Driving Strategic Impact: Mastering Strategy Consulting Skills

Driving Strategic Impact is organized around the core skill of structured problem-solving, which takes participants through four phases of a strategy project: defining the scope, structuring the problem, gathering and analyzing data, and developing recommendations.

These core skills are supplemented with additional sessions on communication, managing strategy projects, and influencing skills. In this way, Driving Strategic Impact offers an effective and multi-faceted approach that can be implemented as soon as participants return to work.

Our approach is built on the following building blocks:

-Strategy consulting toolkit: A set of tools, frameworks and best practices laid out in easily usable formats, such as checklists, templates, or step-by-step approaches that you take back with you for future use.

-Role-plays: Exposure to consulting scenarios that simulate typical client-consultant interactions. These role-plays allow you to test your own understanding of situations and to learn ways to prepare for these situations with clients where your credibility and impact is at stake.

-Consulting scenarios: Specific consulting situations where you will be asked for ideas on how you would approach these situations. We have especially designed these to challenge your thinking and make you see how our instinctive approaches to solving problems often lead us down wrong paths.

-Consulting stories: True-to-life stories to effectively understand and internalize a point. Professor Hitendra Wadhwa, faculty director of the program, will share candid stories from his consulting experience to bring the learnings from the program to life.

-Real-life case study: Professor Wadhwa will present a sanitized case study of a real strategy consulting project he was involved with at McKinsey.