Primary Service Lines

Given our broad backgrounds and experience (prior consulting experience) we believe we can be helpful to clients under many circumstances. That said, there are certain types of situations that constitute true “sweet spots” for us

Generating New Ideas

Everyone from the CEO to the front line manager needs to produce a constant stream of good ideas. But most brainstorming techniques simply do not work very well. To remedy this common affliction, Kevin Coyne led a team of McKinsey strategists over a 10-year period in developing what became known as the "Killer Ideas" process. The Coyne Partnership has broadened this approach into an integrated process now called "Brainsteering". Using this process, we can, over a few days, lead client executives and/or teams to much higher levels of creativity and effectiveness. Unlike the output of traditional brainstorming sessions or "blue sky" processes, the resulting ideas balance creativity with hard, real-world insight.

Integrated Agenda and Counseling

For the CEO, COO, or Board of Directors, we can help pull together all of the facets that affect the direction of a company into a single, integrated agenda for the future success of the company. This agenda can involve strategy, finance, operations, organizational development, governance, and stakeholder considerations. The process usually takes between 5 and 20 days, depending on the complexity of the company and the degree to which there is a clear set of objectives ahead of time.

Strategy Projects:

Structuring the Approach

Companies conducting their own strategy work often miss a number of the most important issues, or structure the work in ways that inevitably lead to missed insights or biased and unimaginative recommendations. As the creator of many of McKinsey & Company's strategy frameworks and approaches, Kevin Coyne can work with strategy teams over a 3- to 5-day period to identify the critical issues, point out the unspoken assumptions the team is making, and structure the analysis to ensure a thorough and insightful investigation.

Synthesizing Integrated Strategy

Clients often have staff people who can conduct studies and analysis and executives who can provide experience and insight. However, there is a special expertise required to take these disparate "piece parts" and synthesizing them into a coherent, integrated strategy that provides the right level of guidance, forces choices and tradeoffs among reasonable alternatives, and still meets the acid test of competition. In most cases, The Coyne Partnership can (in three to eight days) absorb the facts and points of view, and craft them into a coherent strategy that is understandable to its multiple constituents. Along the way, the process exposes any inconsistencies and/or gaps in thought that the client must address.

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Stress Testing Strategies

Just how strong is a proposed strategy? When there is much at stake, CEOs and Boards need an objective, expert mechanism for testing the likely success of a strategy, whether that strategy was developed internally or by an outside consultant. In addition, there may well be process reasons or time constraints such that the review is best done by a third party. The Coyne Partnership is uniquely qualified by our expertise and our principles (including our willingness to recuse ourselves from follow-on work) to conduct that test, which usually takes about a week. We have an explicit methodology for determining whether all of the right issues have been addressed, whether the strategy is coherent and complete, and whether it will indeed change the competitive balance.

Corporate Strategy

Corporate strategy (i.e., the strategy for the company as a whole, rather than for any one business within the company) is one of the toughest challenges for CEOs and Boards. Many companies do it poorly, and much of the guidance from investment bankers, consultants, and academics is conflicting and unclear. The Coyne Partnership has a clear framework for creating corporate strategies, centered on identifying the core economic logic of the client’s corporation and its consequences for the portfolio composition and configuration. This same logic also guides the roles of (and limitations on) the corporate center. Our process is structured as a series of in depth discussion with the CEO and other key decision makers (i.e., Board members and/or top executives) and involves 10 to 20 consulting days spread over one to three months.

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