what upstream actually means
On the advisory gap that compounds at scale.
The decision has been made.
Not the final decision — the strategic one. The market entry. The acquisition. The repositioning. By the time execution begins, the capital has a direction. From that point, everything that follows is in service of scaling it — the legal structure, the operating model, the communications, the product adjustments, the market-specific adaptations. The organisation mobilises. And as it mobilises, the assumptions embedded in the original decision move with it, at volume.
This is the logic of compounding. Not financial compounding — interpretive compounding. A wrong assumption, scaled into operations, is not the same size as a wrong assumption in a document. It is the wrong assumption multiplied by everything the organisation then builds on top of it.
the advisory room
The examination that happens before this point is real and serious.
Financial advisors model the return. Legal teams review regulatory exposure. Political risk consultants map the landscape — who is in power, where the vulnerabilities are, and what the next election might shift. And the major consultancies have noticed that this is not enough. With the world’s political geography in flux, regional strategic knowledge has become a competitive advantage. McKinsey, BCG, and Bain are all building regional depth now — local advisors, local networks, and local political and economic intelligence. This is a legitimate response to a real shift.
All of it falls into the same category of systems: economic, legal, regulatory, and political.
None of it reads the meaning system that the decision is entering.
what the meaning system does
The meaning system is not an atmosphere. It is not the cultural feel of a market. It is the interpretive environment through which a decision will be read — the shared codes that determine what a product signals, what a brand means, what a commitment communicates to the people who will receive it.
It operates independently of the organisation's intentions.
PepsiCo opened its Middle East regional headquarters in Riyadh this year. The investment is substantial — nine billion riyals over eight years. To understand the market, they built a sensory studio: a culinary lab designed to calibrate products to local taste preferences.
This is real and useful work. It is also entirely downstream of the interpretive question, which is not what PepsiCo’s products taste like in Saudi Arabia, but what PepsiCo means — in a market where Vision 2030 is actively cultivating national identity, where local brands are emerging as statements of belonging, and where the relationship between Saudi consumers and American consumer culture is something more complicated than preference.
W Hotels opened in Riyadh on 22 April. The property made deliberate gestures toward local context — a tapestry by a Saudi artist, Al Sadu weaving patterns, a reinterpretation of Bedouin gathering spaces in the lobby. The design is culturally legible. What was not examined is what W Hotels is in a market where its founding logic — irreverence, nightlife, urban hedonism — is structurally absent. The lobby says, Saudi Arabia. The brand hasn't clarified what it means there.
McCormick is in the process of acquiring Unilever’s food division for forty-five billion dollars. The deal gives them Knorr — five billion consumers, ninety markets. Knorr does not mean the same thing in Turkey as it does in Germany or in Nigeria. It carries food memories, class associations, and domestic ritual. In many markets, it is something people grew up with in a way that is not primarily about flavour. That meaning is the asset.
McCormick’s deal communication described the “cultural fit” between the two organisations. They meant internal culture. No one in the room asked what Knorr means to the people who buy it, in the ninety places where they buy it.
the signal the boards are receiving
There is a signal worth noting. Governance publications are now recommending that boards form cultural intelligence committees, appoint external cultural advisers, and conduct regular cultural audits of global strategy. The institutional recognition is real — boards are being told that cultural misalignment is a strategic risk, not a regional footnote.
But what is being proposed is an audit. Assessment of what has already been decided. The upstream question is not whether a decision was culturally aligned. It is whether the assumptions underlying the decision were examined before the capital moved.
the difference
Upstream, in the sense I am using it, is not earlier involvement in the same advisory process.
The financial modelling occurs before execution. The regulatory review occurs before market entry. Earlier involvement in those disciplines does not create an upstream position — it creates a fuller version of the same position. The same systems are being read at an earlier stage.
What is not in the room — at any stage — is the examination of the meaning system, the decision is entering what the decision will mean to the people it reaches. Whether the assumptions driving the strategy are coherent with the interpretive environment in which it is about to operate. This is not an earlier version of the work already being done. It is a different category of work entirely.
The compounding logic applies here, too. The later this examination happens, the more the unexamined assumption has already been built into it. PepsiCo’s sensory studio is downstream of a nine-billion-riyal strategic commitment. W Hotels’ Saudi design is downstream of a brand decision that was never made. McCormick will spend the next several years integrating a meaning system they have not yet examined into the one they already run.
These are not execution failures. They are upstream gaps, scaling.
The paid edition of this piece goes into what that examination actually looks like — and what it produces that the other advisory disciplines in the room do not.