Fifty strategy engagements across fifteen years. Different industries — financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, professional services, technology. Different scales — from $20M to $4B in revenue. Different problems — pivots, growth, restructuring, succession. The variation is real. The principles that show up across the engagements that actually moved the needle, separable from the ones that produced reports without producing change, have proven surprisingly consistent.
Principle 1: The diagnosis is most of the work
Engagements that fail tend to fail because they applied a generic solution to a specific problem. The clients who got the most value from my work were the ones whose problem we genuinely understood by week three. The ones who got less value were ones where the diagnosis was rushed.
The implication: more time on understanding the problem; less time on producing recommendations. Most strategic recommendations are obvious once the underlying problem is precisely characterised.
Principle 2: Strategy is implementation
The most common engagement failure is producing strategic recommendations the client cannot execute. The recommendations may be technically correct; the client's organisational reality cannot absorb them; the strategy fails.
The principle: every strategic recommendation must be paired with explicit attention to how the client will actually do it. If the recommendation requires capabilities the client doesn't have, the recommendation is wrong, even if it's technically correct.
Principle 3: The senior team is part of the diagnosis
Strategy lives or dies inside the leadership team's dynamics. The same strategic recommendation can succeed in one team and fail in another. The variable is rarely the recommendation's quality; it's the team's ability to commit to and execute it.
The implication: any serious strategy engagement has to assess the team capability honestly. This is uncomfortable for everyone (including the consultant) but it's the difference between strategies that work and strategies that don't.
Principle 4: Good strategy is selective; bad strategy is comprehensive
The strategy documents that produced real change were short. Three to five strategic priorities. Clear about what was being declined. The strategy documents that produced no change were long. Comprehensive coverage of every possible direction. Implicit assertion that the company would do everything.
The temptation in consulting is to be comprehensive (it looks more thorough; it's harder for the client to attack). The temptation is wrong. Comprehensive strategy is unactionable strategy.
Principle 5: The first month sets the engagement
If the first month doesn't produce a meaningful insight that the client team didn't already have, the engagement will probably underperform. The client may be polite about it; they'll probably renew once or not at all; the work won't produce real change.
The first month has to be different. Not just analytical work — actual insight that shifts how the team is thinking about their situation. The pressure to produce that early is real and warranted.
Principle 6: Disagreement should surface, not stay submerged
The consulting failure mode is producing a recommendation that everyone in the room nods to and that several people privately disagree with. The disagreement doesn't disappear; it surfaces during execution as drag, sandbagging, or open opposition.
Better: surface disagreement during the engagement. Force the conversations. Resolve them, or at least name them. The strategy that emerges from this process is more durable than the one that emerges from polite consensus.
Principle 7: The CEO's commitment is binary
Either the CEO is fully committed to the strategy that emerges, or they're not. There is no middle ground. CEOs who are partially committed produce strategies that partially execute. The cost is large enough that engagements should be calibrated to test commitment continuously.
If commitment isn't fully there by month two, the engagement scope should change. Better to deliver a smaller scope of work the CEO will actually back than a larger scope that won't be implemented.
Principle 8: Time-bound the work or it expands
Strategy work expands to fill the available time. Engagements without explicit time boundaries produce comprehensive analysis without forcing decisions. Engagements with tight time boundaries force prioritisation that the analytical version avoids.
I now default to shorter engagement scopes than I used to. Twelve weeks, max, for most strategic work. Longer engagements have produced more deliverables and not better outcomes.
Principle 9: The value is created in the room
The PowerPoint deliverable is mostly a record of conversations that have already happened. The strategy gets built in the room — in the working sessions, the disagreements, the moments where the team commits to a difficult choice.
The implication: optimise the room, not the deck. A great working session with a mediocre deck produces better outcomes than a great deck with no working session. The deck is the artefact; the conversation is the work.
Principle 10: Engagement quality is mostly client-quality
The honest assessment of fifty engagements: my work's quality has varied within a range. The variance in outcome has been driven much more by client characteristics than by my characteristics.
Clients who were ready to do the work — willing to engage, to disagree, to commit — got significantly more out of the engagements. Clients who weren't ready got less, regardless of how good the work was. This is uncomfortable to acknowledge as a consultant. It's also true.
The implication for selecting engagements: assess client readiness as carefully as you assess scope. Walking away from engagements where the client isn't ready produces better aggregate work than taking them and producing mediocre outcomes.
The principle underneath the others
Strategy work is mostly the work of running good conversations and forcing real decisions. The frameworks, the analyses, the deliverables — all are scaffolding for that. The engagements that produce real change are the ones that get the conversations right.
Most consulting fails not because the analysis was wrong, but because the conversations didn't happen. The work of consulting, increasingly, is the work of making sure the right conversations occur — and occur honestly enough that real choices follow them.
