Corporate Strategy

The goal of a corporate strategy project is to help an organisation make a well-informed decision about its direction. These decisions are high-stakes and often irreversible, which is why they require careful analysis rather than intuition alone. The work involves combining market data, financial analysis, and strategic reasoning to arrive at a clear recommendation.

The daily work involves gathering and analysing information about markets, competitors, and the organisation's own performance, building models to test the financial implications of different options, and synthesising everything into a structured argument. Interviews with internal and external stakeholders are often part of the process. The final output is usually a presentation or report aimed at senior management or a board.

The main tools are Excel for financial modelling and scenario analysis, and PowerPoint for structuring and presenting the argument. Python or R may be used for more data-intensive analysis. Strategy frameworks are used to structure the problem, but the quality of the analysis depends more on the rigour of the underlying numbers than on the framework used.

The work connects closely to the Strategist role and sits primarily within the Consultancy sector, though in-house strategy teams at large corporations do similar work. It also overlaps with projects such as M&A Analytics and Policy Analysis, which involve similar methods applied to specific decisions. In the Netherlands, large companies and public institutions run strategy projects internally or commission them through consultancies.