Winning strategy

What’s the big deal?

A well known company experienced in less than a decade an exceptional growth. This is thanks to the adopted strategy to maintain revenue growth while the demand for their expertise and knowledge kept rising. The founders were able to force a place in the market and attract large corporations and provide their services. The founders succeeded to maintain this strategy since the beginning and execute and monitor it well as they were close to the operations and were able to steering it according to their rules. The organizational structure was simple, the incentive systems were clear and the decisions were made very quick among the three founders without loosing time.

This “wining” strategy is no longer valid in the new set-up. The organizational structure changed, the current incentive is not tuned to achieve the desired goals. The decision making process is not aligned correctly with unwritten strategy which caused mismatching in understanding the situation clearly.  The whole process and mechanism kept as is in general.  The management failed to create processes and procedures in place to manage and control the partners and therefore the firms. At the first glance to the total picture, the founders inherited classical organizational issues and failed to create new rules to control their corporate and increase profitability and stability without imposing the autonomy at each firm. They didn’t succeed to win confidence in their management style and forge a more collaborative relationship between the firms.

What’s next?

Here are 5-steps approach that might change the firm from its passive to a more proactive attitude:

1. Understand (current) environment (internal/external);
2. Select a winning strategy or adjust the current one to the new environment and challenges;
3. Execute brilliantly;
4. Develop enhanced organizational/management team and individual capabilities;
5. Evaluate and measure.

Current environment

To understand the current situation, the management needs to recognize the following points:

• Mismatch in the strategy between executive committee and the partners;
• Mismatch in decision making and its alignment with the strategies;
• Missing expertise in other interesting profitable industries;
• Missing clear marketing and sales planning and activities;
• Resource leveling and benefit from the current expertise (increase utilization);
• Common culture and a certain organizational behavior that can be controlled;
• Missing leadership and management skills;
• Unclear incentive system that is not aligned with corporate strategy and decision making processes;
• Unclear corporate guideline to manage the firms accordingly.

A common understanding of how these factors might affect the company and its services to the customer and its future position in the current and other unknown industries is also very important at this moment. Since this can be a significant factor to influence company future strategy.

Winning strategy

The role of the founders is to select a winning strategy. Before to do so, the executive committee has to act like a corporate and focus more on the vision, mission and strategy of the company as a corporate and may move away from managing the firm at the same time as a partner. A specific training might be needed to polish and flourish the leadership style.

• Build a leadership style that fit the business purpose;
• Come with a set up of rules and regulations as a guideline for the partners. New policies to enhance the communication and minimize the mismatching with a killing effect of the entrepreneurial spirit;
• Do the founders have the leadership knowledge and experience to lead and manage as the y should be? And therefore, an appropriate training/workshop may the partner help understand how to lead according to the corporate strategy;
• Build an organizational structure that meets corporate demand and mange the partners strategy and expectations;
• The founders should come up with a few variations on the existing incentive system that it thought would satisfy the partner demands and align between their strategy and these of the corporate and decision making processes;
• Build a clear and transparent measure system;
• Train the employees to broaden the knowledge and experience;
• Develop strategies to enter other markets to minimize the risks & develop product and services offers.

Execute brilliantly

Executing brilliantly is one of the stool legs. For example:

• An incentive-related process, whereby individuals learn what kinds of behaviors are likely to be rewarded;
• Second, with regards to Angela’s idea to adopt a new sale technology within the organization might hit a cognitive and incentive barrier. Any attempt to introduce this software must be accompanied by a change in both. Yet this system has its advantages allowing smooth decision-making processes and effective implantation of strategic actions;
• Improve products and services; • Improve customer relationships;
• Improve balance sheer (revenues/expenses).

The executive committee will have to install a new team to mange and monitor the changes. A new model where the executive committee would be only responsible for the strategy and would be concerned with the questions how well the company is doing currently and which milestones reached, what are the company needs to do or enhance more to achieve future targets. Management should be concerned almost only with implementing these strategies with all firms together with the partners.

Develop enhanced organizational team and individual capabilities

The structure of the company business will have to act as the backbone and support concerning decision-making and other processes. Deciding early what type of organizational system the company want to implement will help to ease the stress of implementing other changes. If each partner knows what he or she is supposed to be doing and in a way how and which target he or she need to achieve with his firm, there is less room for confusion and poor judgment.

Perhaps setting up a management team in this case would work the best for the company, or perhaps a hierarchy of decision makers would work better. Either way, setting up a definite structure before important shots are called makes a difference.

This team should take in consideration the training of each individual (including partners and founders) in order to meet customer needs and deliver the agreed quality and therefore keep a satisfied customer for the long run.

The team needs to maximize the value of each firm in a corporate level, increase the utilization across the corporate, and optimize current and new business profitability and increase manufacturing efficiency.

Evaluate and measure

Each individual at the company should ask himself the following question each time:How we do things around here?

The organizational behavior needs to change to increase the business awareness among the employees. The company  needs to avoid any ambiguous measures in order to have the ability to respond quickly to management actions. These measures need to be innovative and not continue to rely on “old” models and problem-solving strategies, from the current executive committee.

The new management team needs to look at:

• How to influence employee behavior and change their attitude;
• How the communication should flow between executive committee, partners and employee;
• How the decision and its execution can be monitored;
• Which performance tool would work best at each firm and which one would work best on a corporate level;
• How to use these score cards to check the executed strategy and how well the employee behaved accordingly.