№ 10The Faculty
Reema Sharma.
Senior Partner, Sharma Lawrence, strategy and negotiation advisory.
On strategy as the long argument an organisation has with itself.
Strategy is the long argument an organisation has with itself. The job of the adviser is to keep the argument honest.
The work
Reema is senior partner at Sharma Lawrence, a strategy and negotiation advisory firm of eleven people in London and Birmingham that takes paid work from a small set of organisations across financial services, the public sector, and one or two large family businesses. She runs the Negotiation in Practice masterclass with Tomas Eriksson. She writes a quarterly note that goes to about two hundred general counsel and chief strategy officers, and she keeps a side-correspondence with a network of about thirty fellow advisers across Europe and South Asia.
Background
She trained in law at the LSE and spent her first eight years at one of the magic-circle firms, ending as a managing associate in cross-border M&A. She moved out of legal practice in 2011 into a head-of-strategy role at a mid-cap financial services group; she ran that group’s strategy office through the post-crisis decade and through one significant restructuring she does not discuss in print.
She founded Sharma Lawrence with Anjali Lawrence in 2019. The firm has not advertised. It has grown only by introduction. The two of them remain the two senior partners and intend, in writing on the wall of the partners’ room, to remain so.
Signature contribution
Reema is known for treating strategy as a long argument an organisation has with itself. She does not believe in strategy days, she does not produce decks, and she does not write reports longer than twelve pages. What she produces, normally, is a sequence of one-page memos over six months, each of which is the answer to a specific question her client has asked her. The twelve memos, taken together, are the strategy.
She is also known for an unusual rule. She will not advise an organisation whose chief executive is not personally willing to write the cover letter on the final document. The rule is firm. She has turned down nine engagements in five years on this basis. Two of those organisations went on to fail publicly. She does not mention this in conversation.
In practice
On a Friday afternoon Reema is reading the third draft of a one-page memo by the chief executive of a regulated bank, six weeks before the bank’s strategy review goes to the board. The memo is one paragraph long and the paragraph is wrong in two specific places. She writes one line of revision and one question on a separate sheet, by hand, and posts both back. By the following Friday the memo will be right. The strategy review will pass. The board will not know she was involved.
If your chief executive cannot write the cover letter on your strategy, your strategy is not finished.
Outside the work
She lives in Birmingham, where she grew up, in a house she has owned since her partnership year and which is now full of her two teenage daughters’ books and dog. She is on the board of a small theatre and the council of a Birmingham primary school. She reads, mostly, history of empire and South Indian fiction.
A twelve-page report that took six months to write is twelve pages someone in the executive will read. A hundred-page report is a hundred pages they will skim.