Portrait of Marian Grone

Marian Grone, founder. Working with executive teams across the U.S.

About

I started ClearFuture Strategy because I kept seeing the same problem.

Companies with a good strategy and no real way to execute it. Or an execution engine running hard in the wrong direction. The fix is almost never another offsite. It is the operating discipline, decision rights, and governance that should turn a plan into work.

I trained as a strategy consultant at BCG, where I worked on transformation engagements across healthcare, life sciences, retail, and energy, and was once brought in to rescue a derailed engagement. I then spent years running strategy and ops at scale. As a VP at McKesson and Collective Health, I owned the annual enterprise strategy cycle, led due diligence on M&A deals that closed over half a billion dollars, built a new market intelligence function from scratch, rebuilt commercial operations processes that had not scaled with the business, and had the honor of acting as a direct thought partner to many business unit presidents and C-suite leaders.

I have been the person in the room who recommends not to proceed. I have rebuilt planning processes that had quietly stopped serving the business. I have told CEOs the thing nobody else wanted to say. That kind of judgment is what I bring to client work, and it is what ClearFuture Strategy is built around.

Most of my career has been in healthcare and life sciences: payer, provider, pharma, distribution, digital health. The complexity of the industry rewards leaders who can hold the strategic picture and the operational reality at the same time. That is where I have always lived.

What I believe about this work

Five things, after fifteen years of doing it.

Strategy is rarely the bottleneck.
The plan is usually fine. What falls apart is everything that comes next: prioritization, operating cadence, decision rights, and the discipline to stop doing the things that no longer matter.
The best strategy work is half facilitation.
Most strategic decisions are stuck not because the analysis is missing but because the conversation has not happened. The person who can design and run that conversation is doing the highest-leverage work in the room.
Operating discipline beats clever frameworks.
Frameworks are a way of organizing thinking. They are not a substitute for the harder work of building the operating mechanisms that make decisions stick after the meeting ends.
Healthcare's complexity is a feature, not a bug.
The industry is hard for a reason: the mission is real, the stakeholders are many, and the consequences of getting it wrong are not abstract. Leaders who can hold all of that at once are the ones I want to work with.
The hard part is what happens after the offsite.
Anyone can produce a plan in a two-day workshop. The work that matters is what happens in the eighteen months that follow: who owns what, what gets stopped, how decisions get made under pressure, and whether the organization can change.

Reach out and we'll have a straight conversation.