Strategy professionals: strategic planners and strategy consultants

Hello. I am Richard Whittington, Professor of Strategic Management at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. I'm going to talk to you about strategy professionals. My focus will be particularly on strategic planners and strategy consultants. I want to explore with you why they are important and the opportunities they present for research.

First of all, I'd better be clear about who I'm mainly talking about. As we will see, the strategy profession is an unusual one, and some might doubt that it is a profession at all, at least by comparison with traditional professions, such as medicine, law, or even accountancy. I'll explain in a moment why it is helpful to think of strategy as a profession. But for now, let me say that my focus is on strategy full timers, particularly strategic planners and strategy consultants. Strategy consultants are those who work for external clients on strategy projects. Many of these consultants work in firms such as the Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Co, or the professional service firm PwC, for instance. But many also work as standalone consultants or in small strategy boutiques. Strategic planners are those who work full time on their organisation's own strategy and perhaps related matters, such as forecasting or acquisitions. These in-house strategy professionals may have other titles than strategic planner, such as chief strategy officer, strategy director, or strategy analyst. Occasionally, and slightly complicatedly, these in-house strategists might even be called internal strategy consultants. But whatever their precise title, I shall include within strategic planners all in-house staff specialists on strategy. Note that these strategic planners are not like line managers for whom doing strategy is just part of a general business role such as business unit manager, divisional manager, or even chief executive. For strategic planners, strategy is their main job. Strategic planners and strategy consultants are two core sets of strategy practitioners. They are strategy's full-time workers. These strategy professionals must, therefore, be central to the strategy as practice research agenda. What are these strategy professionals like? As a starting point for this question, I put on the slide the world's newest profession focused on strategy consulting. Both strategic planning and strategy consulting originated in the early 1960s, and together, they formed a profession dominated by rather confident American men. The strategy profession has changed a lot since the 1960s, and the research issues and the opportunities presented by the changing nature of the strategy profession are what I shall be exploring in this talk. But I need to start by nailing a myth.