Strategic Reviews — Overview: “A Little More Columbo and a Little Less Sun Tzu”

Every so often the management of a business has a prompt to ask itself some big fundamental questions: What business are we in? Where and how should we compete? What are the prospects for our business and how can we change them? Which parts of our portfolio should we keep, sell, close, grow, harvest, restructure? Where do we focus our limited capital and time?

One common exercise provides the basis to answer these essential questions—the strategic review.

It requires an analysis of the attractiveness of the company’s markets, its competitive positioning, drivers of profit and economic value, a review of new opportunities and an assessment of risks. Done well, this strategic review provides management with the information and the confidence to make decisions from the most high-level (such as which businesses should we be in) to the most everyday (such as how do we improve our customer service).

But here’s the thing. A strategic review is an investigation. And in this investigation, God is in the detail. The Columbo fans out there know this already — you don’t solve the case if you act like the local cops and just take a cursory look, missing the key fact that the murdered “burglar” who came in from the lawn has no grass on his shoes. It’s the same with strategic reviews: you don’t generate insight by going through the motions and staying high level; you get it by behaving like the great detective — asking the questions nobody else thought of and noticing the things nobody else noticed.

There is a time for strategy and vision and bold moves and inspiration and big picture; but that time is later, once you know exactly where you stand.

In this forthcoming series of posts, we will cover the basics of performing strategic reviews, highlighting along the way some of the disciplines we use to generate the insights that successful reviews should produce.


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Latitude Partners Ltd
19 Bulstrode Street, London W1U 2JN
www.latitude.co.uk

For the full text of this series email steve@latitude.co.uk