The Strategy Journal

Learn the tools and engagement management techniques of the world’s leading consulting firms.

You need to solve a critical business problem. What if you had one tool that you could carry into meetings and write inside that guided you step-by-step to understand the problem, develop a structure, develop hypotheses, design the tests for the hypotheses, track your daily and weekly tasks, plan the message for your team and manager, manage the project, guide you through critical update meetings, calculate the benefits case to convince your colleagues and start the pilot implementation of your recommendations?

Now you do. The Strategy Journal is the field guide to our popular book Succeeding as a Management Consultant.

This Journal helps readers walk into any situation in any organization anywhere in the world and solve their most pressing business problems via to-do list prompts, self-assessments and strategy calendars. All based on the combined best-practices of the author and the ex-McKinsey, BCG et al. partners who produce all the strategy training programs on StrategyTraining.com.

The Strategy Journal was used by many of our very successful clients and summarizes the approach we used to help them increase their productivity, transform their careers, set daunting career goals, outperform peers and measure the value they create.

The Journal is divided into 3 parts: Overview, Guided Example, and Your Study. The Overview offers you a 1-page guide to the entire process. In the Guided Example, we will work together through a study/project to show you how each page will be used. Thereafter, we create blank templates and guides for you to use on Your Study.

The Daily Pages are split into 8 weeks with a page for Monday to Friday. The pages help you understand your goals each day with a timeline reminder of the deliverables before each client update. As the study begins to wrap up, we move to implementation — what needs to be done, what to implement, and how to measure and track the implementation benefits.

The Strategy Engagement

Follow a partner on an 8-week engagement as he leads a team to develop a unique insight for the client.

The goal of this book is to help you think and develop an insight like a strategy partner.

Almost every management or strategy book is written after the fact. They are written years or months after the situation described, after the authors have had time to sift through their extensive work and piece together a cohesive story. Hindsight is 20/20.

What you get in those books is the final answer. You see the final framework that was developed. The final analyses. Neatly packaged and presented. You end up thinking strategy is a simple linear process where a few analyses offer an unambiguous answer.

This book attempts to give you that experience. A blow-by-blow and day-by-day account of developing an insight in a complex study. To see the messy steps involved. It was written in real time. The notes were written hours before an event happened or hours afterward, usually on the same day.

If you want to be a strategy consultant and be able to produce the analyses in this book, solve complex problems, and influence senior executives, we believe you need to know how messy it usually is. There is rarely an objectively correct answer that stands out from all the options available to a client. A very good strategy often looks exactly like a very bad strategy.

Strategy consulting is an art. There are core analytic approaches we use, but we encourage creativity when using them. We want to unveil this process.

Succeeding as a Management Consultant

Learn the tools and engagement management techniques of the world’s leading consulting firms.

Written for business leaders and consultants who are trying to solve significant problems and create measurable value. Readers can view the templates in consulting studies and understand how they are used. All the foundational strategy and business analyses tools are taught along with the soft skills and practical tools to solve any business problem. This is the only book of its kind walking the reader step-by-step through a complete consulting study.

This book follows an engagement team as they assist a large company in diagnosing and fixing deep and persistent organizational issues over an 8-week assignment. Readers will learn how they successfully navigate a challenging client environment, frame the problem and limit the scope, develop hypotheses, build the analyses and provide the final recommendations.

We have placed the explanation of management consulting techniques within a lively and engaging storyline, which allows the reader to truly understand the challenges faced on consulting engagements, connect with the characters, and understand both how and why they debated elements of the study.

Mavis

A dystopian sci-fi thriller about a productivity paradox. The sequel to Turquoise Eyes by Kris Safarova.

MAVIS is a dystopian novel inspired by historical events. The technology at the heart of the novel is a real commercial process used around the world. Everything discussed about the process from the pipelines to the reactors to the mining process is based on the actual operations of these facilities. This novel is about raising the productivity of a chemical plant.

In Mavis’s dystopian world, starvation, sacrifice and poverty haunt a country trying to recover from The Great Patriotic War. Protected by a peacekeeping force, the nation struggles to coax profits out of a sprawling industrial complex to pay wartime reparations. In this world, the future of every citizen is decided on their sixteenth birthday during a single exam, The Selection. They either join Defense, Productivity or Leadership.

Mavis is assigned to a chemical plant to solve a productivity paradox and struggles with her colleagues as they race to meet the reparations deadline. Mavis must figure out who her friends are, and how does Truman, a soldier who seems interested in her, fit into her life. Yet Mavis is burdened by having left her ill little sister behind. As Mavis investigates the problem, she discovers a conspiracy that threatens the nation just as unexplained sightings spike in the surrounding forest.

This young adult (YA) dystopian novel combines the teaching of science, critical thinking and problem-solving skills with wrenching decisions, betrayal, heartbreak, love and the bond between two sisters that will change the future of mankind.

Turquoise Eyes

Written as a fast-paced international crime thriller.

Turquoise Eyes started off the groundbreaking new genre developed by FIRMSconsulting that combines compelling narrative while teaching critical problem-solving skills.

Set after a bank begins implementing a new retail banking strategy, we follow Teresa García Ramírez de Arroyo, a director general in the Mexican government, who has received some disturbing news. A whistleblower has emailed Teresa with troubling news about a mistake in the loan default calculations and reserve ratios. The numbers do not add up.

The book loosely uses the logic and financial analyses in A Typical McKinsey Engagement.

Our business books are different. Most people learn business because they are forced to, for their careers or to earn a larger salary. We wondered what would happen if we made business books interesting, so people chose to read them? Would we draw more people into business?

If learning is engaging, it will stop being a chore.

Marketing Saves the World

What was McKinsey’s strategy that allowed them to leap so far ahead of the competition?

Every now and then someone comes along whose treatment of the subject of management is both entertaining and insightful. That’s what Bill Matassoni has accomplished in his memoir, which covers his forty-year career selling what he calls “ephemeral things.”

Bill, a former McKinsey and BCG partner, distills his life, loves, and lessons in this unique story of the evolution of the modern marketer. He presents an entirely new way to think about unlocking value in market-spaces, not places. He recounts his adventures — and they are adventures — working for The United Way of America, McKinsey, BCG, Ashoka, and other organizations. In all of them, ideas were the product, and emotion was as important as reason.

We learn about how Victoria’s Secret “democratized” luxury, why beer might become a nutritional product, how BCG tried to compete with McKinsey, and the growing impact of social entrepreneurs. Marketing Saves the World teaches us how to find new dimensions of value that make the world better by enabling multiple stakeholders to win.

Says Bill, “Forget about sharing the pie. Make it bigger.”