How To Hire A Strategy Advisor: 6 Traits To Look For (& What To Avoid) When Building A Great Business Strategy
The odds of getting a Monkey See, Monkey Do strategy are high.
Arrrrr! 🏴☠️ Welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of Category Pirates. Each week, we share radically different ideas to help you design new and different categories. For more: Dive into an audiobook | Listen to a category design jam session | Enroll in the free Strategy Sprint email course
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
It's often tough to get a company's strategy right.
We Pirates have seen this firsthand with the entrepreneurs, executives, and solopreneurs going through our Strategy Therapy course. It has been rewarding to help them refine their strategies. But it has also helped us think about why strategy is so difficult.
Here’s what we found after a lot of rum and rumination:
‘Strategy’ consultants mostly sell Monkey See, Monkey Do strategy.
Great strategy isn’t benchmarking the past but finding weird data that predicts the future.
Distilling weird data seven times gets you an incredibly simple strategy that scales.
If you want to hire an advisor to build a great strategy, here's what we recommend:
Don’t hire an industry specialist from a ding-dong consulting firm.
Look for a strategy generalist who loves weird data and values simplicity.
Find a strategy advisor who has the following traits:
They love and aren’t scared of the ‘new industry/never done it’ roller coaster.
They have a playbook, but aren’t afraid to toss it and freestyle.
They understand conventional wisdom but are skeptical of it.
They aren’t one-hit wonders or coat-tail riders.
They make things simpler vs. complex.
Their outcomes are legit and specific.
In this mini-mini-book on strategy consulting, we're sharing what we've learned as category design advisors—and what we've seen work well for other companies and consultants.
So grab your favorite libation and dive in.