I've organized the text around 20 StrataGEMS.
StrataGEM 1: The Exultant Consultant
All of the StrataGEMS in this book were discovered along my path as a consultant. So, to set the stage for all that follows I begin with some thoughts about consulting both as a personal career choice and as a profession. I’ve come to see the outside consultant as playing many roles: Instiller of Confidence, Post-Post-Graduate Tutor, Organizational Anthropologist, Anecdotal Homeopath, Infuser of “Ordering” Energy, Neutral Third Party Facilitator, and Scrupulous Watch Borrower.
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StrataGEM 2: Key Steps in a Strategic Planning Process
My formative work at BCG with its primary focus on corporate strategy — a field that firm has been credited with pioneering — clearly shaped my own consulting career. This StrataGEM highlights many of the key steps in strategic planning processes that I’ve successfully incorporated in my work.
StrataGEM 3: Dynamic SWOT Analysis
The so-called SWOT analysis is a central component of many strategic planning processes. However, I’ve found that when carried out in the traditional manner, this exercise often ends up being merely a static listing of institutional Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats with little power to define strategic initiatives. So, I’ve expanded it into a Dynamic SWOT analysis and in so doing have significantly enhanced its value in many of my strategic planning assignments.
StrataGEM 4: Strategic Planning in Tough Times
Businesses and institutions experiencing severe financial stress typically find it difficult to think about their futures. When times seem especially risky, there is a natural, human tendency to retrench and wait out the storm. But this default mindset is not merely short-sighted, it is self-defeating.
StrataGEM 5: Role of the Governing Board in Strategic Planning
The governing board in nonprofit institutions plays a key role in initiating and guiding the strategic planning process. In corporate settings, the board of directors typically plays less of a hands-on role but must not only be aware of but embrace the process and its results. Whatever the setting, all boards are the guardians of organizational values.
StrataGEM 6: 10 Rules for Successfully Launching New Products
In my most recent work with Nextrategy Associates, I’ve been deeply involved in advising clients who are contemplating the development of new products. This work yielded 10 Rules of strategic thinking and planning that apply to all sorts of new products and services.
The next six StrataGEMS pay tribute to the “Awesome Corpus Callosum” — the thick bundle of nerve fibers connecting the right (creative) and left (analytical) hemispheres of the human brain, enabling communication between them. An effective consultant acts as a kind of corpus callosum for the client organization. As a former Fine Arts major in college and a practicing artist-cartoonist-illustrator, I find the combination of images, words, and numbers that emerge from the interaction of these two brain hemispheres is especially relevant to my approach to consulting.
StrataGEM 7: Doing It With Mirrors
I begin with a parable that uses the metaphor of a mirror to illustrate an approach that employs reflection on a problem informed by reflection of the problem to gain a new perspective that yields the best solution.
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StrataGEM 8: Cases of Myth-Taken Identity
It’s often the intangible world of organizational life — the world of mythology and symbolism — that infuses the enterprise with whatever meaning it holds for its members and ultimately for its customers and clients.
StrataGEM 9: Fabulous Frameworks
We tend to think of frameworks as merely conceptual scaffolding to organize one's thinking. But when artfully developed, they can serve as visual and narrative structures that translate complex ideas into something both clarifying and memorable — even energizing.
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StrataGEM 10: Dashboards
My interest in dashboards dates back to the early 1980’s long before the term became popular. I was heavily influenced by the work of Edward Tufte, who espoused the bringing together on a single page an array of graphically displayed data to immediately communicate patterns, trends, and relationships that viewing the same data on separate pages could not achieve. In essence, he was describing dashboards. This StrataGEM discusses numerous examples of different dashboard types that I’ve used over the years.
StrataGEM 11: Missing the Fours for the Threes
The purpose of all these Corpus Callosum techniques — from graphic enhancement of data to dashboards, from “mirrors” to mythology and symbols, from compelling analogies to conceptual frameworks — is to free organizational leaders from a preoccupation with what may be more readily apparent, but often misleading, details and enable them to see the big picture. I illustrate this point in cartoon form.
StrataGEM 12: Rembrandts of Things Past
Forced by a pandemic to work virtually with clients, consultants understand something important is missing — the uniquely human sense of shared connection that comes from recognizing that in “real” reality, we are all limited by space and time.
StrataGEM 13: No Puns Aloud
As may be obvious by now, I’m a big fan of wordplay — more specifically, that poor, much maligned subspecies: the pun. Employed judiciously, however, a well-placed pun can reinforce a key idea in the client’s mind . . . except when it doesn’t.
StrataGEM 14: The Board’s Role in Assuring Mission Integrity
The next four StrataGEMS deal with what I call DNAbling Organizational Success. The Board, CEO and senior leadership team play key roles in initiating and orchestrating not only strategic planning, but also in diffusing the organizational genetic code of mission and values. They are the DNAblers.
StrataGEM 15: The Intersecting Cycles of Governance and Management
Imbedding the DNA of mission and values in the life of any enterprise, be it a business or nonprofit institution, must first bridge the gap between the board and management. In this StrataGEM, I suggest an approach that visualizes the interaction between these two domains as complementary, intersecting cycles — a governance cycle and a management cycle.
StrataGEM 16: Leadership Alignment Through Team-Building
However one views an organization, whether as a hierarchical structure with senior leaders at the top or as a series of concentric circles with senior leaders at the center, there needs to be a way of aligning the perspectives of all key decision-makers around the core DNA of values and the strategic themes that emerge from a deliberate strategic planning effort. One such approach which I’ve found to be quite effective is a radiating, self-perpetuating, team-building process.
StrataGEM 17: People Are Appreciating Assets
The more people appreciate how the company values them, the more their value to the company appreciates. I use here Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs and the notion of P-ROI (People Return on Investment) to describe an approach to organizational leadership that places people’s needs front and center.
StrataGEM 18: Landing the Assignment
A consulting practice is built over time. It requires putting into practice concepts and methodologies such as those described in previous StrataGEMs that are designed to help the client succeed. But there are also a host of best practices designed to help the consultant succeed. Like any professional service, building a management consulting practice ultimately relies on reputation. But until then (and even after) every consultant first has to land the assignment. I offer here a few things I’ve learned about how to do that.
StrataGEM 19: Doing the Work
This StrataGEM is not about how to organize teams, facilitate meetings, or any of the other tricks of the consultant’s trade. We all have our own techniques that work for us. Instead, I focus here on how to avoid the many traps and snares that can undercut or derail a client engagement.
StrataGEM 20: Maintaining the Relationship
A consultant’s book of business should include a healthy mix of new and ongoing clients. Small consultancies, especially, can ill afford to devote the time and resources necessary to seeking new clients exclusively. If they do, they would be sacrificing time devoted to engaging in actual client work. Striking the proper balance requires the retention of some clients over multiple assignments. I suggest five approaches to maintaining client relationships.