Strategic Management Advice: What It Costs and When It Works
Companies buy strategy advice and then do not implement it. The reason is structural: the person who wrote the recommendation is not in the room when the trade off has to be made, and by then the recommendation has no owner.
The three ways it is bought
What good advice contains
- A clear statement of what the company will stop doing
- Numbers attached to each option, including the cost of doing nothing
- A named owner and a first action inside thirty days
- The uncomfortable observation the management team has been avoiding
Where projects go wrong
Two failure modes dominate. The first is a recommendation that nobody inside the company has the authority to execute, which stalls at the first budget conversation. The second is a recommendation everybody already knew, delivered at length, which buys internal cover rather than change. Both are avoidable by agreeing at the outset who will own the decision when the work lands.
When to buy execution instead
If the constraint is knowing what to do, buy advice. If the constraint is doing it, buy an operator. Most mid sized companies that commission a strategy project already know the answer within twenty percent, and what they actually need is someone with authority who will carry the trade off through the organisation.
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