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Strategy analyses are complicated. They are ambiguous and rarely present a definitive answer. We have to predict the future and tell a client where/how to operate in that predicted future. That is incredibly hard to do. It’s unlike short-term trading, where traders can quickly adjust positions and minimize risk. Investors often move through trades in split seconds to minimize future volatility. Traders who work with commodities etc., usually have a buyer before they find a seller, thereby having strong certainty in the profit from a trade.
Investors who take long-term bets sometimes win, but often lose. Successful long-term investing is rare because it requires a qualified bet on an uncertain future, much like strategy. They have to take a qualified bet on the future. In that sense, long-term investing shares similarities with strategy work. For every George Soros, many more people made the wrong bets and were driven out of business.
Strategy is difficult for similar reasons but with even greater consequences. You are taking a bet on the future, and you must determine how to increase confidence in your predictions despite uncertainty. Since all data you could use is either from the present but often from the past, you have to extrapolate some version of the past while modifying your reasoning.
Since strategy plays out in years, the predictions have to consider everything from shifting regulations, consumer behavior, competitor behavior, and the client’s ability to fund the changes. More analyses and more detailed analyses do not remove the uncertainty. Unlike investors, who can exit a bad position, strategists often commit to decisions that are difficult or costly to reverse. Yet, CEOs and leaders have to act.
So, how do we do this? How do we make decisions under extreme uncertainty, with data that is always incomplete? How do you make high-stakes decisions when certainty is impossible? How do you convince peers and the board to act despite the unknowns?
This is why we are creating the Strategy Analyses Center of Excellence.
Here are the principles we followed:
And, of course, 1-on-1 coaching clients can get our direct personalized guidance in our weekend clinics given their particular career/engagement challenges or opportunities. We do a deep dive with each client at each results clinic.
Below are the studies we will cover. Again, these are the core engagements that taught us the foundational principles of strategy and analyses. We may adjust this list, but this is the plan for now.
Restructuring a Bank
How does one fix a loss-making bank which is struggling to raise equity capital as its risk exposure is growing?
Restructuring a Large Industrial Concern
How does a large industrial business that measures product cycles in decades leave its loss-making business as it is battling to gain regulatory and licensing approval to join the fastest-growing and most profitable segments of the market?
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Expanding a Bank
How does a bank that has realized its balance sheet can never support its ambitions seek out alliances with other lenders when it has very little to offer?
Changing a Business Model
How does a large company realize and convince its entire board and leadership team that it is pursuing the wrong strategy and facing a catastrophic future unless it changes direction immediately?
Developing an R&D Strategy
Does a corporate R&D division develop cutting-edge technologies, license in what it needs, and/or try to grow its nascent technology consulting business while deciding to invest in costly next-gen technologies?
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Developing a Financial Services Product
How does a bank define the parameters of a product, test its profitability, decide which parts of the product will be within its control, which parts will reside with partners, build the product, launch the product, and calculate the returns from the product?
IT / Digital Strategy Study
How does a company decide how much of the IT team controls IT, AI, digital, and process control, and how does it manage and govern the parts under its control to support an organization rolling out a new digital infrastructure, while managing legacy mainframe systems?
Portfolio Planning Strategy
How do you prove a technology is worth the investment when it is not the cheapest, is a new technology to the client/region, has not been proven to work internationally, and would require costly new infrastructure to bring it online?
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Making the Case for Market Entry
Why would a company enter a new market in which it would take many years to realize a return, where it has no expertise and there are no synergies with the other profitable and fast-growing parts of the business?
Operations Strategy – A New Approach
How does one develop an all-encompassing operations strategy to guide the entire operations of a large diversified business that is considered the best performer in its sector, especially when the client believes there are only minor/isolated operations problems?
Pharmaceutical / Healthcare Strategy Study
How does one move clients from an entrenched view of trying to cut the cost of employee healthcare towards focusing on the returns from funding even more comprehensive and costly treatment for employees?
Innovative Ways to Fund Growth & Expansion
How does a highly leveraged client find ways to fund its growth when its primary asset is co-owned by a founding investor who is unwilling to change the terms of the original investment?
Three Options to Join + Add-On:
Add-on – Article + Book – Published Author program to help you write your article/book. If you are in the executive coaching EB1A program, we will also guide you through your articles writing/publishing process if we will jointly determine that articles publishing should be used as part of your program to help you qualify for EB1A.
