Make sense of strategy
I’ll help you deal with your toughest business challenges, chart a winning path to the future, and get the results you want. No buzzwords. No bullshit.
Strategy that really works for you
Strategy is a serious matter—and more so in turbulent times. So best you take it seriously and work with a seasoned strategist who’ll provide sound guidance and effective solutions.
By combining the knowledge and experience inside your organization with the insights, advice, and solutions I bring from outside, you’ll move the needle the right way. Your team will sharpen their skills in thinking and acting strategically. And your business will become more resilient and agile.
The #1 Strategic Leadership Tool
Business results are a direct outcome of the conversations within an organisation. So purposefully crafting and conducting those conversations is the essence of successful leadership—a must-do, not a nice-to-do.
What’s more, Powerful Strategic Conversation is the one tool that makes all others work, and gives you the surest way to improve your results and outperform your competition.
Let’s talk about it.
Powerful Strategic Conversation
A deliberately orchestrated, inclusive, continuous, and robust conversation that:
- Focuses attention on what matters
- Aligns resources, capabilities, and efforts
- Unleashes the imagination and spirit of your people
- Enables deep personal and group learning
- Drives fast and effective results
- And makes change a way of life
Simple | Sound | Practical
“Strategic conversation” has become a cliche in business, carelessly applied to almost any discussion about strategy. But what I call “Powerful Strategic Conversation” is far more deliberate and focused—and effective. Rather than random, scattershot, and uncoordinated exchanges about this or that, it ensures that your whole team work to the same script. And it has multiple positive outcomes.
This one tool seamlessly links strategy, leadership, and change management.
Make it a way of life in your company, and you’ll be free of the need for a grab-bag of management tools and interventions, while dramatically improving your effectiveness and competitiveness.
As countless clients have found, I make sense of strategy in a way that’ll make sense to you. Like them, you’ll appreciate how fast you get to the decisions you need—and the quality of answers you get.
Strategy Wisdom
My strategy knowledge, experience, and judgment have been developed through years of thought, research, and hands-on involvement in a wide range of complex, high-stakes problems across industries and companies.
This equips me to ask the right “dumb” questions, precisely define your challenges, and quickly grasp their essence. And to provide the insights and guidance you need to make the tough choices that will give you maximum leverage.
It could be just what you need to shift your business to a new growth trajectory.
Fanatical Simplicity
No matter how complex the challenges you face, I’ll help you cut to the chase, focus on what matters, and get the results you want.
The strategy you get will be simple, sound, and practical. So you’ll lighten your workload, cut the number of interventions you think you need, and enable effective communication and execution of your plans.
Importantly, too, it will help make your organization fast, agile, and resilient.
Empathic Candour
Strategy is an intensely human process of thought and action. It hinges on the insights, imagination, and spirit of your people—and also on tough, no-holds-barred debate and argument.
I bring both empathy and candour to every interaction with you and your team. Empathy is about showing deep respect for people, listening carefully to them, and making it safe for them to share their feelings and voice their opinions. Candour is about straight talk, confronting reality, dealing in facts, challenging assumptions, and speaking the truth.
My aim is not only to make your strategy sessions productive, but also to help you embrace these positive practices as key leadership behaviours in your organization, and embed them in your culture.
Time to reset your strategy!
The Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threw the world into turmoil. Then came the Israel-Palestine conflict. And there are many other extraordinary shifts and shocks to be concerned about. So the World Economic Forum warns that we are on the brink of a “polycrisis”—a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part.”
Many companies have recently taken a massive hit to sales and profits. Their leaders are struggling to make sense of the emerging realities, and and are resigned to years of strong headwinds and disappointing performance.
But no matter how hard things get, there will be both winners and losers on the way to a “new normal.” And by acting fast, and with a clear purpose and a sound strategy, you can steady your business and keep growing.
No matter how well or how badly you’re doing today, a strategy reset is now a matter of extreme urgency.
That means a critical rethink of both your strategy and how you create and execute it.
As a leading independent strategist, best-selling author, and incisive and provocative management thinker, I bring unique and valuable strengths to your business.
Whether in one-on-one meetings, team briefings or keynote presentations, a once-off workshop or a long-term consulting partnership, I’ll help you and your colleagues rethink your ideas about strategy—and make your future a matter of choice, not chance.
Multiple benefits
My special skill is in cutting through complexity, simplifying your strategy, helping you focus on the few actions that will make the biggest impact, and providing the discipline you need to execute fast and effectively.
Simplify
Simplify your strategy toolkit, your strategy process—and your strategy
Focus
Focus on your “right” customers and the few strategic levers that drive performance
Create
Create an effective, agile, and resilient business model to deliver and capture new value in a constantly changing world
Imagine
Imagine new ways to compete and win against increasingly hostile competition
Align
Align and inspire your team—even if they’re not in the office—and keep them on track and ready for tomorrow’s challenges
Accelerate
Use 30-day plans to close the gap between strategy and action, to energize your organization, and to get to the future first
Build
Build the competitive resources and capabilities you need to compete for the growth and profits you want—and keep strengthening them every day
Learn
Develop a “Strategy Mindset” across your organization, and win the race to learn and use new knowledge for competitive advantage
Bring common sense to strategy
My no-nonsense process will help you:
- Craft and conduct the Powerful Strategic Conversation you need for a winning strategy
- Sense and make sense of changes that will affect the future of your business
- Challenge your “theory of success” and your sacred cows
- Explore options for new growth
- Unclutter your agenda and identify the high-impact issues that will give you the most bang for your buck
- Build and sustain your your competitive advantage through mastery of “the basics” and the continuous pursuit of breakthroughs
- Develop the Strategy Mindset of your team, to enable them to think and act strategically and ensure the agility and resilience of your business
- Get the results you want much faster than you thought you could
You won’t get a drawn-out process, a lot of buzzwords and fads, theories you can’t use, or promises of yet another “silver bullet” to solve all your problems. What you will get is:
- Straight talk and robust debate
- Experience and common sense
- A simple, sound, and practical way of thinking about strategy
- Valuable insights, ideas, and advice
- Clarity about your future focus and priorities
- A compelling “strategy story” that wins stakeholder support
- 30-day action plans and certainty about who will do what
- A disciplined process for tracking performance
Success stories
Tony Manning has helped our executives to regain confidence and true management control of their businesses in volatile and changing circumstances. I can thoroughly recommend him to assist any business with its strategic overhaul or repositioning exercise
Despite the complexities inherent in any strategic conversation, Tony continues to demonstrate his uncanny abilities in guiding us through a path that keeps these conversations simple and sensible. He achieves that by helping us focus on a few drivers that are basic to our business and through which we can make a noticeable difference
Tony’s revolutionary and thought-provoking ideas were inspiring. He has taken a lot of time over the years to think things through … Gave a different dimension to the process of determining strategy