Report
A practical guide to rapid, high-impact strategy development: twenty years of strategy work set down as a method you can run yourself.
Value creation through strategy
A fact-based analysis of the business opportunity, leading to a clear set of strategic recommendations and a future roadmap.
A process to identify new value-creating opportunities in a business: improving the performance of an existing division, or taking a market adjacency seriously for the first time. It is also the one moment when you step back from operations and test the strategic foundations the business is built on, which is why it has to be a fact-based analysis rather than a view.
A clear set of strategic recommendations and a future roadmap: the course the business will follow, and what has to be true for performance to lift and stay lifted.
Typical scope
This is the scope a review has to cover to be worth running. In the report each area opens with a checklist you can take straight into a working session, followed by a worked example of the analysis that answers it.
Segments, size and growth outlook, the trends moving them, and the adjacencies worth a look.
The value proposition, the capabilities behind it, and the weaknesses competitors can work against.
Organisation and culture, the core processes, and the systems the strategy will have to run on.
The historical drivers of performance, and a forecast with the strategy overlaid rather than last year extended.
The initiatives, named owners for each, and the metrics that will show whether delivery is real.
When to run one
Some companies run a review every year as part of planning. Most of the ones we are called into sit at one of the points below instead.
Growth has stalled and additional effort is not restoring it. Whether the cause is the market, the proposition or the operating model is worth knowing before another year is spent on the same approach.
A new leader has a short window in which to form a view that the board and the team will accept. A review provides an independent fact base to form it from.
Buyers and investors pay for a credible plan. Four weeks is usually enough to produce one that withstands due diligence and supports the valuation being sought.
The annual planning cycle can become a strategy cycle without adding three months and a consulting bill to it.
A new segment, a market adjacency or an acquisition target can be tested for whether it is real, and whether the business can fund it, before capital is committed.
Whether the problem is strategic or operational is worth establishing before anything is restructured, since the two call for different responses.
What changes
These are the places a good strategy shows up, and the places a vague one costs you.
Management knows which two or three levers its advantage rests on, and the senior team agrees on them, which gives the business a position it can defend when the market tests it.
Without it
Every function optimises for itself, and the trade-offs get made by whoever argues hardest.
Better allocation of capital and a better return on it, because the forecast is built on the strategy rather than on last year plus 5%.
Without it
Capital follows last year’s allocation, and the business case gets written after the decision.
The organisation structure and the core processes are aligned with the strategy.
Without it
The structure keeps enforcing the old strategy long after the new one was announced.
Staff understand the strategy and the role they play in it. Engagement tends to follow alignment.
Without it
Staff hear a new direction every year, and stop listening somewhere around the third.
The board can test management’s recommendations against a fact base, which tends to improve the quality of the discussion between the two.
Without it
The board debates opinions, management defends them, and nobody can point to the evidence.
Delivering the review
Reviews run under real time pressure. Every day has to count, and no analysis can be done that will not make the final cut.
By the end of day two you should be able to state the conclusion you expect. Break it into the components that would each have to be true, then spend the four weeks trying to break it. The leading firms work this way for a reason: McKinsey’s decision tree, Bain’s answer-first. They call the structure MECE, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.
Be targeted in what you gather. A short, focused survey or a handful of customer calls gets you to an 80% answer in days. You will not build a full financial model in four weeks, but you can model the main levers, and strategic models exist to compare options rather than to budget. Working capital and tax detail almost never change the decision.
A good review needs people who are freed from other duties to do it, including a project lead with the time, an analyst who can model scenarios, someone internal who knows where the data lives, and a sponsor senior enough to clear roadblocks. The best results come from mixed teams, with internal members seconded in for the length of the review.
Distilling the analysis into a structured argument takes longer than anyone plans for. Have a draft report outline by the end of week one. It also keeps the 80/20 discipline honest, because an outline makes it obvious which analysis will never make the final cut.
A review without an implementation plan tends to be wasted. You will not write a detailed program plan in four weeks, but you can set the roadmap, with the initiatives, the owners, and when each one is due.
Extract, page 12
Three sub-questions that do not overlap and leave nothing out, each resting on three conditions that must be true. That is what MECE means in practice, and it is what sets the analysis plan for the four weeks.
Should we develop the proposition for segment X, while running segment Y for cash?
01
Is segment X the best opportunity for the future?
02
Is segment Y cash-generative, but in decline?
03
Can we fund and staff both at the same time?
Common mistakes
Each one gets a page in the report, with the correction. Searching for a strategy framework returns hundreds of millions of results; almost none of them fit your business, and reaching for one is how most reviews end up with a hole in the middle.
Indicative timeline
The full workplan is in the report. This is the shape of it.
Agree the questions the review must answer, form the initial hypotheses, and draft the report outline. Data requests go out in this first week.
Market sizing, competitor position, and a customer survey or interview program. Enough evidence to confirm or reject each hypothesis.
High-level modelling of the main financial levers, the strategic options set out, and a first view of which of them the business can fund.
Recommendations, the implementation roadmap with initiatives and timing, and a report the executive can take to the board without rewriting it.
The workplan
The indicative project plan from page 25 of the report. The shape is the same across engagements; the detail moves with the question you are answering.
| Workstream | Preparation | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scoping and project management | Data requestPrepare data | Initial hypothesis | Refine hypothesis and logic structure | Finalised hypothesis | Develop high-level implementation plan |
| Market research and analysis | Review internal data, interview managementConduct desktop market research | Plan primary research | Execute primary researchSupplementary analysis as required | ||
| Financial modelling | Specify model | Develop structure | Populate scenarios | Refine model assumptions | |
| Report development | Draft outline | Populate content | Preliminary draft | Refine reportFinal draft | |
| Stakeholder management | Kick-off | Weekly catch-up | Weekly catch-up | Review preliminary draftReview final draft |
Get the report
More than twenty years of strategy development collected into a single guide to running a strategic review. Written as a method rather than a brochure, with no case studies of ourselves.
Common questions
A structured process to evaluate the external environment and internal context of a business, in order to define the optimal positioning and operating model for the future.
Companies can spend months on a strategy that is out of date by the time it is signed off. With a structured approach and an 80/20 mindset, a clear strategy and future roadmap can be completed in as little as four weeks.
Internal data against a request that goes out in week one, time with management for interviews, and an executive sponsor senior enough to clear roadblocks. Where a review works best, one internal person is seconded in for the four weeks.
Yes. A review can take in the whole group or a single division, and one of the more common reasons to run one is to establish whether a division is underperforming for strategic or operational reasons. The scope is fixed in week one, when the questions the review must answer are agreed.
