Principal, Corporate Strategy

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THE OPPORTUNITY

The work starts with the question.

JOSEPH is looking for a Principal to help lead the strategic work of the firm.

Principals operate close to the decisions that matter. They work directly with founders, executives, and marketing leadership to understand complex situations, determine what is actually driving them, and develop a clear point of view about what should happen next.

The work spans positioning, customer strategy, competitive strategy, and growth strategy. But the mandate is larger than any one discipline:

Bring clarity where the answer is not obvious.

You will be expected to ask difficult questions, challenge comfortable assumptions, uncover what others may have missed, and turn rigorous thinking into recommendations leadership can act on with confidence.

This is not an execution role. You will not be measured by the volume of work produced.

You will be measured by the quality of the decisions your thinking helps make.

Every engagement begins with a question.

Why are we losing relevance? Where should growth come from next? What position can we credibly own? Which customer matters most? What should we stop doing? Where should we compete—and where shouldn't we?

Your responsibility is not to arrive with a predetermined framework. It is to understand the situation deeply enough to determine what question actually needs to be answered.

You will lead engagements from ambiguity to direction: framing the problem, guiding research and analysis, developing strategic alternatives, making choices, and communicating a recommendation with clarity and conviction.

You will work directly with leadership throughout that process.

The objective is not another presentation.

The objective is a better decision.

• Lead consequential strategic marketing engagements from question to recommendation.
• Advise founders, executives, and senior marketing leaders.
• Frame complex and ambiguous situations into clear strategic questions.
• Develop strategies across positioning, customers, competition, and growth.
• Direct research into markets, customers, categories, competitors, and emerging opportunities.
• Identify the signals that matter and separate them from the noise.
• Develop hypotheses, test assumptions, and build evidence-based arguments.
• Create strategic alternatives and make clear recommendations between them.
• Challenge client thinking when the evidence demands it.
• Communicate complex ideas with precision, simplicity, and conviction.
• Guide strategists, associates, and research talent contributing to engagements.
• Raise the intellectual standard of the work around you.
• Contribute to the ideas, methods, and perspectives that define JOSEPH.
• Help build the firm—not simply work within it.

We are looking for exceptional judgment.

You can enter an unfamiliar situation, understand it quickly, determine what matters, structure the problem, and develop a point of view without waiting for someone else to tell you what to think.

You are deeply curious but relentlessly practical.

Analytical without becoming academic.

Confident without becoming rigid.

You know how to defend a position—and how to abandon one when better evidence emerges.

You understand that information alone is not strategy. Neither is a framework, a workshop, a deck, or a collection of observations.

Strategy requires choice.

And good counsel requires the judgment to know which choice to recommend.

You ask questions before reaching for answers.

You look for the problem beneath the problem.

You can distinguish what is interesting from what is important.

You are comfortable saying, "We don't know yet," and disciplined enough to find out.

You can hold competing possibilities in your head without becoming…