Strategy

Do you want to develop a counterintuitive strategy insight and/or lead a team to develop a counterintuitive strategy insight?

You have enough experience to know that frameworks, decision trees, applying MECE and 80/20 principles, hypotheses, and structured problem solving are important, but they are not enough. You know a brilliant insight often looks like a mediocre insight. A great strategy often looks like a bad strategy. Analysis is messy. Data is flawed and misleading. Best practices routinely fail. Hypotheses change. Data changes. Linear thinking often does not work.

This book helps solve this problem. We present the background to a client. You get to follow the design of the strategy study and watch how the solution is developed. Over the past 10 years on StrategyTraining.com and FIRMSconsulting.com, you have seen us help numerous clients solve complex business problems: developing a big data strategy, a corporate strategy, a digital & IT strategy, a pandemic & disaster strategy, a luxury brands strategy, a turnaround & transformation strategy, and more—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.

This book shows you the daily steps, actions, processes, and considerations that go into developing a unique insight for a major company under tight timelines and intense scrutiny. You will get to see which data is used, why it was used, which data was discarded and why it was discarded.

On a daily and weekly basis, you will see us use strategy considerations, engagement update reports, storyboards, analyses tools, strategy maps, client management tools and more, summarizing the best practices from ex-McKinsey, BCG et al., partners and our most successful clients, to help you solve mankind's most pressing problems. The book helps you learn the process to solve strategy and business problems like a strategy partner. You will get to see the numerous contradictions, nuances, and trade-offs that the highest-performing strategy thinkers face. You will learn how to make ethical and balanced decisions based on who is the client and who is not the client. The core of this book revolves around the daily guides to show you how the study is designed, planned, staffed, structured, and run, all the way from focus interviews to day-in-the-life-of studies to financial analysis, financial modeling, and case studies. The book is divided into weeks. Each week is split into days. Days are split into key activities and observations from the study.

While we can't guarantee the results of each reader, clients who have used the book and FIRMSconsulting Insiders who have used the accompanying online training program consisting of 270+ videos on which the book is based report:

• Deeper insights
• Greater recognition
• Rapid promotions
• Deeper understanding of executives
• Happier teams
• Greater productivity
• Project success
• Superior assignments

The book takes you step by step, week by week and day by day through the process to receive a problem, frame the problem, structure the analysis, assemble the team, manage the team, and manage the client toward the solution. You get to go inside the mind of a strategy partner. That is the greatest benefit of this book. At times you will see references to additional resources that our most loyal members, FIRMSconsulting Insiders and SLIDES members, have access should they need to dive deeper into a specific topic (e.g., competitive strategy, digital & IT strategy, implementation, problem-solving, etc.).

Note: Due to the page number restrictions for print books, this book is split into two parts. You can follow the rest of the engagement in Part 2.

• Introduction
• Engagement Background
• Latin America Bank (LAB) Request for Proposal (RFP)
• Design This Strategy Engagement
• Week 0: Planning
1. Building up to the engagement
2. Great strategy consultants can come from any background
3. Why does the Latin America Bank exist?
4. Should the state enter a market that can be served by the private sector?
5. Does LAB compete on risk or price?
6. Has LAB considered less risky ways to extract profits from the US market?
7. What is LAB's role relative to all other state entities?
8. Why relying too heavily on your McKinsey/BCG/Bain past employment is a trap
9. Boutique firms need to be less aggressive but have intellectual firepower
10. The quality of training is directly proportional to the impact of the engagement
11. A good engagement structure assumes the client's preferred option is not valid
12. Basic logic can generate an 80%-accurate answer before detailed analysis is required
13. Ensure that the CEO smooths the path for the consultants
14. Forgetting the expectations exchange is probably the single biggest career killer
15. Most hard skills are are a commodity in management consulting
16. Small signals on an engagement snowball into setting the tone
17. Partners expect efficiency and selflessness when communicating
18. Focus interviews are the heart of top-down analyses and must be done first
19. Are you designing a case study about a company or an attribute?
20. Does your value system exists as words or in everyday actions?
21. Internal strategy units sometimes feel challenged by external consultants
22. Military strategy teaches much about competition strategy
23. Demonstrated competency is at the heart of the best consulting
24. Competition strategy is partially about forcing your competitors to waste resources on preempting an action you will not take
25. The cost of capital differential is a key arbiter of LAB's options
26. Women should not be punished for their beauty
27. Lack of confidence forces poor choices in image management
28. Reading and interpreting exhibits is a crucial skill
29. Having a reliable inside source at the client is a valuable asset
30. The team is structured to start like a greyhound, slow down a little, and end on a high
31. Case studies add value if you are clear about their purpose
32. The engagement office should be a safe zone, closed from the client
33. Consulting teams should be trained to manage engagements for times when things go wrong
34. Interns are future CEOs and should be treated as such
35. Good training must adjust as the mood and energy levels of participants change
36. It is a good sign to be genuinely excited the day before a major engagement begins
37. The ability to leave your ego at the door will make you a great consultant
38. Forget everything a firm claims to be. They are who they hire and what they reward
39. The role of a partner is to make the client successful
• Week 1: Interviews and Analyses
1. The first few days are critical to set the direction of the engagement and analyses
2. Basics, basics, basics
3. Focus interviews guide the team and help build the credibility
4. Credit guarantees are quickly identified as a potentially larger problem
5. When communicating with a partner, think about how to help him or her, not yourself
6. LAB is in a dire financial situation, driven by the credit guarantees
7. If the credit guarantees are so lucrative for the partner private banks, why is the product not growing?
8. Take time to constantly adjust and improve your plans
9. Finding mistakes is not the same as solving a problem
10. Having a big ego is the worst baggage for a consultant
11. You can mainly bond with a client over non professional tips
12. Always check the source material
13. Take the time to ensure that a critical insight is understood
14. Shadow studies reliable test the initial hypotheses
15. Strategy consultants should spend more time thinking and less time analyzing
16. The halo effect impacts just about every engagement
17. Be clear about definitions in an engagement
18. The value of one insight is greater than the volume of insights
19. Presentations are successful thanks to the pre-presentation
20. It is best to wrap up focus interviews and shadow studies as early as possible
• Week 2: Part 1: Interviews, Studies, Meetings
1. Force the manager to step into the leadership role
2. Don't let the business case analyses begin unless the planning is crystal clear
3. Case studies are hard work, requiring extensive corroboration
4. Learn how to get things done with low confidence
5. If LAB will be immensely profitable in twenty years, we would have failed
6. Commitment is more important than intellect
7. The real action begins when the analyses are done
8. Nimisha used clever techniques to assume leadership
9. This engagement matters to the US, which manages several large state banks

A very good book on how to apply a number of tools and approaches to a management consulting engagement.

I like the writing style, even if the use of a fictional case study always make it a bit harder to swallow. Admittedly, they make it a lot better than a number of their competitors.

If you're interested in management consulting, this is really recommended reading, but be aware of that this is the first part of two (you really need both Book One and Book Two.).