214 50 TOPEXECUTIVECOACHES
create a language for people to solve problems laterally, as well as to fa-
cilitate decision making up and down the organization.- Strategy constitutes the most powerful lever for motivation—within
and outside the organization. Strategy must provide meaning as well as
guidance, and must be meaningful beyond the bounds of the enter-
pr ise. Strategy creates the foundation for brand.
In the broadest, most value-neutral sense of the word, strategy fulfills an
ideological, as well as an informational purpose. Jack Welch and Sam Walton
stand out as leaders who fulfilled both needs brilliantly. Many CEOs remain
trapped in the equation ofstrategy with planning, and many leaders down
the line fail to see themselves as strategists at all.
A strategic advisor can no longer be someone who primarily leads projects
to assess market positioning or corporate portfolios. Both of these tasks con-
tinue to be important, but the capabilities to execute them have dissemi-
nated far more widely than in the golden age of the strategy consultant. The
tasks of an advisor have evolved to include:
•Helping a leader understand the role that strategy must play at a given
point in his or her organization’s evolution
•Working with leadership teams to develop a discipline for working to-
gether to develop and articulate a strategy
•Determining the analytical basis for the small number of guiding ideas
that drive the selection of a strategy
•Formulating strategy as a story that is compelling, memorable, and use-
ful to internal and external audiences- Finding ways to launch experiments that enable the learning necessary
to refine the development of a strategy
•Developing a process by which the core ideas of a strategy can be
shared, understood, and applied across an organization
My experience working as an advisor in this capacity suggests that neither
the traditional strategy firm nor the solo practitioner model of coaching pro-
vides a good institutional context for this role. The leverage ratio at which
strategy firms operate makes it very difficult for partners to focus on advi-
sory work. Their minimum efficient scale in terms of monthly fee levels cre-
ates a bias for heavily resourced, analytically intensive efforts that typically
must be pushed to closure faster than their client organizations can integrate
these new ideas into their business.
Solo practitioner coaches face a different set of issues. Their model tends
to emphasize serving as a sounding board for the senior leader and /or the