency with human creativity, expertise, and leadership. The challenge is not whether to use AI, but when and how to integrate it effectively.

Listen to the episode

Work with us

Boundaryless provides on-demand consulting services with an iterative and outcome-based approach. We iterate fast and produce results quickly. We work with organizations of all kinds, from Fortune 500 to small startups and even the UN!

For?startup or project teams, we help with:

• ecosystem mapping?and?value chain analysis
• product/platform strategy?and?experience design
• assessing?growth problems, designing?growth models, defining?growth tactics?for launch and liquidity
• set-up of?validation?items for?validation sprints

For?larger companies?that are a bit more mature, we also work on:

• overall portfolio strategies
• team structures?(product/growth/engineering)
• setting up?multiple-unit structures,?distributing P&L, and more for an entrepreneurial organization setup

Are you facing these and other challenges? Let's discuss how we can help:

Book a 30-minute no frills FREE consultation call.