Rob George — twenty years actually doing strategy.
When the consultants leave, the skill should stay. I help leaders, teams and individuals get strategic, through coaching, training and workshops.
I became a classically trained strategist as a consultant, then went and got “proper” jobs. I’ve built, landed and run corporate strategies, led teams of 500-plus, and grown multi-billion-pound businesses from the exec teams of FTSE-listed retailers and media companies.
Here’s the thing I kept noticing. Organisations spend fortunes buying strategy, from consultants, from agencies, from whoever has the glossiest deck, and almost nothing on building strategic thinking themselves. So the strategy turns up in a suit, presents on a Thursday, and leaves. The slides stay. The skill doesn’t.
Critically, those slides are out of date before the ink is dry. Success in delivery comes from the people landing the plan having the skills to evolve the strategy when, not if, it goes wrong. Better still if those same skills mean they never needed the suits in the first place.
So now I work with leadership teams to build strategies they own, train teams, and coach individuals to sharpen their strategic thinking.
One or two days with your leadership team to co-build a distinctive strategy and set it up to land. Not me presenting a deck and walking out. Us building the thing together, in the room, so what you leave with is genuinely yours.
Most strategies fail not because they were wrong, but because they were someone else’s. When the team builds it themselves, with me there to push and pressure-test rather than hand over answers, you get something distinctive, solid, and actually owned by the people who have to deliver it.
Let’s talk →We treat strategy like a dark art, best left to McKinsey. But strategic thinking isn’t magic, and it isn’t a once-a-year event. It’s how you cut through noise, find the question under the question, and make a good call when the data runs out, which it always does.
That skill doesn’t just produce a strategy. It makes everything sharper: the prioritisation call, the board paper, the team restructure, the decision you have to make on Tuesday with half the information you’d like. I teach your people to think that way and keep it. Works for a team of five or a room of five hundred.
Let’s talk →You can buy advice anywhere. What’s rare is someone who’ll help you do your own best thinking, with no agenda, nothing to sell you next, and not flinch when you finally say the thing out loud you’ve been circling for months.
I coach senior leaders and ambitious people on the things that actually move a career: thinking strategically, landing change that sticks, getting through a leadership transition, working out the next move when the current one has run its course. I won’t hand you answers, and I won’t pretend they’re all already in you. I’ll make you sharper at getting to them.
There’s no fixed price on this, by design. I don’t charge a set fee. Coaching changed how I work, and I think it should be available on its merits, not on whose budget it lands. Pay what you think a session was worth, whoever you are, anywhere from the going rate for a physio or tutor to what an exec coach normally costs. Both ends are welcome.
[Coachee quote 1. Two or three sentences works best, something about a shift in how they think or a decision they finally made.]
[Coachee quote 2.]
[Coachee quote 3.]
[Training quote 1. Ideally about a skill the team kept using, or a session that changed how they make decisions.]
[Training quote 2.]
[Training quote 3.]
Placeholder quotes above. Send me the real ones and I’ll drop them in.
Twenty years, mostly learned the hard way
The best conversations start with an email and no agenda.
hello@robdgeorge.com →