Steve Sashihara Discusses His New Book with Consulting Magazine

Steve Sashihara talked about his new book, The Optimization Edge: Reinventing Decision Making to Maximize All Your Company’s Assets, in the new issue of Consulting Magazine. Steve, the president and CEO of Princeton Consultants (nice name, Steve!) argues that downsizing is no way to grow a company. Instead, the smart firms have figured out a better way to make business decisions. In the book and his practice, he shows clients how to squeeze every ounce of value from their company, even under the perfect storm conditions of the last few years. The two-page spread starts like this:

Consulting: I know Princeton Consultants has always had a heavy focus on optimization, but why did you decide to write the book?

Sashihara: We’ve been focused on optimization as a small boutique firm for 30 years now. Optimization was traditionally always a nice-to-do, a nice-to-have for very high-end companies, but we now believe it is becoming a categorical imperative. People know a lot about analytics, but don’t realize that optimization is at the very high end of the analytics spectrum. I was trying to explain it to clients, and I realized that no real definition of optimization existed out there. So, I figured I’d write the book.