Is your strategy solving the challenge you are facing?

"A strategy is a way through a difficulty, an approach to overcoming an obstacle, a response to a challenge. If the challenge is not defined, it is difficult or impossible to assess the quality of the strategy. And if you cannot assess a strategy's quality you cannot reject a bad strategy or improve a good one."

-Richard Rumelt, author of "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy"

In today's fast-paced and ever-changing business environment, managers and executives have to evaluate risks and respond to new opportunities on the fly. When faced with moving targets and unfamiliar situations, logical reasoning and facts that are supported help to determine the best option or course of action in decision making.

Prevailing Machine Learning (ML) helps to make decisions on things that is known, but NOT the UNKNOWN. AI based on Symbolic Logic helps to make decisions on things that are not previously known. It also offers explanations and causal reasoning on new subjects.

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Introduction

ELAINE, is a cloud platform, built with symbolic logic to augment human intelligence. ELAINE's automated abstraction digests and analyzes narrative to provide you instant result, identify momentum, challenge, abstractions ranked by relevancy, and automated knowledge map, with supported excerpts and so that you can navigate by breath, depth, abstraction or relationship to understand the context and semantics.

For example: Analyzing Macy's Q3 2023 earnings transcript (Nov 16 2023) to identify its strength and weakness:

Input: Submit Macy's earnings transcript to ELAINE for analysis

Interactively, ELAINE provides the following analysis:

Main theme expressed by Macy's executive

• "opportunity to offer compelling value, to have a strong Black Friday, and take advantage of the extra days in front of the Christmas holiday season ... "
• "competitive on price, look for opportunities to expand AUR and expand margin through the mix of categories and the types of products selling ... Expect to continue to lean into the opportunity to expand margin. That is both in the pricing science, as well as in the mix of products selling."

• "So, maybe Tony, can you elaborate on the scale opportunity that you've cited from the portfolio approach? Maybe how you see your three nameplates positioned in the holiday and also the ability for them to drive the low single-digit growth next year?. . And then, Adrian, could you outline fourth quarter gross margin drivers and just how best to think about gross margin opportunity multi-year? ..."
• Strong customer base: "We remain excited about the power of Macy's portfolio - Macy's, Bloomingdale's and Bluemercury. We speak to 40 million customer at Macy's, 4 million customers of Bloomingdale's, and upwards of 1 million customers at Bluemercury. Between the three, offer a range of price points from off-price to luxury."
• Gross margin: "We start the fourth quarter in a solid inventory position. Inventory down 6% year-over-year, down 17% to 2019. We're controlling what we can control. We have flexibility. As we think about the transition from the fourth quarter to next year, the thing that we feel good about is that we have a seasonally appropriate target ending int he fourth quarter. We expect to be about flat to year year, but down approximately 18% to 2019. So, we're very focused on gross margin, we're very focused on profitability and looking forward tot he holiday season.

• Brands: "If we do a good job as a leadership team, we have the agility to move inventory, move marketing, move web exposure, move presentation in stores to the businesses that are trading best. We're in the early stages of a reimagination, pleased with the growth On 34th Street in its first few month, the reimagination of I.N.C. and more to come."
• "We want to be the best partner out there to the retail community. We're going to be flexible in our financial models.View Analysis ReportELAINE is a cloud platform. The process is simple and fast - from submission of narrative to analysis results in a matter of seconds. Input: Submit a problem narrative to ELAINE for analysis

1. Discover Context
2. Discover stories
3. Determine stories as declarative or imperative in nature
4. Organize stories by relevancy
5. Draw relationships between stories
6. Create abstractions from stories to support creative thinking and design thinking

Output:

1. Abstraction of stories organized by relevancy
2. Knowledge diagram depicting relationships between stories
3. Logical report summarizing stories by topics and abstractions
4. Highlight stories with tailwind and declarative potentials
5. Highlight stories with headwind and declarative potentials
6. Highlight stories with work-in-progress or imperative in nature

Performing a quick assessment on the three ELAINE reports yields the kernel for an effective strategy.

This process can be repeated with competitors' earnings transcripts to identify their strength and weakness.