Globalization and the resulting business complexity have made it increasingly difficult to determine where an organization’s greatest leverage lies within a given business strategy. Virtually all large companies have faced challenges arising from flawed strategy or flawed execution at some point - some have experienced both simultaneously. Yet few have established a disciplined process to clarify how much their current difficulties stem from one or the other, and what design choices they should make to improve performance. Traditional planning processes often tend to be backward-looking, internally focused, and incremental in nature. As a result, managers may end up addressing the wrong problems. Moreover, understanding one’s business has become more difficult in recent years for several reasons. Beginning in the 1990s, many companies pursued mergers and acquisitions not only to achieve scale but also to acquire complementary products, channels, and customer segments. This has created inconsistencies that are difficult to reconcile within many firms. Accelerated globalization has further disrupted the assumptions on which many businesses were built, creating misalignments between strategic design and the operational demands of local markets and supply systems. To address this increasing complexity, AVONLEA Consulting has developed a business strategy audit that investigates the full range of strategic choices and performance drivers within a company. The audit identifies areas of misalignment and determines the highest-priority actions needed for improvement. Improving the businesses you already have and building the ones you need are interdependent activities. Weak operational performance undermines growth, and lack of growth diminishes the ability to attract the talent, resources, and customers that improve performance. AVONLEA Consulting addresses both strategy design and strategy transformation. Executive management must make design choices that are internally consistent and develop a coherent strategic plan that supports successful transformation. Large organizations have become increasingly complex. More than ever, executive managers need a clear line of sight across their strategic options to drive improvement through disciplined planning and rigorous strategy audits. A smart, honest, and comprehensive audit - one that incorporates strategic risk - can lead to breakthrough performance that goes far beyond simply catching up with competitors. Ultimately, the goal is to build a distinctive strategy that competitors find difficult to imitate, thereby protecting your position in a competitive environment. Like any successful value-creation effort, keeping the process evergreen through continuous monitoring ensures that you can anticipate shifts in the external landscape and respond early. Apply the same level of rigor to your strategy formulation as you do to your annual financial audits (which, for good reason, are always conducted by external parties), and the payoffs will follow. Building and managing a complex enterprise spanning multiple businesses, geographies, and sources of value can be daunting - but that is the reality of evolving competition. A well-crafted business strategy can help cut through the complexity, strengthen operations, and equip your organization for the next stage of growth.