Square Peg International, a business consulting practice and long-standing member of the SPS, was a double winner at this year’s Institute of Consulting awards on 20 October.
Proving that bigger is not necessarily better, the boutique consultancy was named Practice of the Year and its Director, Phoebe Dunn, won the coveted title of Consultant of the Year.
The Institute of Consulting awards recognise outstanding examples of consulting in action and entrants are judged based on their strategies, projects and performance, backed up by evidence of success and benefits delivered to clients.
Square Peg specialises in supporting leaders and their teams through change and transition – and specifically in finding the sweet spot between strategy, leadership and people practices.
To win Practice of the Year, Square Peg International received glowing testimonials from clients including Coca-Cola, who praised the firm for its “top-quality work delivered with creativity and integrity”, and the Birds Eye Iglo Group, who said the company has ‘‘first class consultants and advisors working to improve business performance and productivity”.
Square Peg’s work was also lauded by Dr. Joe O’Mahoney, a lecturer in Organisational Analysis at Cardiff Business School and author of the recent report, Management Innovation in the UK Consulting Industry, published in partnership with the Institute of Consulting. According to Dr. O’Mahoney, “Square Peg demonstrates the importance of developing innovative practices through skilled individuals working with clients on a day-to-day basis”.
Consultant of the Year, Phoebe Dunn, Director of Square Peg International, was recognised for her outstanding work with clients, including Coca-Cola, where she supported a major reorganisation project across 38 countries, and the Birds Eye Iglo Group. She was also praised highly for her executive coaching work for executives within a British Airways subsidiary.
“We are delighted to win not one but two Institute of Consulting awards,” Dunn says. “The consulting marketplace is increasingly cluttered, so it’s great that our innovative and collaborative approach to working in partnership with clients has been recognised – our focus has always been on developing long-term client relationships based on trust and sustainable and mutual success. On a personal level, I am thrilled to win Consultant of the Year and be singled out from a field of high calibre consultants. My clients include some of the world’s biggest brands like The Coca-Cola Company in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Birds Eye Iglo and The Mileage Company, who know a thing or two about quality and value in consulting partners so to have their endorsements means a great deal. What’s more, the Institute of Consulting is the standard bearer for the industry, so to be recognised by them is fantastic.
Huw Hilditch-Roberts, director in charge of the Institute of Consulting, calls Square Peg “a shining example of how a small consultancy can produce truly outstanding work.”
“Interestingly, the company recognised for its achievements working with clients on major transitions and in difficult times – which is what quality consultancy should be about particularly in the current business climate,” Hilditch-Roberts says. “Square Peg has set incredibly high standards and raised the bar in terms of a benchmark for others to follow.”

As reported in our previous newsletter SPS is working on a special issue of Strategy Magazine, and is to host a working conference, both on the subject of ‘Developing strategy as a profession’.
The magazine special issue will be published in February, in advance of the working conference in March. On 12 March we will host a pre-conference dinner in the Founder’s Library at New College Oxford.
Expressions of interest in attending can be sent by email to paul.barnett@sps.org.uk. Please give your reasons for wishing to attend. All applications will be considered by trustees in early 2012.

In the past month support for the SPS business schools initiative has grown considerably. Saïd Business School and Oxford Brookes have both become corporate members of SPS and nominated faculty members. Duncan Angwin of Oxford Brookes and Richard Whittington of Saїd were instrumental in building the relationship with SPS and now plan to collaborate to establish an SPS Strategy Club open to students of both schools.
Explaining his reasons for supporting the initiative, Whittington called the SPS initiative “a great way of bringing students closer to the world of practice. We look forward to welcoming SPS members into our classrooms.”
In the past month Strathclyde Business School has also become a corporate member nominating over a dozen members of the faculty. Now plans are afoot to run the first SPS Strategy Club event there on 9 February. Mark Anderson, President of Strategy and Business Development at Pearson International and author of The Leadership Book, will talk on the subject of strategic leadership. Discounted copies of the book are available to SPS members.
A long standing corporate member of SPS, Newport Business School have just renewed their membership and are also keen to establish an SPS Strategy Club, with first event being planned for February 2012.
The recent additions mean that over a dozen UK business schools are now in the process of establishing SPS Strategy Clubs, and we are getting expressions of interest from business schools abroad. All understand the benefits of introducing practitioner perspectives to support academic learning, and of working with SPS to increase engagement with the business community.

In early 2011 we looked at membership types and pricing. We introduced two new membership types; introduced new levels of corporate membership based on the number of nominees; and replaced club membership with a discount on corporate membership for non-profit, public and third sector organisations.
Earlier in 2011, we introduced Fellowship for well-qualified and experienced strategists that meet our criteria to earn the post-nom title FStratPS.
SPS has also been busy adding at least one new benefit a month and will continue to do so. Members can now enjoy 25% discount on all management and strategy books from Gower Publishing, and 35% discount on a selection of books from Pearson. We have negotiated discounts on a number of magazine publishers too. You can get the digital edition of Strategy and Business for just US$9.95 a year or the print and digital editions for just US$34.95 a year. Other publications include Harvard Business Review (-46%), the Economist (-67%), Fortune (-53%), Business Week (-52%), and many more.
To make it easy to work out the right membership option for you we have created a simple table of the types, benefits and prices.
With so much on offer, why not join now?

An audience of students and faculty members attended the first SPS Strategy Club event at the University of Huddersfield Business School on 5 December. The audience also included Professor Christopher Cowton, Dean of the Business School.
John Anchor, Head of the department of Strategy and Marketing, introduced Kim Warren, teaching Fellow at London Business School and creator of the Strategy Dynamics Approach, and Richard Stephenson, a highly experienced strategy practitioner. They presented a similar talk to one recently delivered at St Andrews Business School, titled ‘Where was strategy in the crisis?’, exploring the broken relationship between strategy and finance and the urgent need to fix this. They also focused on the interdependency between business functions, the need to break down non-reciprocally operating information silos, and the importance of joined-up thinking.
Feedback from both students and staff has been positive, says Anchor. “The students enjoyed the use of scenario planning by the presenters. For them, this helped to bridge the gap between their classroom experience and the application of strategy tools and techniques in the business world. Academic colleagues were also particularly interested in this aspect.”
University of Huddersfield Business School have been a keen supporter of the SPS Strategy Clubs initiative from the start, and more events will follow early in 2012. Future events will also be open to SPS members and local business people.
Anchor is very positive about the event and the SPS Strategy Club Initiative. “We have been corporate members of SPS for a number of years. I am also a Fellow. Strategy is a core element of both the undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum and is therefore of considerable importance to both students and staff. I welcome the initiatives by SPS to professionalise strategy and to make it more like other professional bodies representing functional areas.”

This month a member of the SPS LinkedIn group asked simply “What is the purpose of strategy?”
One member wrote that: “Strategy is about building and integrating resources over time to create competitive advantage in a specific market for the sole purpose of creating business value.”
Another opined that strategy and strategic plans are a company’s hypothesis for achieving future success. “The plan should reflect a shared view of key assumptions, objectives and areas of focus,” he wrote.
These two definitions “need to be set into the context of considering a range of possible and probable future events”, wrote a third member of the group. “A certain amount of crystal ball gazing is needed to consider worst, best and medium guess outcomes, in response to possible external events.”
A car analogy was offered by another member. “Cash is the petrol that keeps you going, and if you really want to go places you are going to need to keep finding cash (producing). You are also not going to get very far without the driver (knowledge), and then there are all the other things that are pretty important to have; the windscreen wipers, the mirror and the air bags etc (not to mention the STRATnav).”
Why not join in the debate, with almost 7,000 members of the SPS LinkedIn group.

Following careers in the military and in industry, Robert Grattan has devoted himself to the subject of strategy and its related theory through his research into the strategy implementation employed by business, governments and the military. Strategy process is widely studied and taught but, Grattan argues, comprehensive prescriptive theories have yet to be developed.
The book is based on analysis of the strategic defence review (SDR) conducted by the UK Ministry of Defence, the methodology for which has been employed in other countries. The study focuses on how the review was managed through the twin lenses of strategic business management theory and the ‘Essence of Decision’ theory of governmental decision-making closely associated with the John F. Kennedy School of Government in the USA.
The author’s interviews with the leading figures in Government, the Civil Service and the Military who participated in the SDR process offer a unique insight, as does the access to information in Ministry of Defence files gained under Freedom of Information legislation.
Strategic Review is thus a book that provides vivid insights into what happened in a large complex organisation during a major strategic review and highlights the problems likely to be encountered during the process of formulating strategy in business, in government, in sport and any other human endeavour. It will appeal to those intrigued by the similarities between the issues facing business and military strategists; to those involved in public policy-making; to the defence community; and to academics and higher level students with an interest in this rich field of study.
The Author: Robert Grattan was an officer in the Royal Air Force for 30 years, retiring in the rank of Group Captain. He subsequently held senior management posts in industry and worked as a consultant.
Having obtained a BA degree with the Open University in the UK and an MSc. in Business Administration from the University of Bath, Robert earned his PhD at the University of the West of England for his comparative study of the strategy process, embracing military and business. The study was published in 2002 by Palgrave-Macmillan.
Dr. Grattan has lectured in the School of Strategy and International Business at UWE and is now a Visiting Research Fellow there and a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the University of Ballarat, in Australia. He has written two books and authored a number of journal articles and conference papers and is a member of the review panels of the Journal of Management History and the Journal of International Business and Entrepreneurship Development.
SPS members can get a 25% discount on this and all other Gower management titles. Please visit our member discount page for the required discount code.

Jon Roughley, most recently Head of Strategy and Planning for the Phoenix Group, a FTSE 250 company and the largest UK consolidator of closed life assurance funds, has become the latest SPS Fellow. He has over 20 years’ experience of successfully formulating and implementing strategic change within Financial Services and has been responsible for definition and delivery of strategy at group, business unit and functional levels and across a number of specialisms including financial management, operations management, customer management, sales, marketing, HR and corporate development. At the Phoenix Group his focus was on restructuring, M&A and operational excellence. Roughley has an MBA from the University of Northampton and when not working enjoys playing rugby and walking his dogs with his fiancée.
He discussed the challenges in professionalising strategy as a discipline and why he is glad to become an SPS Fellow.

What are your thoughts on becoming an SPS Fellow?
I feel proud and privileged to have become an SPS Fellow. I believe the Society’s vision to develop strategy as a professional discipline is an exciting one and one that I am keen to be part of. I feel that for too long strategy has lacked the professional recognition of other corporate functions whilst arguably being the most influential on organisational performance.

Why is strategy important and what challenges are there in making others realise its worth?
I am yet to meet a CEO who does not believe that having a clear strategy underpinned by rigorous execution is critical to the success of their business, and this applies equally to for-profit and non-profit organisations. However, there is plenty of confusion as to what this means in practice, how best it can be achieved and what a good end product should look like. This is not surprising as strategy is not a simple topic. It requires many skills: analysis, creativity, problem solving, forecasting, communication and planning to name but a few.

How should strategy be professionalised as a discipline?
To achieve the recognition we desire, strategists will need to demonstrate how strategy, and the methods that sit behind it, are adding real-world value to organisations. An understanding of a wide range of theories, models and techniques is an important toolkit for any practitioner but the real skill is to translate these into an approach that is suited to your business and the people you are working with. Ultimately success is not measured by the process but by the outcomes.
The one thing that strategy should never be is ‘woolly’. It is about making choices: setting out what an organisation intends to do, and equally what it does not intend to do. It must be a clear statement of intent: defining the intended outcomes in both financial and non-financial terms, and laying out the actions that will be pursued to achieve these, why these are appropriate and achievable, and the risks involved. Ultimately it is about implementation and delivering the levels of performance predicted. Its power comes from clarity: having a defined plan, stated in terms that a wide range of stakeholders can understand, commit to and align their actions to. In my experience businesses want practical approaches that will drive outcomes, not theories.

What does the future hold for strategy?
I believe we have an opportunity to improve the perception and quality of strategy. Its history as a management science gives it a strong foundation but over time I feel the connections between academic research and organisations have become fractured and therefore practice is not benefiting from emerging thinking and academia is not benefiting from actual experiences. There is an opportunity to address this and create a virtuous circle, which I believe the Society is uniquely positioned to do.

Following correspondence with the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Strategic Planning Society (SPS) was invited to submit a consultation response on the future of narrative reporting. We answered questions asked in the ‘response framework’ such as, “Do you agree in principle with restructuring the current reporting framework into a Strategic Report and an Annual Directors’ Statement?” and, “Do you agree that the Strategic Report should include information on: company performance, principal risks and uncertainties, key performance indicators, key financial information … and for quoted companies should include: strategy, business model, environmental and social information, key information on executive remuneration and its link to performance?”
The SPS also put itself forward to co-ordinate a high-level panel of strategists who could undertake the development and production of the guidance material required for the Strategic Report on behalf of the Accounting Standards Board.
As those familiar with the Society will already be aware, SPS has a particular interest in this subject area, having hosted the Strategic Value in Corporate Reporting Awards for several years. The awards, which recognize annually the best in corporate reporting standards, will again take place in April 2012. Further details will be in our next newsletter, or email awards@sps.org.uk.

For the full consultation response is available here: SPS Narrative Reporting Response 281111

In line with its mission to elevate strategy towards the status of established and recognised professional discipline, SPS will run a working conference on 13 March 2012 for those interested in the future of strategy as a professional discipline. A possible title for the event is: ‘Developing Strategy as a Profession’. The structure of the programme is intended to enable the attendees to test, evaluate and help develop further the key initiatives in the SPS strategic framework.
The event will be hosted by SPS in association with Said Business School, Oxford. As a working conference the number or delegate places will be limited and we will aim to ensure a good mix of constituent interests are reflected. Attendance will therefore be by invitation only.
Expressions of interest in attending can be sent by email to paul.barnett@sps.org.uk. Please give your reasons for wishing to attend. All applications will be considered by trustees in early 2012.