Strategy&

Strategy& is the strategy consulting arm of the PwC network. The brand was introduced in 2014 after PwC acquired Booz & Company, a management-consulting firm with roots extending to the early twentieth century.¹ Its name preserves the ampersand associated with Booz & Company while distinguishing the practice from PwC’s audit, tax, and broader consulting services.

The combination gave Strategy& access to PwC’s international offices, industry specialists, technology capabilities, and transaction, tax, risk, and assurance expertise. PwC describes the arrangement as linking strategy with execution across the client organization.² Strategy& therefore operates as a branded practice within the PwC network rather than as an independent, separately listed corporation.

Strategy& focuses on decisions that determine where an organization competes, how it creates value, and what capabilities it needs to deliver its objectives. Its work commonly includes corporate strategy, portfolio choices, growth and market entry, mergers and acquisitions, business-unit strategy, operating models, organization design, and functional strategy.¹³

The practice also works on large-scale transformation, digital and technology strategy, sustainability, supply chains, and sector-specific challenges. Engagements may begin with a CEO or board-level question but extend into implementation planning, capability building, performance measurement, and change management. This orientation reflects a distinction made in strategic-management literature between choosing a distinctive position and merely improving operational effectiveness.

• Corporate level: portfolio, capital allocation, and growth direction.
• Business level: competitive position, customers, products, and markets.
• Enterprise level: operating model, organization, data, technology, and execution.

Strategy& is designed to combine senior strategy advice with the capabilities of a multidisciplinary professional-services network. PwC’s consulting platform includes services spanning technology, deals, operations, people, risk, and transformation, allowing a strategy engagement to draw on specialists beyond traditional management consulting.³

The arrangement also creates practical boundaries. PwC’s separate lines of service are subject to professional, legal, and independence requirements, especially where audit relationships are involved.² Client teams and contracting entities can consequently vary by jurisdiction. Like other global networks, PwC is organized through legally separate member firms, so the Strategy& brand does not represent one single worldwide legal entity.

Its typical clients include multinational companies, governments, and other large institutions. Assignments may be global in design but are delivered through local member firms and teams familiar with national regulation, labor markets, and industry conditions.

Strategy& inherits more than a name from Booz & Company: it carries forward a tradition of strategy consulting associated with work on organization, management, and corporate leadership. Booz & Company itself emerged from the earlier Booz Allen Hamilton consulting business, although Strategy& and Booz Allen Hamilton are separate organizations today.

A less visible feature of the brand is its relationship to the wider PwC Global Strategy Survey and other research-led publications. These materials function both as knowledge products and as evidence of sector and functional specialization; they are not substitutes for the confidential analysis performed in client engagements.¹

The ampersand is also substantive branding: it signals the intended connection between strategy and execution, and between strategic advisers and the wider PwC capability base. In practice, the boundary between strategy consulting, deals, operations, and technology advisory can be fluid, particularly during transformations.

Strategy& should not be confused with the generic business term “strategy” or with Booz Allen Hamilton. The former describes a field of decision-making; Strategy& is a specific commercial brand operating within PwC. Booz Allen Hamilton retained its own identity after the separation of the businesses and is now primarily associated with technology, analytics, engineering, and government consulting.

The brand’s positioning is consequently narrower than PwC as a whole but broader than a boutique strategy firm: it combines a strategy-specialist heritage with the geographic reach and implementation resources of a major professional-services network. Its work is best understood at that intersection.

Strategy consulting

Advisory work that helps organizations make major choices about direction, competition, growth, portfolio, and capabilities.

Operating model

The structure of processes, governance, organization, technology, and capabilities through which a strategy is delivered.

PwC network

The worldwide network of legally separate PricewaterhouseCoopers member firms operating under the PwC brand.

Booz & Company

The management-consulting firm acquired by PwC in 2014, whose strategy practice became Strategy&.