You Don’t Have a Strategic Plan-Good

Management consulting is one of the fastest-growing professions world-wide, increasing by well over 20% per year, with the top 50 firms exceeding a growth rate of 27% in 1998. According to Consultants News (“Explosive Growth,” 1999), the management consulting market reached R89 billion in 1998 and was projected to exceed R100 billion in 1999. In 1980, the total market for management consulting was only R2 billion. Staffan Canback (1998) pointed out in a recent C2M article that in 1990 there were only about 18,000 management consultants worldwide. Today there are over 550,000, of which 60% are estimated to be in the United States. This growth rate, along with an increase in service offerings, having outstripped any increase in the number of clients, has led to increased competition for clients.

Help Your Clients Manage the Business Cycle

Despite the profound impact that the business cycle has on the fortunes and fate of so many businesses large and small — and the employees and investors that depend on them — you will not find a single book or consulting manual that offers a comprehensive guide to strategically and tactically managing the business cycle. This gap on the managerial bookshelf is truly the “black hole” of corporate strategy — because the business cycle is arguably one of the single most important determinants of corporate profitability and stock price performance. This is a gap, however, that the most forward-looking and business cycle–literate consulting firms can lucratively exploit and fill.

Help Your Clients Manage the Business Cycle

Despite the profound impact that the business cycle has on the fortunes and fate of so many businesses large and small—and the employees and investors that depend on them—you will not find a single book or consulting manual that offers a comprehensive guide to strategically and tactically managing the business cycle.

Black Swan

Future scenario construction is an example of creative systems thinking wherein various mental models are shared, and a number of probable future frameworks are created. Consideration of these probable futures allows companies to anticipate changes, be more prepared and be less vulnerable to unfolding events. Both rational and imaginative forces are at play in their construction. The idea is that enough scenarios are written “to condition managers to see past many of their blind spots”