Strategy Consultants Are Failing Their Clients

Let’s get right to it: too many strategy consultants are selling outdated thinking dressed up in modern language. They’re failing their clients. Not subtly. Not accidentally. Openly.

They claim to deliver strategy, but what they really hand over is a polished list of initiatives with nice verbs and colorful timelines. It looks impressive in a boardroom. It reads well in a stakeholder memo. But scratch the surface and you’ll find nothing but fluff.

These aren’t strategies. They’re activity catalogs. And companies are paying a premium for them.

You Had One Job: Define How to Win

Let’s review what strategy actually is, because it seems a lot of consultants forgot.

Strategy is a set of choices:

• Where to play.

• How to win.

Not where you want to play. Not how you hope to win. Actual decisions. With trade-offs. With focus. With a clear reason why your chosen path puts you in a position to succeed, preferably one your competitors can’t easily copy.

But what are consultants delivering instead?

“Strategic plans” bloated with:

• Laundry lists of goals

• Buzzword bingo initiatives

• Milestone charts with zero context

• KPI matrices that measure activity, not impact

This isn’t strategy. It’s theater. It’s a performance of thinking. And it’s wasting everyone’s time.

The Timeline Trap

Let’s kill this bad habit once and for all: strategy does not have a timeline.

A strategy ends when it stops working, not when the fiscal calendar ticks over. Yet over and over, we see documents titled “Strategic Plan 2025–2030,” as if the clock decides the direction of the business.

Execution needs a timeline. Capital needs sequencing. Milestones need deadlines. Of course. But the strategic choices behind it all? Those should evolve only when the competitive reality demands it, not because it’s year five and the slide deck is expiring.

If you’re wiping the slate clean every five years just because the strategy “ran its course,” you didn’t have a strategy. You had a short-term plan with a fancy title.

AI Changed the Game. Most Strategists Didn’t Notice.

Now for the part that should really make you uncomfortable: the world has moved on, and most strategy consultants haven’t.

With the increasing adoption of AI, speed matters. Flexibility matters. Experimentation matters.

You can’t spend 12 months running a strategy process anymore while a startup with no baggage uses off-the-shelf AI to build, learn, and pivot three times before your steering committee even agrees on what to prioritize.

The old model of strategy, big bets, locked-in plans, rigid execution, is obsolete. You’re building stone castles in a world of drones and lasers.

Yet we still see consultants clinging to this “plan everything, change nothing” mindset. Why? Because it’s easier to sell a roadmap than to teach clients how to adapt. It’s easier to hand over a glossy deliverable than to embed real decision-making agility into the business.

Flexibility is now part of competitive advantage.
If your strategy isn’t designed to adapt, you’re building obsolescence into the system from day one.

Stop Selling Safety. Start Selling Truth.

The worst offenders aren’t even the lazy consultants, they’re the ones who know better but choose not to rock the boat.

They tell the client what they want to hear. They list every initiative anyone mentioned in a workshop. They avoid making hard calls. They slap the word “strategic” on every department’s pet project to keep everyone happy.

And then they invoice six figures for it.

That’s not strategy. That’s political compromise packaged as progress. And it does real damage. It distracts leadership. It spreads resources thin. It creates false clarity. And when things inevitably go sideways, the client is left holding a playbook that was never built to win in the first place.

If You Call Yourself a Strategist, Then Act Like One

Being a strategy consultant means you have one job:
Help companies figure out how to win.

Not how to do more. Not how to make everyone feel good. Not how to fill out a matrix.

Winning requires:

• Focused positioning

• Real trade-offs

• Clear execution boundaries

• And built-in adaptability to respond when things change (because they will)

If you’re not helping clients get to that point, you’re not a strategist, you’re a project manager with a thesaurus.

If you're still delivering “strategic plans” that read like corporate vision boards, you're part of the problem. And you're failing your clients.

Do better. Or get out of the way. There are companies out there who need real strategic thinking, and they’re done paying for fake versions of it.