Courses

How To Think Like A Strategy Consultant

This course focuses on practical problem-solving techniques and will help your staff make better decisions. Drawing on the training that new associates in many large consulting firms receive, the course provides frameworks for organizing one’s thinking, laying out a step-by-step problem-solving approach, developing a project plan, and determining core analyses. In addition, the course provides key frameworks to help people organize information in ways that drives them to conclusions and “so what’s”:  Decision Trees, Porter’s Five Forces model, the Seven model, the Strategic Gameboard, Organizational Diagnostics, and a full panoply of marketing and market assessment frameworks. It includes a customized case study that allows students to apply the course teachings to a specific real-life business example.

This course was initially developed at the request of American Express, where it consistently receives highest ratings for both content and teaching expertise.

How To Write Presentations Like A Strategy Consultant

This course focuses on developing and presenting data-based conclusions and recommendations.  It will help your staff think about and present analytical work that addresses the specific issues of the audience and facilitates decision-making.  The course provides frameworks to facilitate data synthesis, employ logic and judgment in reaching conclusions, develop a point of view on the implications of analyses, strengthen conclusions by developing counter-arguments, and structure presentations that communicate clear and compelling arguments.  Using case studies integrated with short lecture segments, the course covers organizing and “story-boarding” a presentation, writing headlines, crafting charts and adapting presentations to different audiences.  It employs a case study that allows students to apply the course teachings to a relevant real-life business example. Developed as a follow-up course to “How to Think . . .,”  this course assumes some understanding of basic analytical techniques, but is accessible to all students. 

Managing Change

This course provides a complete change-management curriculum to support the transformation of an organization.  It will help your staff prepare to manage through the change process by building a tool kit of resources that address the basic facts of change, e.g.,

The course starts by laying out an overview of the phases of transition.  This allows participants to conduct a self-assessment to recognize their own attitudes toward change so that they can consciously deal with them. Then, the course presents tools that allow participants to assess and predict who in their organizations will support change and who will resist, and to understand why, and what to do about it.  It also provides participants with guidelines for identifying key change agents in their organizations; developing strategies and tactics to maximize change agents’ support and effectiveness; determining key areas of resistance and key resistors; developing action plans to predict and minimize change disruption, and monitoring the effectiveness of their implementation.  The course is applicable to organizations in the planning stages through the implementation of a change initiative.

Building and Leveraging Brand Equity

This one-day course teaches the "do's and don'ts" of building and extending brand equity. It uses real-life examples of the world's strongest brands -- Nike, Harley-Davidson, Starbuck's, Coke, JetBlue, and many others -- to illustrate Best Practice brand-building techniques. The course sets forth the rules of branding, and provides insights into what makes great brands great, how brand equity is built over time, and how it can be damaged or destroyed. It lays out the rules for brand building and brand extension, and provides strategies and real-life case studies on brand extension. Participants also work through a customized case study focused on their specific branding challenges.

Becoming a True Strategic Partner

The situation:  your clients (internal or external) think of you merely as an executor and tactician, not as a source for strategic counsel.  How can you change their perceptions?  This half-day course provides approaches and tools for listening strategically, moving conversations from the tactical to the strategic, and presenting your recommendations and tactical plans within a strategic context.  Participants will be exposed to frameworks that help them to identify the “big picture” strategic issues and to communicate them to clients.

Leading Productive Meetings (in development)

In today’s business environment of team-focused leadership and matrix organizations, more and more time is being spent in meetings.  This one-day course concentrates on maximizing meeting productivity and includes analytical tools and processes (e.g., for summarizing ideas and themes in real time, coming to consensus and conclusions, and ensuring follow-up and follow-through).  It also teaches methods for handling difficult situations (for example, hostile audiences or challenging personalities) and different types of meetings (e.g., face-to-face, conference calls, Web-based formats).  It provides training not only on how to be good meeting leaders, but also on how to be productive meeting participants.  Finally, it provides techniques and analytic frameworks for special types of meetings, such as brainstorming, strategic planning, making business decisions, and reporting progress against goals/updating.