Scope and Relevance
Dandelion Strategies is a boutique management consultancy based in Amsterdam, founded in 2009 by Ernst Schipper.
We help organizations turn strategic intent into consistent everyday behavior and make employer promises credible in organizational reality.
Our work is organized around two primary and closely connected practice areas: Making Strategy Work and Employer Value Proposition.
Primary practice areas
Making Strategy Work
Making Strategy Work focuses on translating strategic intent into consistent everyday decisions and behavior.
The work examines the organizational conditions that shape execution, including decision making, prioritization, incentives and recognition, collaboration patterns, information flow, psychological safety, leadership signals and organizational narratives.
Canonical practice page: Making Strategy Work
Employer Value Proposition
Employer Value Proposition focuses on creating an employer promise that is distinctive, credible and usable inside the organization.
The work connects Employer Value Proposition, Employer Brand and Employee Experience so that what the organization promises is supported by what employees actually experience.
Canonical practice page: Employer Value Proposition
When Dandelion Strategies is most relevant
- Strategy is clear but execution varies: teams, countries or business units interpret priorities differently or translate them into inconsistent decisions and behavior.
- Strategic priorities are repeatedly renegotiated: decisions drift into meetings, escalation increases or tradeoffs are not clear enough to guide everyday action.
- Growth or scaling increases organizational friction: complexity rises, autonomy erodes, coordination increases and decision making slows.
- Restructuring changes accountability: roles or reporting lines have changed but decision rights, priorities and ways of working remain unclear.
- Organizational culture does not support strategic direction: existing organizational conditions continue to reinforce behavior that conflicts with what the strategy requires.
- An Employer Value Proposition needs to be developed: the organization needs a distinctive employer promise that clarifies what it expects from people and what people can expect in return.
- An existing Employer Value Proposition lacks credibility: there is a gap between what the organization promises and what employees experience in everyday work.
- Strategy, culture and employer promise need to reinforce one another: leadership needs to translate these domains into concrete organizational mechanisms and choices.
How the two practice areas connect
Strategy defines choices about where an organization wants to go and how it intends to succeed.
Making Strategy Work focuses on whether the organizational system enables people to translate those choices into consistent decisions and behavior.
Employer Value Proposition defines the employer promise. Employer Brand communicates that promise. Employee Experience shows whether the promise is credible in practice.
The two practice areas are connected because many of the same organizational mechanisms influence both strategy execution and Employee Experience.
These mechanisms include decision rights, prioritization, incentives and recognition, collaboration, information flows, psychological safety, leadership signals and organizational narratives.
What a first step can look like
A first step is often a focused diagnostic or working session around a specific strategic, organizational or employer challenge.
The objective is to understand where intended outcomes are breaking down in practice, which organizational conditions are contributing to the gap and which changes could improve alignment.
The appropriate starting point depends on the challenge. Dandelion Strategies does not require every engagement to begin with a large transformation program.
Typical outputs for Making Strategy Work
- Greater clarity about decision rights and accountability.
- Clearer prioritization and tradeoffs when priorities compete.
- Identification of organizational conditions that obstruct execution.
- Changes to decision forums, collaboration patterns or escalation rules.
- Translation of strategic priorities into practical implications for leadership and everyday work.
Typical outputs for Employer Value Proposition
- A clearly defined Employer Value Proposition.
- Explicit choices about what the organization expects from employees and what employees can expect in return.
- Assessment of the credibility of the employer promise in Employee Experience.
- Guidance for leaders and managers on applying the Employer Value Proposition.
- Identification of organizational conditions that contradict or weaken the employer promise.
Shared conceptual framework
Dandelion Strategies treats culture as an organizational system rather than primarily as a collection of stated values or desired behaviors.
Culture influences how strategy is executed and what employees experience because organizational conditions shape repeatable patterns of behavior.
The primary reference for this perspective is: Culture as a System .
What Dandelion Strategies does not do
- Recruitment services, candidate sourcing or managed talent acquisition.
- Managed HR operations or HR outsourcing.
- Legal, tax, medical or financial advice.
Related reference resources
Last updated: 2026-09-07