Like Satan in the book of Job, I’ve been going to and fro in the earth over the past few months, in my case talking to corporate executives, consultants, and former consultants. Among my questions to them: How are you thinking about strategy these days? Is the highest of managerial arts — or sciences, if you prefer — dead, as some allege? And what’s hot on the corporate rialto by way of consulting work?

Some tentative conclusions:

There is not much of a market for stand-alone strategy studies any more. Or, put another way, trying to base a consulting business on same is a mug’s game. The days when you could make a living responding to companies’ discovery of strategy, as in “Gosh, we gotta get ourselves one of those,” are gone with the 1970s (or maybe the 1990s in the “developing world”). Strategy has triumphed, the installed base is huge, no self-respecting company would be without one.

This poses a dilemma for consulting firms. On the one hand, membership in the top bracket — the lofty heights occupied by the likes of McKinsey & Co. and the Boston Consulting Group — still seems to require a strong strategy credential. Which is why you hear outfits such as Oliver Wyman and Booz Allen & Hamilton advertising themselves on the radio (public, of course) as strategy consultants.

But consultancies clinging too long to a specialization in strategy at the expense of other practice areas now find themselves in trouble. They may have done a swell $2 million strategy study for a client, but then have to watch from the sidelines as a more broadly based firm swoops in to do the $15 million project — a total systems redesign, say, or a corporate reorganization — entailed in implementing the strategy. Marakon, which put value-based management at the core of its strategy concentration, is essentially defunct. Monitor & Co., co-founded by Michael Porter back in the early 1980s, has seen better days.

Meanwhile behemoths such as McKinsey and BCG, to maintain their above-industry-average growth rates and keep their global office networks humming, have broadened what they do and moved down the food chain. McKinsey teams are beavering away in places like the United Arab Emirates and the ‘Stans — Turkmenistan, say, or Tajikistan — but they’re as likely to be doing operations projects as pure strategy work.

The most intense competition between consulting firms is for “whale” engagements. Undertakings with $20 million price tags such as the post-merger integration of a giant pharmaceutical client and its equally humongous acquisition. Or redesigning a company’s entire store system and approach to customers. While BCG or McKinsey will still proudly help a client devise a corporate strategy, in the eyes of many in the industry such projects have become what retailers call “loss leaders” — products you have to offer to get the customer in the door, but not where you make the real money.

Ultimately what the consultancies are competing for are semi-permanent, year-in, year-out relationships with companies rich enough to pay scores of millions annually for help and advice. In this context, as the Olympian firms broaden their offerings, their challenge becomes maintaining their pricing power, their ability to charge strategy-level rates for types of work that consultants from Deloitte or Ernst & Young will offer to do for a lot less.

At real live companies, strategy isn’t dead; it’s embedded in other initiatives. To be sure, you can still occasionally find a company buying a whole-hog, build-me-a-strategy-from-the-ground-up project. Typically such purchasers are emerging from some sort of major corporate unpleasantness — a near bankruptcy, say, or having missed out, Nokia-like, on a ground-shaking technological shift. Or, sometimes related, they have a new CEO with a mandate to shake things up and make her mark.

At most companies, though, the strategy has been established, even institutionalized. One CEO I talked with rattled off a list of undertakings for which he had enlisted consulting help. None sounded to me like company-defining strategic. But when I asked if, for him, strategy was dead, he was close to being offended. “Of course not,” he replied. “For us, our strategy informs every big decision we make — what markets to enter or exit, what acquisitions to make, what products to introduce.” (The very issues he had consultants gathering facts on.)

Foolish me, I came away thinking, underestimating the ubiquity, and triumph, of corporate strategy.

Walter Kiechel III is the former Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing, former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, and author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World. He is based in New York City and Boston.