Welcome to June’s Strategy Pulse.

May was about execution: whether companies can actually deliver on their strategies. June is a harder question. Before you can execute, your structure has to allow it. And right now, a lot of organisations are discovering that it doesn’t.

The decisions landing this month, from Meta’s wholesale reorganisation to the Big Four cutting in some places and hiring in others, all point at the same underlying problem. The shape of the organisation itself has become the obstacle. That’s a different kind of challenge from capability or planning. You can upskill people. You can hire better. But if the structure is wrong, none of it moves fast enough.

Big Shift: The Org Chart Is the Strategy

For years, restructuring was shorthand for cost-cutting. Leadership would announce a “strategic realignment,” a few hundred roles would disappear, and the business would carry on in roughly the same shape. The language was strategic. The intent was financial.

What’s happening now is different, and Meta is the clearest current example of why.

Meta announced it was reassigning 7,000 employees into four new AI-focused organisations, structured around what its chief people officer described as “AI-native design principles.” This ran alongside plans to cut roughly 8,000 jobs and freeze 6,000 open positions, with the moves affecting close to 20% of the company’s total workforce.

The restructuring involves flattening management layers and creating smaller, faster-moving teams organised around autonomous AI tools and agents, with staff internally referring to the reassignment process as being “drafted.” It’s not subtle, and it’s not primarily a cost story. It’s a structural bet: that the organisation built for social media at scale is the wrong shape for what Meta needs to become.

The strategic logic is real even if the execution is uncomfortable. Meta’s moves signal how aggressively large technology companies are reallocating resources toward AI product development, concentrating specialist talent and trimming functions seen as less central to future growth. For everyone watching from the outside, the relevant question isn’t whether Zuckerberg has called it right. It’s whether their own structure could support a move like this if they needed to make one.

Most organisations couldn’t. And that’s the problem.

Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends survey (Deloitte Insights), drawing on more than 9,000 business and HR leaders across 89 countries, found that 7 in 10 business leaders now say their primary competitive strategy over the next three years is to be fast and nimble. Only 28% believe scale will be their main differentiator. Scale built the last generation of market leaders. Speed is what the next one is being organised around. But wanting speed and being structured for it are two very different things.

📌 Takeaway: The org chart is no longer just an operational document. How you’re structured is a signal of whether you can compete. Companies still running on 2019 hierarchies are making a strategic bet they may not realise they’ve made.

Brand in Focus: KPMG and the Consulting Identity Problem

The Big Four are not having an easy 2026. But KPMG‘s recent moves are worth examining more carefully than the headline numbers suggest, because they reveal something broader about what professional services brands are now selling, and whether that matches what clients are actually buying.

KPMG laid off around 400 consultants in its US advisory division in late April, with cuts concentrated in regulatory risk, customer operations, and financial services consulting. Two converging pressures drove it. Regulatory demand dropped sharply after the US government’s rollback of financial oversight, reducing client spend on compliance-related advisory work. At the same time, post-pandemic over hiring caught up with the firm as attrition slowed and teams remained larger than the available work required.

But the cuts are only half the story. KPMG was explicit that parts of its advisory business are still growing, specifically in transactions, strategy, and AI services. Same firm, same quarter, shrinking in one direction and investing in another.

That’s a brand and positioning challenge as much as a workforce one. KPMG, like all the Big Four, built its market position on breadth: the idea that one firm could handle everything from tax compliance to transformation strategy. The firm now expects employees to demonstrate how they’re integrating AI into their client work, with the emphasis shifting from generalist consulting to specialised, technology-driven expertise. The pitch to clients is quietly changing. So is the pitch to candidates.

The firms that navigate this well won’t just be the ones that cut in the right places. They’ll be the ones that tell a coherent story about what they’re for now, in a market where “full service” is no longer sufficient as a positioning.

📌 Takeaway: The Big Four’s restructuring is a brand story. When you cut compliance and grow AI strategy in the same quarter, you’re making a public statement about what consulting is worth paying for in 2026. The question is whether the brand is keeping up with the strategy.

Consulting Corner: The Fragmentation Problem

The consulting market isn’t necessarily shrinking. It’s sorting.

Compliance and regulatory advisory, which drove enormous volumes of work through the 2010s, is contracting as a demand category. Strategy, AI integration, and transactions are growing. The firms built wide, across every service line, are now having to make choices about where they actually want to compete. And the firms that haven’t made those choices yet are carrying the cost of both.

For clients, this is more consequential than it might appear. The consulting market of 2026 looks less like a set of full-service generalist firms and more like a landscape of specialists with generalist branding. Knowing which firm has genuinely built capability in the area you need, rather than staffing it from a stretched bench, has become a more important procurement question than it used to be.

Deloitte’s 2026 Human Capital research identifies organisational agility as the defining competitive differentiator, with organisations leading on it around twice as likely to report better financial results. But only 8% of business leaders say their change management and learning initiatives are highly effective. That gap between ambition and infrastructure is exactly where the most valuable consulting mandates sit right now. Not AI implementation. Not change management in the traditional sense. Operating model redesign: who decides what, how work flows, and whether the structure can actually support the strategy on paper.

That’s harder to sell than a technology project. It’s harder to deliver. And it requires a different kind of consultant than the ones being cut, not a generalist who can cover a service line, but someone who can read an organisation’s design and diagnose where it’s blocking itself.

📌 Takeaway: The consulting market is fragmenting around specialisation. Generalist capacity is being cut; specialist capability is being competed for. For anyone hiring or being hired in this space, the question has shifted from “which firm?” to “which practice?”

🔔 Final Thought

The consistent thread across everything this month is the gap between knowing and doing. Most leaders agree the structure needs to change. Most organisations are still built in ways that make change slow, expensive, and politically complicated.

AI isn’t closing that gap. If anything, it’s widening the visibility of it. The companies moving fast look further ahead than they actually are, because the baseline has dropped. The ones that haven’t moved yet aren’t just behind on technology. They’re behind on the organisational conditions that would let them catch up.

The question worth sitting with going into the second half of the year: if you had to redesign your team from scratch next month, would it look anything like what you have now? And if the answer is no, what’s actually stopping you?

Want to stay on top of this? The Strategy Pulse continues monthly.

In the meantime, if you found this useful, share it with someone navigating their own execution gap.