Page 71 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Developing a Strategy 61

When to bring in consultants

Strategy consultants can be helpful, but it’s a mistake to hand over all
the thinking about your strategy to outsiders. You and your team may
not have the capacity to run a strategy project alone, but you will need
to be centrally involved and own the process. Consultants can minimize
the burden by providing facilitation and specialized expertise. Consul-
tants can also be helpful in holding up a mirror to your organization and
framing questions objectively, without political bias. But the final strat-
egy must belong to you and your organization, not the outsiders.

ence research, and also filtering what was being learned with the judgment
of various local station managers, the PBS strategy team found the right
balance to be sufficiently comprehensive—but not needlessly exhaustive—
to make the design choices required for a new channel.

Identify key issues and problems to solve
In synthesizing your findings from the internal and external investiga-
tions, strive to identify the key issues and problems to solve, that is, where
there’s a mismatch or clear opportunity arising when you compare trends
or external conditions and what your organization is currently doing. Your
central task is to select questions relevant to the strategy that will frame
key choices and ultimately shape the overall strategy.
For example, as the research unfolded, the PBS team realized the
strategy for the new children’s channel would have to address several
critical issues: specifically designing the programming service for the
channel to deepen engagement and learning opportunities with the tar-
get audience of children in low-income households; identifying the most
promising opportunities for integrating broadcast content with digi- tal
games; differentiating the new channel from others in the children’s media
marketplace; determining the operational implications of the cross-
platform approach; uncovering the financial and technical implications of