CONSULTRAJ's Strategy Practice helps clients develop corporate and business unit strategies that improve operating and capital market performance. These strategies work in many ways - exploiting structural changes in a globalizing economy, building businesses around "intangible" assets (such as intellectual property, brands, talent and networks), serving unmet customer needs more creatively, as well as fostering improvements on many "traditional" strategic dimensions.

Our goal is to help senior executives take new perspectives on competitive strategy that build on their own market and competitive insights. We assist business strategists with a number of tools, including strategy under uncertainty, game theory, business dynamics, real option strategy and negotiation strategy.

Service Offerings:

Corporate Strategy:

Corporate value added. Making the corporate "whole" worth more than the sum of its parts is the biggest challenge facing many multi-business companies. We work with clients to define a role for the corporate center that goes beyond monitoring operations, allocating resources and coordinating shared functions. We help the corporate center shape the company's direction and boundaries and identify privileged capabilities and insights.

Intangible-based business building. Intangible assets include capabilities or resources such as intellectual property, brands, networks and talent. Uncovering strategic options hidden among the intangible assets in companies' core businesses can provide new growth avenues. We help companies review their portfolios to identify such growth potential.

Business Unit / Product Line Strategy

Strategy under uncertainty: We work with clients to formulate strategies that take advantage of the opportunities presented in highly uncertain business environments while also managing the risks. We give clients tools, frameworks and planning and decision-making processes that help them make solid strategic choices, even in turbulent markets.

Competitive dynamics: When companies implement major strategies, there is always uncertainty about how competitors and potential new market entrants will react. We have developed approaches based on game theory to help clients better predict and shape these competitive dynamics. These approaches can be applied to a variety of strategic issues, including pricing, market entry and exit, capacity management, mergers and acquisitions and R&D strategy. We sometimes use competitive "war games" to help client executives "live" in their competitors' shoes and develop new insights into market dynamics.

Core strategy concepts: Successful businesses have a sense of where and how to compete, an understanding of the competitive landscape and the ability to generate and evaluate ideas for maximizing value. We work with clients to refine their approach to business unit/product line strategy, including setting aspirations, developing a mission and vision, clarifying value propositions, analyzing industry dynamics and generating strategic options.

Strategic Planning Processes

Creative strategy development: We have developed several approaches to help clients generate innovative ideas. The "killer idea" approach poses provocative questions that were "reverse-engineered" from recent breakthrough business ideas.

Business unit/Corporate planning processes: We studied 26 best-practice companies to identify attributes of successful planning processes. We discovered that they generally provoke questions and facilitate conversations rather than creating documents, rely on facts to make key decisions, and involve those expected to implement the strategy in the planning process. We use these insights to help clients reinvent their strategic planning processes.