Report 01 / Publication
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 hold to, 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 these six points instead.
The business has hit a ceiling that more effort is not clearing. You need to know whether it is the market, the proposition or the operating model before spending another year pushing.
You have ninety days to form a view and be believed. A review gives you an independent fact base rather than the opinions you inherited.
Buyers and investors pay for a credible plan. Four weeks is the quickest route to one that survives diligence and supports the number you are asking for.
Turn the annual cycle into a genuine strategy cycle, without adding three months and a consulting bill to it.
A new segment, a market adjacency, an acquisition target. Test whether it is real, and whether you can fund it, before committing capital.
Establish whether the problem is strategic or operational before restructuring anything. The two need very different responses.
What changes
These are the five places a good strategy shows up, and the five places a vague one quietly costs you.
You know which two or three levers actually drive your advantage, and so does everyone else in the room. Consensus at senior level, and a position you can hold when the market tests it.
Without it
Every function optimises for itself, and the trade-offs get made by whoever argues hardest.
Better allocation and a better return on it, because the forecast has the strategy overlaid on it rather than last year plus five per cent.
Without it
Capital follows last year’s allocation, and the business case gets written after the decision.
The organisation and the core processes line up behind the strategy instead of quietly working against it.
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 follows alignment, not the other way round.
Without it
Staff hear a new direction every year, and stop listening somewhere around the third.
The board can hold management’s recommendations against a real fact base, and the two sides stop talking past each other.
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 per cent 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 genuinely free to do it: 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 a plan of attack is wasted. You will not write a detailed program plan in four weeks, but you can set the roadmap: the initiatives, the owners, and when each one lands.
Extract, page 12
Three sub-questions that do not overlap and leave nothing out, each resting on three things 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 now, not in week three.
Market sizing, competitor position, and a customer survey or interview program. Enough evidence to confirm or kill each hypothesis.
High-level modelling of the main financial levers, the strategic options set out, and a first pass at which of them the business can actually 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 holds 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.
