Arresting the saboteurs of strategic change

“The best-laid schemes of mice and men, gang aft a-gley” – so goes a line in one of poet Robert Burns’ pieces which aptly describes how even the best thought-out plans can still go awry.

“I guarantee you that no matter how wonderful your strategy is, you will not execute it the way you planned,” said Robin Speculand, CEO of Bridges Business Consultancy Int. He was speaking at a recent workshop organised by the UOB-SMU Entrepreneurship Alliance Centre. Speculand, a specialist in strategy implementation, has helped governments, multi-national companies, and local corporations like Singapore Airlines to implement their strategies.

Certainly, successful executions of even the most thought-out strategies are fraught with challenges. There are plenty of examples showing how implementation failed because of inadequate preparation or the leadership’s inability to cope with unexpected events.

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Change Management

Change Management

Least Likely To Succeed

A global economy spiraling out of control continues to throw business leaders from their seats, forcing companies to adapt and quickly, sometimes blindly, embrace leadership changes. Senior executives for some of the largest companies in the world agree these adjustments have largely been unsuccessful, according to new research.

A recent study from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and a management consulting firm showed that 42% of business leaders in the U.S. and Europe admit their change-management programs in the past five years have more or less failed. Companies plan to spend more money on leadership transitions to fix the problem--yet, at the same time, they aim to reduce operational costs.

Experts say a successful leadership transition is not defined by a sound plan to restore a company's fiduciary responsibility, but rather it's about knowing how to make it happen. "It's easy to write a plan and make a fancy notebook, but it's hard to actually implement it," said Constance Dierickx, a senior consultant of RHR International.

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PWC - Creating a sustainable business

Sustainability relates to a company’s ongoing ability to protect and grow shareholder value through positively managing its impacts on, and relationship with, diverse stakeholder constituencies. This means integrating economic, social and environmental concerns and opportunities within decision-making and applying them to help deliver business goals.

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Mapping Strategic Issues in Key Markets

In order to portray the richness of the GlobeScan Report's data in a manner that delivers strategic insight for our clients' issues management and communications functions, GlobeScan has created a series of issues matrices for key country markets. By combining both top of mind findings (i.e., urgent issues) with prompted seriousness findings (i.e., importance), along with trend data (i.e., issue momentum), we arrive at what can be called "accountability" issues needing pro-active management and communications in each given market.

In the issues matrix below for the United States, the upper right quadrant shows the problems that are rated as most serious and getting worse, namely health care, dishonest leadership, and crime. Additionally, concern about health care in the United States has increased over the past four years. These problems can be viewed as accountability issues, with strong public pressure on both public and private sectors organizations to take corrective action.

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The challenge Human Resource has to overcome

Analysts, industrialists and academicians are of the opinion that a strategic mix of shared services and outsourcing is the new model that is driving HR teams in global organisations to achieve and sustain excellence. However, what is yet to be understood is whether outsourcing is really the pathway towards
attaining competitive advantage. Today, transformation of HR operations has shifted the focus from a traditionally reactive and administrative function to one that is tightly connected to the business. The effect of this strategy is significant in making it possible for businesses to respond to market and human capital changes more rapidly.

When AT&T enters into a seven-year outsourcing contract with Aon Consulting for combining the talents of its human resources and payroll organisations with Aon’s core competencies in employee benefits, compensation, employment and other services – what is their prime motive? Most certainly, the obvious answer would reflect the basic principle kkore on its core competencies.” Initially, outsourcing was done mainly to bring down costs, however, a changing feature of outsourcing today is that it no longer involves only low-key operations. Increasingly, services that are being outsourced are those that require highly skilled and qualified personnel who are able to provide the service quality standards required and this has led to a increase in the outsourcing of human resource services.

Today, human resource professionals are expected to deliver more advanced and differentiated human capital skill sets, create and maintain high performing workgroups, offer technology platforms with increased functionality and direct access to information as well as partner with business leaders to align people strategies with business goals in order to achieve corporate initiatives. Dave Ulrich, a leading scholar in human resources, recently wrote that the competitive forces that managers face today and will continue to confront us in the future demand organisational excellence. The efforts to achieve such excellence – through a focus on learning, quality, teamwork and re-engineering – are driven by the way organisations get things done and how they treat their people. Those are fundamental human resource issues. To state it plainly: achieving organisational excellence must be the work of HR.

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The HRMC talent development cycle

HR Management Knowledge

Creativity in individuals

The Five Biggest Customer Service Blunders of All Time

While howls of protest over poor customer service continue to fill the air, there remain some businesses that manage to consistently deliver superior customer service year in and year out. These are the places where turbo-charged employees pursue customer delight with a passion, places that ignite a flashpoint of contagious enthusiasm in employees and customers alike.

Foremost among the lessons to be learned from such flashpoint businesses are the blunders to avoid - those fatal mistakes that trip up just about everybody else.

1. First Blunder: making customer service a training issue. Businesses of all kinds invest huge amounts in training programs that do not - and simply cannot - work.
   
2. Second Blunder: blaming poor service on employee demotivation. Businesses looking for ways to motivate their workers are almost always looking in the wrong places.
   
3. Third Blunder: using customer feedback to uncover what's wrong. Businesses often use surveys and other feedback mechanisms to get to the causes of customer problems and complaints.
   
4. Fourth Blunder: reserving top recognition for splashy recoveries.
   
5. Fifth Blunder: competing on price. It's one of the most common (and most costly) mistakes in business.

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Nestle, Pepsi Reported To Have Held Merger Talks

One of the reasons that Nestle has given to walk away from a possible deal with Pepsi is that Pepsi sells too much junk food and drink.

Huh!

Let me see if I understand this. Nestle, the company that presents itself as healthy and nutritional and has a tag line that says "Good Food, Good Life", is worried about getting into the market for junk food and drink. Fair enough.

I wonder when they found out what Pepsi did for a living? These failed discussions being revealed puts Pepsi in an awkward position.

Egg on face Nestle!

Onésimo Alvarez-Moro

See article:
Nestle and PepsiCo held merger talks in the spring that eventually collapsed over concerns about selling too much junk food as well as structure, according to a published report on Thursday.

The Wall Street Journal reported that PepsiCo (PEP) made an initial approach to Nestle (NSRGY) in the spring, citing a person familiar with the situation.

But Nestle was concerned that a deal with Pepsi would dilute its mission of selling more healthy food and beverages. There were also complications of structuring a deal to combine with the smaller Pepsi, the report said.

Pepsi, in addition to its colas, owns the Frito-Lay brand of potato chips. Nestle also peddles junk food with products such as Scooby-Doo Mystery Pops and the KitKat chocolate bars.

There are currently no talks between Nestle and Pepsi, the newspaper added.

The report did give a boost to Nestle shares, which rose over 2%. Shares of Unilever (UL) , another European consumer products giant, also rose over 2%.

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The new dynamics of managing the corporate portfolio

* Companies today must actively manage their corporate portfolios or face off against activist shareholders, private equity firms, and hedge funds eager to jump in and do so for them.
* Yet managing a corporate portfolio isn't what it used to be; it's no longer enough just to divest underperforming businesses and reinvest in better ones.
* Companies must be—or become—the most natural owners of their businesses while balancing investment opportunities against their supply of capital, basing these moves on the predicted returns of current and potential investments.

This article contains the following exhibits:

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Sustainability Management System

Risk management a holistic approach

The Challenges of non-market influences on market strategies

When: October 14-17, 2007
Where: San Diego, California, USA

Strategic Management Society conference

From the outset, a central focus of strategic management research and practice has been the development of concepts, models and tools to guide effective market-based, competitive strategies. Today, however, strategists face mounting external pressures from increasingly mobile, influential, new media savvy and demanding stakeholders. These increasingly diverse and changing groups of stakeholders are having a greater impact on competitive and corporate level strategies and, as a result, on the practices of strategic management. These influences no longer are localized in their impact. They are felt on national, regional and global levels. Consequently, non-market strategies are being employed in an ever widening circle of market settings: agriculture, airlines, autos, bio-tech, chemicals, food processing, e-commerce, entertainment, natural resources, pharmaceuticals, retail, etc. Are some non-market strategies more appropriate for some industrial sectors, or economic development conditions than others?

Non-market strategies can be employed to create and/or maintain a firm’s source(s) of competitive advantage or to erode or destroy the sources of competitive advantages of its competitors. How firms compete against each other in market contexts can and will be impacted by treaties, regulations, legislation, litigation, the media and a diverse and rapidly increasing population of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). And a wide variety of institutions are available to firms pursuing non-market strategies: the WTO, the courts, legislative and regulatory bodies, the media.

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Shaping strategy from the boardroom

* US companies, with the scandals behind them and the new compliance rules mastered, should devote the next wave of governance reform to using the human capital of their boards to develop and support corporate strategy.
* Too many boards play only a minor role in developing and shaping strategy in partnership with the CEO. As growth and innovation become their focus, they must debate strategic questions more energetically.
* Boards need more senior executives who are fluent in current business themes and have deep industry expertise.
* Boards must also make strategy as important as compliance when they manage their work and reform their processes.

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Business continuity and crisis management

Are the CMO and CFO Marching in the Same Strategic Direction?

Thursday, March 22, 2007

8:30 AM - 9:30 AM
Los Angeles Daylight Time

10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Chicago Daylight Time

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
New York Daylight Time

3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
London Standard Time

45 minute presentation, 15 minute Q&A.

The tenure of the average CMO is now less than two years. What explains the career-limiting disappointments of these high-level marketing executives? Just ask the CFO. If marketing is to credibly measure and demonstrate its impact, it must collaborate with the finance organization to define key metrics, gain support for operational programs and establish effective communications.

This valuable presentation will address the key elements of an effective CMO-CFO Alignment Initiative. You'll learn:

* How recognized enterprises have overcome the hurdles associated with marketing-finance misalignment to establish rigorous and disciplined measurement processes.
* How to define and operationalize credible marketing measures.
* What steps you can take today to close the gap between marketing and finance.

While much has been said about the problem of marketing measurement in recent years, few speakers have presented compelling and proven solutions. But that's what is most needed now. Today's top marketing organizations have tightly aligned themselves with finance. Don't miss this opportunity to learn how world-class CMOs and CFOs are spanning organizational boundaries to deliver career-elevating results.

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Business continuity management