Seven Essential Skills for Aspiring Corporate Strategists

A career in Corporate Strategy

Many young professionals aspire a career in strategy - either as a Consultant in one of the big strategy consulting firms (McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, A.T. Kearney - just to name a few) or as part of the Corporate Strategy team at one of the major corporations. While there are numerous social media posts, articles and publications about work and life as a strategy consultant - partly driven, of course, by the recruiting efforts of the big consulting players - information about careers in Corporate Strategy teams or Inhouse Consulting are much harder to come by. 

In fact, similar to external consulting, a job in Corporate Strategy offers exciting projects, outstanding development opportunities and the outlook for a stellar career:

• Corporate Strategy teams typically work on the most exciting and most relevant strategic projects for their companies - not only setting the strategic direction for the company, but also executing at least some of the top-priority projects that are bound to shape the future of the company.
  This also means working on a wide variety of topics, across all functions within a business - be it Marketing, Operations, Supply Chain, Finance, Human Resources or IT.
  In short - life as Corporate Strategist never gets boring, and no day is like the other.
• Typically anchored with the CEO or even part of the CEO Office, members of the Corporate Strategy team have constant exposure to the top management of the company and are involved in basically all crucial meetings and events relevant to the long-term direction of the company. This gives team members unique development opportunities, and the chance to work with (and learn from) the most senior leaders in the business. 
• Although certainly a demanding, high-stress job, being part of the Corporate Strategy team opens opportunities to fast-track your career (both inside and outside the company). For example, one of my team members in her late 20ies, in a Manager role at that time, received a double-promotion after working in the Strategy team for 2 years and getting exposure to all senior managers in the company, and moved on to head an entire department, managing millions of trade volume; Minor Food's former Head of Strategy moved on to become CEO of Minor Food's China Business; and some of my very talented younger colleagues left to pursue their Master's degrees at Ivy League Business Schools before being hired by some of the top global retailers and tech companies. 

Very much like the typical career progression in the top consulting firms, 2-3 years in Corporate Strategy can easily shorten your career progression by 8-10 years! This is what makes a career in Corporate Strategy so exciting and desirable for young professionals who are still in the early stages of their professional development.

What makes a good Corporate Strategist?

Unfortunately, roles in Corporate Strategy are relatively rare, and entry criteria can be equally tough (and in some cases even tougher) than entry criteria of the top management consulting firms. With only 1-2 openings per year in typical Corporate Strategy teams in Thai companies, recruiters are very selective, and candidates need to bring to the table not only outstanding qualifications and the required technical and "soft" skills, but also a great cultural fit to both company and team in order to be successful. 

So here is my personal list of the seven most important skills and traits an aspiring Corporate Strategist should have:

(1) Problem-Solving Skills

The most important skill for any consultant: The ability to get to the root of a complex problem, break it down into smaller (solvable) portions and then prioritizing and focusing on what is required to solve the problem. This also includes the ability to separate facts from fiction, moving away from gut-feel ("I think we should...") or experience-based decision-making ("When I was working at XYZ in 1989, we ...") and towards a fact-based way of looking at problems.

McKinsey's "7-step Problem Solving Method" is a great tool and framework for a structured Problem-Solving process.

(2) Data Analytics

In order to take a fact-based approach to problem solving, the Corporate Strategist must be equipped with a very solid analytics tool kit. This involves advanced quantitative and data analytics skills. In practice, this usually involves being well versed in using Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access - but in recent years, more advanced data management skills are increasingly important (Python, R Programming, etc.).

It is important to note here that Data Analytics doesn't stop with with analysis of data, but must always lead to true "insights" - the "so-what" of the analysis (a big rookie-mistake: presenting management with a bunch of complex analyses and data tables without having ready an interpretation and pointing towards the meaning of the data).

(3) Top Management Communication

Which leads us to the next point: One of the top skills required in a consultant's day-to-day work is the ability to communicate to Top Management - in a very concise, "to-the-point" manner that cuts through the complexity and focuses on the information decision-makers truly need. This particularly includes providing an independent and fact-based opinion (more under point #7: maintaining integrity)

A great tool or method to learn about Top Management Communication is Barbara Minto's "Pyramid Principle". 

(4) Collaboration & Team Work

Key to being successful at Corporate Strategy work is to have deep knowledge of all aspects of the business. With the complexity of large businesses, literally nobody - not even the CEO - has that indepth round view of the entire business. Therefore, it is absolutely crucial for Corporate Strategy teams to be well embedded in the corporate setting and maintain strong and good relationships with all Departments and all parts of the business. Collaborating with others, jointly working on business problems, and constantly being together with BU Heads and their teams at the forefront of what is happening (new projects, unexpected events, major competitor movements) is an integral part of the day-to-day job of a Corporate Strategy team.

This also means that the Strategy team itself has to be a well-functioning team, tightly knit together. As I like to tell my team: 'We can argue and fight among each other to get to the best solution - but when we talk to others outside our team, we MUST speak with one voice'. This takes a considerable amount of team building, but even prior to that, it requires careful recruiting to make sure to build a team that "clicks" - i.e. where every team member is the right cultural fit.

Important: This does not mean, by the way, to assemble a team of "conformists", i.e. people who all think alike or all oblige and give in to the majority opinion. On the contrary, I like to surround myself with people who challenge me and each other, who question common ways of thinking and are not afraid to sometimes take a contrarian stance towards a topic. Only that truly pushes the thinking forward and makes a difference.

Organization Behavior Theory has plenty of tools to analyze team work and help struggling teams overcome their challenges.

(5) Influencing Techniques

One flaw of working in the Strategy function of a company is that you are typically not in charge of the decision-making and the implementation of that Strategy. That privilege is given to the CEO, the COO or other BU Heads. The Chief Strategy Officer is often "just" the trusted advisor, who works on the plans, but then has to stand on the sidelines (not always, though: sometimes the CSO owns and leads projects to completion, but I would say this is the case in less than 20% of the time).

Therefore, to ensure that the company indeed moves into the desired direction and that the strategy gets implemented successfully, the Strategy team must master the skills of convincing and influencing key decision-makers in the organization. This is hard work, time consuming, and requires quite a bit of patience and the ability to read people. 

Luckily, the consulting tool-kit contains a set of useful techniques to "influence with integrity". 

(6) Managing complexity and uncertainty

Probably no need dwelling too long on this point, but needless to say that today's corporate world, economic and competitive environment is getting increasingly complex (the word "disruption" comes to mind), especially as technologies evolve at an ever faster pace, and speed is of utmost importance - speed of recognizing what is going on, speed of defining what the problem is, speed of evaluating potential solutions, speed of implementing the solutions, and speed of reacting and adjusting if something is off. 

Along with this complexity and the need for speed comes a great level of uncertainty. Being aware of the uncertainty, evaluating risks and being comfortable taking decisions with the well-calculated risk in mind is essential. The key word here is "comfortable"...

(7) Maintaining integrity

Last, but definitely not least, leaning on a sentence I picked up from the mission statement of the consulting company A.T. Kearney a few years ago: Corporate Strategists to be worth their salt needs act with utmost sincerity and integrity - speaking the truth as they see it and not necessarily what the key stakeholders in the organization want to hear. (Can you see the potential conflict with point #4?)

This is definitely not always easy, and sometimes might not make you the most popular person in a meeting or in a working team, but it is absolutely essential. Otherwise, what is the value of having a Corporate Strategy team in the first place if the team does not dare to challenge the status quo if they see the need?

Of course, in most situations, people across the organization understand the strategic direction  of the company and are aligned, but there is the odd case where - after thorough analysis, problem-solving and reaching a consensus within the Strategy team - the team's viewpoint turns out contrarian to pretty much everyone else's. And in these situations, it is important to stand up for your conviction and speak out. 

For me, this is part of the ethos of a good consultant - whether external or internal.  

Putting the 7 skills to action

These are the 7 skills I would consider most crucial in becoming - and being - a good Corporate Strategist. There are probably a dozen others that are part of the job, but these are the ones I found most helpful in my career. Excelling at all of them is not easy (and if you ask my colleagues, they would certainly be able to come up with war-stories where I failed miserably at some of them...), but being aware of them, doing an honest self-assessment of the level of proficiency against each of the 7 points, and then investing time to master them is the first step towards a great and successful career in one of the most exciting areas of a business.