The office smelled like burnt popcorn. Not even fresh, the kind that lingers after someone nuked a bag two hours ago. Chairs squeaking, somebody tapping a Bic pen so hard it left little dents in the cheap laminate table. That was the mood when we opened VWCG’s site. Nine tools, little emojis like they’d been copy-pasted from a text thread. Looked unserious. I thought, this can’t be real.
AI Readiness Assessment came first. Somebody smirked, said “what’s this, Buzzfeed for business?” We clicked through anyway. Red, red, red. Data scattered, governance zero, strategy a joke. The CTO rubbed his forehead like maybe pressing hard enough would erase the screen. We laughed—nervous laughter, not funny laughter. I kept thinking about the half-empty whiteboard behind us with “AI Vision 2025” written in dry marker. Nobody mentioned it again.
Different day, same tools. Vision Canvas. Hotel ballroom, fake-wood tables that wobble if you lean too far. We typed “customer first” because what else do you type? Junior manager in a wrinkled hoodie muttered “we don’t do that.” Air conditioner buzzing, papers shifting, everyone stopped. The cursor blinked. Somebody backspaced. That’s all. But it felt like something cracked.
The SOP trio is boring—taxonomy, creation, management—but only boring until you’ve lived without them. I remembered the factory floor, night shift, everyone swearing their way was the right shutdown. Pull this lever, no, that lever, no, just yank the breaker. One guy actually crossed himself before hitting a button. The wizard would’ve saved scars. Maybe even saved jobs.
Leadership Radar—god, that wheel. I rushed through mine. Thought it’d show me balanced, strong. It didn’t. Delegation at the bottom, like a broken spoke. I laughed, too loud, told myself it was wrong. A week later I was re-doing someone’s slides because “they wouldn’t get it right.” The wheel wasn’t wrong. And the Emotional Intelligence tool… I closed the laptop before finishing. The score still floated in my head all week like a bad song lyric.
90-Day Roadmap is easier. Restrictive, yeah, but in a way that feels like guardrails. One founder I know cursed it. Said he’d never chain his vision. Three months later, his team wasn’t burned out for once. He didn’t admit it out loud but he didn’t fight the roadmap next time either.
SWOT is ancient. Professors beat it to death. Still—midnight, greasy pizza boxes, startup team going in circles. They pulled it up. Wrote weaknesses in Sharpie on a napkin when the markers dried out. By the end they had a direction. Ugly, but usable. Someone said “finally” and everyone laughed, the good kind this time.
All nine tools. Scattered, blunt, not clever. They don’t give answers. They corner you with what you already know but haven’t said. Mirrors, really. Cracked ones sometimes. And cracked mirrors still reflect.
I keep thinking about that blinking cursor after “customer first” vanished. The way nobody looked at the whiteboard again after the AI score. The pen tapping dents in the table. These things stick. Tools don’t do the work but they leave bruises where excuses used to sit.
And that’s—
Consultant 
Consultant 
Consultant