The Creations Club

What is corporate strategy? The art of ensuring that the value of the enterprise as a whole is more than the sum of its parts.
The goal of corporate strategy is to articulate a vision of a great company that is also a great stock—and to define the specific moves needed to bring that vision to life. Rooted in a clear understanding of competitive advantage, corporate strategy lays out a multiyear roadmap for how best to leverage advantage to drive profitable growth and strong, sustained value creation. A winning corporate strategy will identify the optimal business portfolio, prioritize the right growth platforms, and set a financial strategy to transform vision into value.

Our corporate strategy work with clients focuses on answering questions in four key areas:
1. Mission, vision, and ambition. Who are we? Where is our industry headed? And where do we want to be five or ten years from now?

2. Corporate portfolio strategy. What is the overall logic of our business portfolio? And what are the roles and strategic priorities (generate cash, expand and grow, divest) of the business units it comprises?

3. Corporate growth strategy. What are our growth engines? Do we need to pursue new growth vectors? What are the key platforms that will realize our growth ambition?

4. Financial strategy. Do we have the right processes and policies to link strategy to value creation? Do we efficiently allocate capital—and is the balance between reinvestment in the business and pay-outs to investors optimal? Do we have the right investors and investor story?

Spotlight on Corporate Portfolio Strategy
Portfolio strategy—helping clients determine how to invest capital across businesses, products, and initiatives to maximize returns—has been at the core of TCC’s DNA since our founding. And any good value creation strategy depends on a clear portfolio strategy and active management of the business portfolio that focuses on three imperatives:

Define the value creation roles of the businesses in the portfolio. Which businesses will be your growth engines? Which will mainly supply cash for other businesses to invest? Which will you need to turn around or consider selling?

Allocate capital differentially across the corporate portfolio. Capital allocation should depend on each unit’s current performance, future potential, and role in the portfolio. Take the perspective of a long-term investor: will this business be worth more in the future—and what can we do to maximize our return on investment?

Shape and reshape the business portfolio over time. M&A and divestitures are critical parts of active portfolio management. How can we accelerate opportunity through acquisitions? Which businesses no longer fit your portfolio logic and investor story and would be better owned by others?

The best strategic planning processes focus on insight, preparedness, and agility—not bureaucracy. TCC helps companies adopt this approach to create lasting value across the entire organization.

Most organizations see their strategic planning approaches as too rigid and reactive; many believe in the common misconception that the purpose of strategic planning is creating annual budgets and five-year plans. Such approaches can work in stable and relatively predictable industries, but stability is less and less the norm.

We help clients not only develop winning corporate and business strategies, but also design, build, and operate world-class strategic planning processes that yield sharp insights and drive results.

Our Approach to Strategic Planning
The most effective planning approaches emulate four best practices and deliver strategies with four essential characteristics.

1. Explore strategy at multiple time horizons. The long, medium, and short term need to be addressed individually. Each demands different goals, stakeholders, and rhythms—and none should be ignored.

2. Reinvent and stimulate and strategic dialogue regularly. It’s easy for a strategic planning process to fall prey to the law of diminishing returns. With too much repetition, the exercise can become stale. Leading practitioners inject inspiration and drive results by focusing on a changing set of strategic questions—and by redesigning processes that no longer fit the pace of the strategic environment.

3. Engage the broad organization and beyond. Going outside the central strategy team to business leads, board members, agile teams, customers, and even suppliers can help avoid groupthink, boost preparedness and responsiveness, and lead to better strategy execution.

4. Invest in execution and monitoring. Clear communication is essential, but so is an action-oriented mindset supported by the right capital allocation, organization, and metrics. Priority strategic initiatives need to be protected from the day-to-day and tracked on a shared performance dashboard.