Article Reprint: Advisor-Client Perceptions on Strategy Offsites

Companies conduct offsite sessions with senior management to define and refine corporate strategy. Advisors actively participate in these sessions as facilitators and planners to help companies “unlock” management’s strategic thinking. To gain maximum value from these sessions, and align strategic vision with execution of ideas, clients must understand the motivation and capabilities of strategy offsite advisors.

Strategy offsites are perceived as internally driven planning and ideacreation sessions whose frequency and relevancy are aligned to the needs of the company. We limit our discussion to those sessions conducted by (or for) senior management that deal with the highest level strategic issues.

Companies typically conduct an average of three high-level strategy offsite sessions annually. The top-down, bottoms-up sequencing of follow-on meetings at divisional levels indicates dozens of additional offsites per year. These could be considered strategic in nature, though line-level sessions tend to be more implementation-oriented.

Clusters of Advisors

The universe of advisors who plan and participate in strategy offsites is extremely broad. The traditional population of these experts can be viewed along two extremes: organizational specialists who facilitate communication; and knowledge domain experts who bring a functional/industry/geographic expertise that could be lacking inside the organization.

Analyzing these two extremes offers a more refined view of strategy offsite advisors and pushes them into one of three general categories.

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Advisor-Client Perceptions on Strategy Offsites