Speaking

Most strategy work is good at describing where a business stands today. The harder question is where it is heading, and how the companies it competes with will respond once it moves. Competitors do not behave the way a spreadsheet assumes. They act from where they stand against their own goals, which is why some press hardest when they are behind and ease off once they are ahead. Getting that second part right is where a lot of strategy work goes thin, and it is the part I care most about.

That view comes from thirty years of applied work and from a body of strategy theory that treats a company as a system, where each move reshapes the conditions for the next. The theory stays under the hood. What a room needs is the judgment on top of it.

A second thread is about the tools themselves. I now take a concept to a deployed product in a few months, alone, without a team or an approval chain, so the outcome rests entirely on the judgment behind what gets built. These tools amplify whatever judgment is already there. Hand them to someone without the experience and you get more noise. Hand them to thirty years of pattern recognition and you get something worth shipping. That shift is bigger for some people than others, and I speak to who, and why.

Strategy Past the Framework.

A framework gets you to the edge of a problem and then stops. What decides the answer is the judgment past that edge: which question to ask, which interpretation of the data to trust, and where you stand against the goal before you weigh any single bet. This talk is about that part of strategy, the part that does not fit on a two-by-two. It draws on thirty years of applied work and on a way of seeing a company as a system with feedback, where a competitor's next move depends on where they stand against their own goals. The throughline: the analysis has gotten cheap, and the judgment it cannot supply is what decides the outcome.

Manufacturing Eminence: How AI Collapses the Reputation Timeline.

Eminence, a recognized point of view and a published body of thinking, used to take a decade to build. For someone with thirty years of judgment, the distance from a head full of ideas to a recognized authority now runs in months. The tools do not manufacture the judgment. They compress the time it takes to make it visible. I make the case through a live example in progress: a years-old question about how to see the world clearly, turned into a deployed product and a public presence, built start to finish with these tools.

• From Noise to Signal: A Clean Measure of a Messy World. A case study in using AI to turn messy, competing data into a coherent, defensible point of view.
• The Imaginer Who Can Finally Build. Why the collapsed build step matters most for the thinker whose constraint was never the idea, and what that opens for a generation of experienced people.

I do not speak about this from the outside. The U.S. Sentiment Signal is the worked example. There are dozens of competing measures of national well-being, each with its own baked-in bias. I had wondered for years whether a cleaner one was possible, and concluded the data already exists, the problem is synthesis: bringing the pieces together to say what they add up to and where they point.

So I named the concept, built it, deployed it, and put it into the world. One person, idea to public product, on a timeline that did not exist a few years ago. The judgment was thirty years in the making. The build took weeks.

See The U.S. Sentiment Signal.

David Rose is the founder and managing director of Triente, a principal-led strategy, advanced analytics, and primary research firm in Fort Collins, CO. He spent the first seven years of his career in strategy consulting at Deloitte, leaving as a Senior Manager, then held senior roles across top firms: an Associate Partner and Senior Expert in Analytics at McKinsey, a Principal at AWS leading worldwide go-to-market for Amazon Q Business partners, and SVP of Analytics and Insights at Fiserv, where he built a new data business from concept to launch, work that produced four patents. He advanced to doctoral candidacy in system dynamics and mathematics, with graduate training at WPI and MIT Sloan. He founded Triente in 2012 and relaunched it in 2026 to work where strategy, analytics, and applied AI meet, building and shipping the things he speaks about.

To book a talk, connect with me on LinkedIn, schedule time, or reach Triente at inquiries@triente.com. I am based in Fort Collins, and I travel for the right room.