Strategy consulting

Strategy workshops

"Powerful leadership alignment around a roadmap for the future."

Our strategy workshops workshops revolve around leadership alignment, strategic clarity, and how to translate strategy into operational terms.

We prefer to plan and structure our strategy workshops from an informed position enabled by a pre-assessment of the company and its environment. 

This ensures that we as facilitators understand the core issues at hand and enable us to select the most appropriate tools and methodologies to be used in the workshop.

Our approach is to use discussion and debate to populate strategic planning models, which provides insight, answers and options.

Our workshops are outcome-driven, ending with decisions and next steps for strategy implementation.

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For more information, see strategy workshops.

 

Strategic planning service offering

Our main strategy consulting service offering is strategic planning:

Corporate strategy, dealing with the role of the head office, choices about the range and resource allocation in the portfolio of business units, and the vision of the group as whole.

Business unit strategy, dealing with the vision, mission and competitive strategy of each.

Functional strategy in support of business unit strategy - manufacturing strategy, marketing strategy, human resources strategy, etc.

To determine strategy, we firstly help clients develop a thorough understanding of where they are and what they are facing in terms of internal strengths and weaknesses, and environmental threats and opportunities.

Secondly, we help clients obtain clarity about where and what they wish to be in terms of a articulated and clearly understood concept of the desired future of their organisations.

In doing so, we place a high emphasis on viable and defensible competitive strategy, and a feasible customer value proposition.

Lastly, we help clients to determine how to get there by translating the envisioned future into actionable and measurable operational terms.

We not only help clients to formulate strategy, but also to implement strategy through project management and utilising the Balanced Scorecard.

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For more information, see strategic planning.

"Is your company's strategy not working as desired?"

We found that the reasons for clients being unhappy with the results they get from their strategic planning are related to one or more of the following shortcomings:

Lofty vision and mission statements on office walls, but nobody knowing what it really means and how to execute it.

Strategy devised as a once a year workshop rather than a continual process,

Lack of buy-in and alignment from the leadership team.

The organisation not part of strategy formulation and implementation, with strategy confined to the board room and leadership team.

No envisaged future.

The mission not underpinned by market segmentation and targeting based on market attractiveness and competitive strength.

The mission not underpinned by a competitive strategy to position the company for competitive advantage.

Strategy not translated into operational terms - no goals, objectives, measures, targets and initiatives.

Strategy translated into operational terms but not balanced in terms of financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth - i.e. no Balanced Scorecard.

Do you sell packaged strategy to your clients?

No, in the sense that we investigate each individual client's unique situation and devise strategy tailor-made for a client's needs from first principles. 

Yes, in the sense that in order to decrease time spent and cost to clients, our strategy consulting employs strategic tools, methodologies and rigorous processes employed many times before.

Do you help clients implement strategy?

Yes, that is why our strategy consulting helps clients to formulate strategy in implementation-friendly format. 

To this end we use the Balanced Scorecard to operationalise strategy, and help clients how to best manage the performance review process.

Which school of strategy do you represent?

We believe in Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard as the best methodology to map, implement and track strategy.

It balances not only across different perspectives (financial, customer, internal, and learning and growth), but across time, with leading indicators and performance drivers vs. lagging indicators and outcome measures.

The Balanced Scorecard now also integrates Treacy & Wiersema's customer value proposition and Kim & Mauborgne's value innovation in the Customer Perspective.

We believe in Hamel and Prahalad's resource-based strategy.  But we also use Porter's positioning strategy.  After all, its the only strategy approach that has been proved in micro-economics.