Corporate Strategy
Most strategies are inherited
Corporate strategy is the set of choices that determine what a company is: which markets it competes in, what it owns rather than buys, where capital goes inside the business, and what it declines to do. Most of those choices were made once, under conditions that have since changed.
A great deal of strategy work produces a document that describes a company back to itself.
The market it already operates in. The competitors it already knows about. The ambitions it already had. It is accurate, it is extensive, and it changes nothing.
The useful version is narrower. It identifies the small number of choices that actually determine the company's economics, examines whether those choices still hold, and says what should change.
The most common finding is not a bad decision. It is an old one that never came up for review - the same share of capital and attention going to the same parts of the business, year after year, because that is how the budget was built the last time anyone asked.
That usually means separating the decisions that matter from the ones that only feel urgent. It often means questioning something no one has questioned in years, because it worked once and nobody went back to check whether it still does.
The work is finished when these have honest answers.
Which parts of this business actually earn the capital committed to them?
Has the split between them changed in the last five years, or only the total?
Should we enter this market - and if so, do we build, buy, or partner?
Are we positioned where the margin is, or where the volume is?
What has two years of technology spending actually changed?
What are we still doing because it made sense five years ago?
Where does the plan rest on an assumption no one has tested, and if it is wrong, what breaks first?
A company that can answer these has a strategy. A company that cannot has a set of habits.
How the work takes shape.
Strategy review
An independent second opinion on a plan that has already been made. The decision stays with you, what changes is the quality of scrutiny it has survived. Often the fastest way to find out whether a plan is sound or merely familiar.
Capital and attention review
Where money, management time, and effort currently go across the business, and whether that split still reflects where value is created. In most companies the answer has not moved in years, while the business around it has.
Rolling roadmap
Priorities in order, with owners, sequencing, and review points. Set on a rolling horizon rather than a calendar one, so a change in conditions triggers a review instead of waiting for next year's planning round. Written in plain language, so the people responsible for executing it can read it without translation.
Market and expansion assessment
Where demand is real, reachable, and worth the cost of reaching. Includes the markets to decline, which is usually the more valuable half. Where the original growth engine is slowing, it also means asking what the second one is, and whether it is close enough to the first to be built rather than bought.
Scenario and risk planning
Trade policy, input costs, financing terms, and regulation now move faster than most planning cycles. The useful question is what a given change would do to this business, and at what point it would call for a different decision. Forecasts age badly. A response worked through before the condition arrives holds its value.
A strategy that ignores context is a template.
We look at the business as a whole: its economics, market position, ownership, management, incentives, vulnerabilities, and ambitions, together with the environment it operates in.
Institutions shape markets. People respond to incentives, but not always as predicted. Political and economic change can undo the assumptions behind a business model long before it appears in a financial statement.
For most of the last thirty years that context sat at the edge of strategy. It now sits at the center: trade policy, industrial policy, and regulation have become inputs to ordinary commercial decisions rather than background conditions to be assumed away.
What works for companies in general is rarely what works for this one, under these conditions, at this particular moment.
Start with the situation.
The most productive conversations begin with a description of what is happening and an open question about it. You do not need to arrive with the problem already defined - defining it is part of the work.
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