Strategie als Erlaubnis

I've watched 20+ companies this year pay consultants to write their corporate strategy, and realized what nobody involved says out loud:

Companies don't pay for strategy. They pay for permission to do what they already wanted to do.

It usually starts in the boardroom.

The board hands management a direction: become greener, get more economical, or explore a new market.

Management now has to turn that into an actual strategy paper.

Writing one is intense, and many companies don't even know how to structure it themselves.

That's where the consultants come in.

They do the analysis and come back with two or three options, each with its upsides and downsides.

But the management picks the one it preferred from the start.

And if something goes wrong, there's a respected firm's name on the cover to point to.

Honestly, that's not unreasonable. If I were the manager, I'd want to steer it too.

Then the document gets celebrated. Everyone's relieved it's finally done. And then nobody speaks about it for three years.

What happens in those three years?

The company starts executing, and the execution runs into the real world.

You planned to enter a new market, but political instability made it impossible.

You set a direction, and a competitor moves in a way the document never anticipated.

The strategy was written at a high enough level that it couldn't account for any of it.

A strategy should give guidance.

But it has to stay a working document, something fluid.

Keeping it alive takes ongoing data: what sales is hearing in the market, what legal just flagged, and what regulations changed.

Maybe around 90% of that is public knowledge anyone can find, if you can process it fast enough.

The edge is the other 10%: the insider signal, the thing you heard, or the change you saw, fed back in while it still matters.

That's the difference between a strategy you commission and a strategy you run.