“Be market driven”

Our Scandinavian client CEO had challenged his people to be ‘market driven’ and was dissatisfied by their response. We were engaged to help improve innovation and discovered that three factions within the organisation each had a different idea of what ‘being market driven’ meant. As a consequence, each faction tried their best to ‘be market driven’ whilst acting at cross-purposes with each other. Levels of confusion, frustration and dissatisfaction were palpable and had caused the organisation’s growth to stall.

Helping our client CEO and other key people to identify and address the roots of these different catalysed breakthroughs in understanding and co-operation between previous adversaries. This resulted in a new awareness that rather than ‘being market driven’ they had  in fact to drive the market. The enthusiasm and energy released by this new awareness demonstrated that, like in so many organisations, people needed to ‘get out of their own way’ in order to succeed.

“Those stupid foreigners”

Our client, a global household name manufacturer of hi-tech consumer products, was having major problems aligning their Europe based product designers with their manufacturing and marketing colleagues in Asia. A good example of the typical ‘local optimisation causing global problems’ occurred when one the product design teams chose to save $10,000 by incurring a two week delay in shipping in a critical-path component. From a local perspective, the saving made perfectly good sense, but unbeknown to the Europeans, the knock-on two week delay in production start in Asia would have cost the company over $1,000,000 in lost profits.

We discovered that the European designers held the rather uncharitable (and in fact inaccurate) view of their Asian colleagues as “thirty years behind the West”. Similarly, Asian marketing and production people saw the Europeans as “technology tinkerers” oblivious to the intensely time critical commercial realities of a hi-tech consumer products business.

Our work focused on creating shifts in awareness that helped bridge to overcome the chasm of mutual mistrust and misunderstanding between Europe and Asia. We helped people to develop a deeper appreciation for the contribution and competence of their colleagues, resulting in a meeting of minds across significant distances - physical and cultural. This prompted the team to work together in a spirit of co-operation that enabled them not only to eliminate the ‘phantom’ cost saving and other problems, but also to build greater sustained alignment and agility in a globally diverse organisation.

“They’re trying to cheat us”

Our well known and highly respected client is a diversified Japanese engineering group with global business operations and customers. Their relationship with a key client was in serious danger as a result of an escalating misunderstanding about their performance in a multimillion dollar export contract. The misunderstanding had reached a level where lawyers had been engaged by both parties. We were asked to help resolve the dispute and to help them understand why it had occurred, so they could avoid similar situations in future.

Our initial investigation revealed that the product at the centre of the dispute was basically sound and met the requirements of the contract in all important respects. Despite this, our client’s customer had come to believe that our client (the supplier) did not possess the competence to meet the contracted requirements. Furthermore, since lawyers had now become involved, both parties now mistrusted each other’s  motives and intentions. Our work identified several key interactions in which the seeds of major misunderstandings had been planted, mostly attributable to limited mastery of the nuances of English by the Japanese engineering team and susequently reinforced and perpetuated by written communications. Cultural differences and language barriers had made relatively minor issues appear to be problems of ‘show stopper’ proportions in the eyes of their customer.

By identifying the roots of these key misunderstandings we were able to help our client to appreciate their customer’s concerns and to regain their confidence and trust. The work also raised awareness of the fundamental importance of managing cultural and language sensitivities in what was primarily an engineering driven environment. This enabled both parties to ‘save face’ whilst resolving the conflict, allowing our client to not just recover but strengthen their relationship with a key client and avoid incurring further unnecessary legal fees.

“Help us to help them understand that we must transform”

In this case we were engaged by second tier leadership to help them develop top management recognition of the need to shift from organisation to new era awareness, thinking and behaviour.

Our client is a well known global leader in the fast moving financial services sector.  With the advent of Internet banking, WAP enabled phones and the impending arrival of 3G communications the senior technology management team were concerned that whilst their business environment had become one of continuous, highly competitive innovation, their strategy and senior leadership thinking were still ‘old era’.  We worked with people from their main UK and US business operations to develop insights about how they could constructively challenge their top team around their traditional ways of thinking about strategy and leadership.

We helped them to create top team awareness shifts based on weaving best practices in continuous strategising into the fabric of the organisation. Senior leadership team members were engaged in each phase of the work to ensure that their buy-in to the need for, and implications of, change. Although we led the working team and the design of internal work assignments, our client sponsors themselves led the interactions with the senior leadership team with us coaching in the background. This way, the senior team accepted the work as a valuable contribution from their own people, increasing faith in their capabilities and accelerating their integration as key participants in leadership of the enterprise.

“Kill the Wolf”

Our client is a global healthcare products manufacturer with a portfolio of well known brands. Headquartered in Europe, our client’s existing core marketplace was being invaded by a new hi-tech product from a leading global competitor in the US. The challenge was clear; launch a competing product in the next nine months or exit this segment. As the segment had always provided a highly profitable and protected base of cash flow, exiting the segment would have put them on a ‘slippery slope’ for the rest of their market.

We worked closely with their product designers, developers, manufacturing and marketing people to help them design and launch a product in half their traditional product development cycle time of eighteen months. We worked closely with the product development management team, identifying key product and manufacturing process issues and areas where major shifts in awareness, attitudes and mindsets would be needed if they were to succeed. We worked with them to codevelop ways to overcome internal barriers, including awareness of overseas colleagues. We also helped them deal with the initial emotional reaction to the invader - one of them called this their desire to ‘kill the wolf’ - and to transform this into the determination to beat the invader at their own game. The new product was launched on time, repelled the invader and captured market share in additional territories as well.

“How do we survive beyond ‘The Wall’?”

With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, 70 years of Communist ideology was replaced almost overnight with Capitalism - probably the most colossal culture change we have ever encountered. “Culture shock” doesn’t even begin to describe the effect of the almost instant disappearance of the central economic planning apparatus that had been the source of work and funding for as long as anyone could remember. Our brief was to equip several national technology institutes in former Warsaw pact countries with new skills, attitudes and capabilities to compete successfully in the brave new free market economy.

We worked closely with the leadership teams of the technology institutes, individually and collectively, to help them rapidly make significant shifts in awareness, perceptions and behaviours. Having previously worked extensively with other technology institutes, R&D centres and led technology and innovation management improvement projects in commercial enterprises around the world, we were able to catalyse rapid shifts awareness in those areas that are key to successful performance in a highly competitive global marketplace.

We worked closely with the top leadership teams to help identify which of their competencies and capabilities would be of most competitive benefit in the future. We held teaching, training, coaching and counselling sessions to help the leadership teams develop their competitive approaches, alliances and abilities. Rather than simply copy what  Western competitors did, we worked with them to develop their own insights and approaches in an iterative manner. With each iteration we agreed a package of work that they would complete before our next meeting, where we reviewed progress, addressed concerns and raised issues that they needed to work on in the next cycle for which we also provided telephone, email and Internet based support.

Over the next few years, the institutes that successfully shifted their awareness became commercially viable whilst the others either downsized out of existence or had their best people and markets cherry-picked by invaders from Western Europe and the US.