LoginImplementing Strategic Change
With the economic pressures upon business increasing daily there has never a more important time to release the handbrakes on business performance. The boom times of the last 20 years have now given way to more cautious customers, lower growth rates in many industries and more fierce competition. The very nature of this landscape means that senior executives and boards need to understand that past positioning strategies of “where to play” are no longer sufficient, without greater insight into “how to play”.
This book reveals how to hard wire the link between strategy and operations that is central to executing strategy successfully. Based on detailed research from winning companies this book shows how to extract significant productivity improvements and build a virtuous cycle of lower cost, greater staff engagement and greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The secret to success in the future is to understand the essential micro linkages that exist within the critical processes of every business. Understanding how work is really done and how that translates into the customer experience is core to value creation. Typically companies leave 20-40% excess cost and poor quality service on the table by ignoring the insights that come from understanding the interfaces that exist within each core process. This happens as management is too far removed from the reality that around 75% of processes go undocumented and left to chance. And typical approaches to process mapping fail to capture the real situationally specific processes that themselves are subject to change.
Step by step this book shows how to capture these insights, improve employee engagement and extract significant benefits. Many strategies fail - not because they are directionally incorrect but because they fall down in execution. The worst failures are where the execution failures directly impact on the customer.
A new lens on what drives success is required by boards and senior executives, and this book provides it with a clear roadmap for how to clearly see and address the new reality.
The book draws on two unique sets of research. The first is thorough documentation and analysis of everything which 13,657 people actually were doing in 117 different organizations, many of them household names. This data for example uncovers that organizations usually only document 1 in every 4 activities carried out. Further, that this “missing” information, when collected, would reveal that fully 1⅔ days out of every 5 days worked (33.6%) is spent in activities such as correcting received errors and chasing missing information. We call this critical but potentially wasted activity interfacing activity noise. The second set of research identifies the key management principles by which the best organizations in the world can be identified. Marrying these two sets of research provides the substance promised in the book title.
The mapping to capture these critical interfacing activities can be easily and quickly done, and is indeed best done by the staff themselves using suitable tools. Our research documents how enthusiastic they always are when the opportunity is presented to make their organisation less frustrating and much more effective in meeting customer and strategic goals.
Once the organisations processes are stabilised and efficient then ‘implementing strategic change’ (the title of this book) can transform away from the frustrating, difficult and often unsuccessful, to quite the opposite. Benefits accrue in terms of better staff alignment, decisions can be made at the right level, staff morale increases, and hence outcomes for the customer improve. Through wasting less effort and materials, reducing rework and interfacing errors, cost of goods sold (COGS) reduces. The 1⅔ days wasted out of every 5 worked can be more than halved without calls on precious capital. Service, quality and timeliness increases. The resources freed up and redeployed to add new forms of value. Return on shareholder funds is driven forward.
