Approach
Which parts of this plan would have to be wrong before the decision changes, and has anybody checked those parts?
Where a company is pointed, and what it has to stop doing to get there.
Most strategy names the destination and leaves the refusals to be discovered later, by whoever happens to be holding the budget. Direction is the work of making the refusals explicit: corporate direction, the shape of the portfolio, entry and exit, and where capital goes.
The single call that does not come round again.
What is actually being decided, what it rests on, and which of those dependencies anyone has checked. The decision is often smaller than the paper around it, and occasionally very much larger. Investment decisions, timing, options and the scenarios that would change them.
Where a strategy meets the organisation that has to carry it.
Most strategies are quietly renegotiated at this point. The work is on the structures that decide whether a plan survives contact: who decides what, on what evidence, and how anybody finds out it is going wrong.
Capital, regulation, technology and competitors, each on its own clock.
The question is rarely what they will do next. It is which parts of a plan would feel it, and how early anyone would know. Regulation, terms of trade, competitor response and shifts in technology.
We do not sell days, staff workstreams, or write the paper that justifies a decision already taken. Strategy is the work itself, not a service wrapped around someone else’s.
For the same reason there is no client list here and no case studies. What we publish instead is argument about method: the notes name no company and quote no figure, and they are the fairest way to judge how we think.
Read the notesWrite to us, and say roughly what the question is.
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