“The result is real, executable initiatives, not pie-in-the-sky, which the team can follow through on.”
Ed Ojdana
Retired President
Experian Interactive
We founded Strategic Offsites Group in 2002 based on a simple observation: many organizations were conducting their top management strategy offsites—their most critical strategic conversations—without the benefit of an external facilitator. Many executives felt that these unique opportunities for organizational change were suboptimized. We knew that focusing our expertise could generate significant benefits for our clients, and so two days after retiring as a Managing Partner of Accenture, Bob Frisch launched SOG.
This initial focus on top-team strategy offsites led to our developing the first formal approach to preparing for and designing these meetings. It became the foundation of our Harvard Business Review article, "Offsites that Work", the first and only HBR article written on the topic of strategy offsites.
While we initially focused on the annual (or semi-annual or quarterly) strategy offsite, clients now engage us for a wide variety of strategy topics, including innovation, growth, value proposition development, mission/vision/ values, business model design, initiative prioritization, organization redesign, and many others. Our projects run from single meetings to multiyear transformation efforts. The common denominator is that they are conversation-based, alignment-focused, have a clear deliverable, and both we and our clients believe our involvement will add significant value to what the management team would be able to accomplish without outside assistance.
In the decade since our founding, we have executed projects in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Singapore, Korea, China, Japan, and South Africa. We have worked for CEOs, boards, and senior executive teams at some of the world’s most respected organizations. Our thought leadership has been featured in the world's leading publications, including the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Bloomberg Businessweek, CFO, and the Wall Street Journal. View selected SOG publications >.
Our experience facilitating leaders and senior management teams working through their most critical issues has given us a clear perspective on how these teams function. There are few if any firms whose Partners have spent thousands of days with as many teams in as many industries discussing as many issues as we have. The insights gained from this experience led to our groundbreaking article, "When Teams Can't Decide" (Harvard Business Review, November 2008).
Jossey-Bass recently published our first book, Who's in the Room? How Great Leaders Structure and Manage the Teams Around Them.