Portfolio clarity beats growth targets.

Companies typically realise only about 60% of their strategies’ potential value, according to Mankins and Steele in Harvard Business Review. A Bain study of large companies across eight industrialised countries found seven out of eight failed to achieve profitable growth over a decade, despite plans that targeted it.

The gap is not ambition. It is clarity about what the company will stop doing. Growth targets accumulate; the portfolio of activities underneath them rarely gets pruned.

Our strategy work starts from the portfolio: where the company competes, where it earns its return, and which activities carry cost without conviction. We leave leadership with a short list of commitments, each with a decision date and a named owner, rather than a long list of aspirations.