Tony Taccone

Tony Taccone
A strategy consultant and founding partner of First River Consulting, established in 1998. Prior to that a consultant with Beddows & Company (1988-1998) and an economist at Mellon Bank (1985-88). Over twenty years of experience consulting to companies in the steel industry and other capital intensive industries, primarily in North America, but also in South America, Europe, and Asia. Consulting experience is heavily focused on the strategy development process – from conception through implementation.

M.A, Duke University in Durham, NC and B.A., Washington & Jefferson College, Washington, PA. Born in Erie, Pennsylvania. Married with three children. Currently reside in Franklin Park, north of Pittsburgh.

I am a very practical person, with little patience for irrelevancies and a strong sense that doing what you choose to do as well as you can is more important than choosing what you ought to be doing. This is why I ended up migrating from my initial career as an academic economist to my current position as a partner in a boutique strategy consulting firm. Economists spend too much time trying to define optimal choices in an ordered world. In my experience, there is no optimal choice, and the world of business is anything but orderly!

Our approach to strategy consulting is extremely practical. We’re not big on models, theories, or buzzwords and we do not try to get you to come up with the best idea the world has ever seen. Instead, we believe that successful strategies emerge from understanding your competitive environment better than your competitors do and working effectively as a management team to adapt to a dynamic environment. Our clients appreciate our practical approach and find that the clarity of purpose that comes from a good strategy makes managing in a disorderly world a little easier.

My consulting experience has been varied by topic because my clients and their issues have been varied. I’ve worked with rapidly growing, entreprenuerial organizations and large, bureaucratic companies with decades of history and lots of inertia. I’ve worked with managers trying to make very specific decisions, such as whether to build or expand capacity in a particular product, and managers trying to decide whether the very core of their business is viable. Through these various consulting assignment I’ve learned that helping managers requires the tools and knowledge to generate new insights (good ideas) and the skills to help management teams reach consensus and act with purpose (effective action). To communicate our thoughts with the outside world, I make presentations at conferences and write papers. Some of them are available on our Nerds of Steel website.