WHY do I specialise in strategic thinking training ?
Based in London and working globally, I'm a strategy trainer, consultant, facilitator & coach. I specialise in helping teams and organisations solve strategic problems. A French-British rocket-scientist by training, I’ve been lecturing on strategic thinking and complex problem solving to the CEOs, management teams & future leaders of major corporations, consulting firms & tech start-ups for 20+ years. I make smart people smarter.
This training focus started as an accidental request by 3 clients at once in 2004 (Barclays, BBC, Deloitte) and it has slowly grown into a purpose I love, and get highly praised & well rewarded for. I’ve now delivered 500+ strategic thinking training sessions to a global portfolio of 60+ very happy clients and 10,000+ up-skilled participants.
I started my career in management consulting (with Deloitte), and then completed my MBA at INSEAD. I've been working as a strategist ever since, first with Kalchas (a medium-sized Bain and McKinsey spin-off) and then with Instigate Group, where I've worked with some of the leading organisations in media, retail, consumer goods, financial services, industry, and consulting.
WHO is the training most suitable for?
Over the last 20 years, 3 main types of organisations have been very happy, repeat buyers of my strategic thinking training sessions:
major corporations (BBC, HSBC, McDonald’s, Thomson Reuters, etc) for their corporate strategy teams, and future leaders / high potentials across the company,
consulting firms (Deloitte, OC&C, Booz Allen, Allianz Consulting, etc) for the yearly up-skilling of their consultants, senior consultants & managers,
tech startups (Betfair, Moneybox, Bloom & Wild, Unidays, etc) for their founding team, and senior members of each function (product, marketing, tech, etc).
I have also worked with NGOs, investment funds, venture capital firms, sports organisations, etc. The feedback from participants is consistently very positive across these too. In large and/or fast growing organisations however, the potential for the training to have a company-wide transformational impact is just that much bigger.
WHAT does the training cover?
The main focus of my training is to boost the strategic thinking skills of the participants & their organisation. This comes in 3 flavours: Entry Steps, Core Training, and Advanced Level.
The Core Training (see overview here) is my most popular course, with 300+ sessions delivered. It is aimed at the central teams (strategy, finance, product, marketing, etc), and future leaders across the company (4+ years of professional experience). Participants all comment on how they have acquired in a few days a radically different mindset, seeing solutions much faster with much greater clarity, as well as a shared language & toolset, to crack a large variety of problems – including around new revenue streams generation, business resilience, and overall long-term strategic thinking.
The Advanced Level builds on the core “How to Be Strategic” training, and adds complexity & sophistication. It is aimed at the senior strategic community (management team, head of functions, heads of BUs, strategy team, etc) across the company (8+ years of professional experience). This Advanced course is not suitable for participants who haven’t yet attended the Core course. Very commonly, we use real live company issues during the exercises, and the outcomes can sometimes be implemented the very next day
The Entry Steps is very specifically aimed at people in junior roles in consulting firms, in-house consulting, or strategy teams (up to 3 years of professional experience). The course requires a familiarity with Excel, Powerpoint and Miro, and equips participants with the logical building blocks they need for a career in strategic thinking & strategy formulation.
You can see more details here on my best-selling Core course, happy clients, and participants’ feedback.
HOW is the training delivered?
I’ve had the opportunity to experiment with many delivery methods, formats, group sizes, etc, over 500+ sessions. The approach that consistently gets the best feedback (during the course, right after the course, and a few years after the course) is 2 consecutive days for 12 to 20 participants.
Participants only get a proper feel for the techniques in practice after 30 to 60 minutes doing an exercise in teams of 4 to 5 people. As a facilitator, I need to rotate quickly enough between the teams so they don’t go too far away from the path (or they get disheartened), and the max number of teams I can handle is 3 to 4 (think “spinning plates”). Hence the max number of participants at 20, with 1 facilitator. We can go up to 40-50 participants with 2 facilitators.
Interestingly enough, this is exactly the same whether the delivery happens in-person or via Zoom. The in-person delivery is more akin to theatre (big stage presence of the speaker, room-wide laugher & engagement, slides as background) whilst the remote delivery has intentionally been designed to be more like cinema (slides in the foreground, changing more frequently, more discrete speaker presence).
HOW MUCH does the training cost?
Prices vary depending on delivery method, location, and group size. It starts at US$20k for Zoom delivery of a 2-day course for up to 20 participants anywhere in the world. In-person delivery for up to 50 participants outside Europe can reach up to US$50k. Multiple sessions from the same organisation naturally trigger volume discounts.
You can see more details on my best-selling Core course, happy clients, and participants’ feedback. Please do also schedule a 30 minutes chat with me if you’d like to enquire further. I’d love to hear from you!