Business Strategy & Planning

Our experience has informed us that the failure of companies to achieve their business goals is less an issue of selecting the right strategies, but more related to less than effective strategy execution. Conventional strategic planning separates the "planners" from the "implementers." This artificial separation undermines effective execution of even the most thoughtful and elegant strategies. We provide consultation and facilitation to help our clients develop the right business strategies to address current/future challenges and exploit emergent opportunities. The result is a portfolio of highly actionable strategic priority initiatives to achieve competitive advantages in their respective markets.

But most importantly, we assist our clients to mobilize, align, and motivate their workforce to execute on these strategies effectively. We use a highly inclusive approach that taps into the talents and perspectives of diverse stakeholders to generate innovative approaches and build broad based commitment for highly motivated concerted action.

Strategic Organization Design

The source of real, sustainable competitive advantage emanates from how an organization structures and coordinates its people and business processes to maximize its distinctive capabilities and enhance its capacity to perform. How an organization designs itself is a critical component of its strategy execution plan. Our experience has taught us that there is not a perfect, or universally effective, organization design solution. Tradeoffs always need to be made. But such tradeoffs need to be based in a defined set of criteria and clarity about what the design is intended to accomplish. In addition, the design that works for one organization will not necessarily work for another.

Our proven methodology and tools assist our clients to select the effective organization design that meets their unique needs, facilitates achievement of their defined goals, and leverages their organization's distinct capabilities. Our approach includes a focus on achieving the optimal alignment among all organizational components including strategy, structure, management practices, operating processes, enabling technologies, and culture.

Culture Realignment

Organization culture can be a strong enabler or powerful obstacle to implementing change and executing on business strategies. Yet, organization culture remains an enigma to most organization leaders. Our culture realignment "roadmap" and manager tool-kit helps guide our clients through the daunting task of redirecting and reshaping their organization culture to sustain high levels of performance.

The "roadmap" begins with an assessment of the current culture using our structured inquiry and discovery process to identify core organizational beliefs and values and how these influence current behavior. We also assist our clients to define the future culture required for success. A culture change action agenda is then established based on a "culture gap audit" comparing the current with the future culture to determine which aspects of the current culture can be leveraged, modified, extinguished and/or new aspects added to enable achievement of strategic business goals. Our proven culture realignment strategies are then systematically applied to shape and direct culture change efforts.

In addition, our culture realignment roadmap can be readily adapted to help structure and facilitate culture due diligence that informs merger or acquisition decisions, post-merger culture integration or post-acquisition culture assimilation processes.

Human Resources Transformation

The human resources value chain is a critical contributor to organization performance success. Our approach begins with the development of an HR strategy that is aligned with and substantively contributes to the execution of enterprise wide business strategies and addresses priority people related business issues. We then assist our clients to assess each of the key components of their HR value chain (e.g. selection, development, compensation, performance management, etc.) to determine the extent of redesign required to enable the effective implementation of new HR strategy. We also help our clients to develop measures for monitoring the effectiveness of their new services model. Finally, we provide expert guidance for managing the change and transition associated with the transformation process.

Our approach is systematic and highly collaborative often involving multiple stakeholders who are the "customers" of HR services and is focused on addressing the highest priority strategic people related business issues required to maximize organization performance and achieve the highest levels of manager and employee satisfaction.

For additional information about our services and workshops, please contact us.