Many different elements of strategic thinking are necessary to ensure success. We offer a comprehensive toolkit of approaches to help clients with specific needs around growth, globalization, competitive issues in the marketplace, and a number of other strategic and tactical concerns that may arise.

Please review the services we offer our clients.

We work with clients to formulate strategies that take advantage of the opportunities presented in highly uncertain business environments—while also managing the risks. For example, companies and their consultants have long used scenario planning as a tool for managing uncertainty—but often use scenarios that are slightly altered versions of the same future. We believe scenario planning works best when it focuses on the elements of the future about which there is the greatest uncertainty. Will new regulations be passed? How long and severe of a downturn will we face in our sector? This approach yields a divergent set of scenarios that represents a plausible set of potential alternative futures. For each scenario, we can help the client build early-warning indicators that a scenario is becoming more or less likely, a portfolio of strategic options, the no-regrets moves it can make under any scenario, and the contingencies it should be prepared to consider.

Making the best decisions in today's uncertain and rapidly changing environment also requires the right data at the adequate level of granularity. We can provide a dynamic dashboard of crisis indicators across major world geographies, including analysis of executive sentiment, key macroeconomic indicators, trends in credit and capital markets, and the changing role of government. Looking further out, we can help clients develop insights into the major trends that are likely to impact the global business environment over the next 10 to 15 years and assess the impact on their business.

A powerful business unit strategy focuses on creating shareholder value by producing products and services whose value exceeds the cost of providing them; capturing value from competitors, customers, and suppliers; competing successfully against others for market share; and cooperating selectively to enlarge the potential market. Central to these decisions are the challenges of selecting how and when to compete.

It's also crucial to understand competitive dynamics and game theory. Most strategy decisions are interdependent—the best strategies for our clients often depend on the strategy choices made by their competitors, customers, suppliers, and complementary goods and services providers. Executives recognize these interdependencies but don't always know how to systematically describe, predict, and/or shape the strategy choices of other players in order to ensure their own strategies succeed. Game theory provides a systematic process and set of analytical tools to model and leverage such competitive strategy interdependencies.

Making the corporate "whole" worth more than the sum of its parts is the biggest challenge facing many multibusiness companies. We work with clients to define a role for the corporate center that goes beyond monitoring operations, allocating resources, and coordinating shared functions. We help the corporate center shape the company's direction and boundaries and identify privileged capabilities and insights.

We studied dozens of best-practice companies to identify attributes of successful planning processes. For example, we discovered that they generally provoke questions and facilitate conversations rather than creating documents, rely on facts to make key decisions, and involve those expected to implement the strategy in the planning process. We use these insights, captured in our Strategic Management Performance Index, to help clients reinvent their strategic planning processes.

Large-company growth has long been an area of focus for McKinsey. A decade ago we published The Alchemy of Growth and introduced the three-horizon framework. Over the past four years, we have undertaken a new, extensive study of large-company growth to deepen our insight. In the new book The Granularity of Growth, we enhance the three-horizon model by integrating it with a more robust and granular understanding of the sources of revenue growth.

We've become convinced that there is a problem with the broad-brush way that many companies describe their business opportunities. Large companies in particular suffer from the tyranny of the aggregated and average view: "China is where the action is." "Chemicals is a cyclical industry." "Aging will generate increased demand for health care." Although popular, these generalizations offer very little help to executives looking for meaningful growth opportunities. We believe that real winning plays can emerge only when companies take a much finer and more granular view of their market segments, their needs, and the capabilities required to serve them well. We can help clients to do that by defining their growth ambition, identifying growth opportunities, and wiring their organization for growth.

Driving innovation is a significant challenge. Companies usually complain about lack of ideas and an anemic innovation pipeline. We rarely, however, find companies lacking ideas. Instead we find that existing ideas are small, incremental, and capable of only modest value creation; or they are buried in complex organizations, in the hands of individuals with no capacity to drive them forward.

While they do not need to be addressed simultaneously, excelling at innovation requires excelling at all its pieces:

	Leadership, culture, and organization have a disproportionate impact on how companies perform in innovation. Our organization-specific diagnostic can help assess an organization's capabilities, and our tools will help foster an environment conducive to innovation.
	Creativity is critical and must be integrated with analytical discipline; our ambidextrous approach to ideation combines analytical rigor and creativity to help companies generate breakthrough ideas.
	Consumer focus is a key success factor for innovation; with ProductMatics we bring to our client a rigorous method to optimize its product or portfolio over the whole process from the idea to commercialization.
	The innovation portfolio must be actively managed at the firm level and independently of traditional projects to significantly reduce overall risks and increase returns.
	Today's innovation efforts are a matter not of a company but of a network. We help our clients to find the right "open-innovation" model and get the most out of it.
	Benchmarks and best-practice knowledge help us get a view of clients' actual innovation performance and identify key levers to drive innovation.

Our distinctive approach to innovation has helped clients on hundreds of engagements around the world and is supported by our diverse network of consultants, alumni, and experts as well as our proprietary tool kits and research materials.

Because tremendous value is at stake, managing sociopolitical and regulatory issues has become a top priority for CEOs across industries. However, most company leaders lack a clear strategy for dealing with these issues. We can help clients to shape the sociopolitical forces that affect the company within its social contract and to actively manage these forces by developing a strategy that deals with reputation, regulatory issues, and key relationships with internal and external stakeholders.