Author Archives: Geoff Carss
The success rate for business change has not materially improved for 20 years in spite of increasing investment in management training and development. I was recently talking to a global multinational that undertook a full review of how good they really were at changing their business – new processes, new products, restructuring, etc. They employed an external company to do the review against a set of realistic criteria such as achievement of the original change project’s objectives, time to achieve benefits, stakeholder commitment, effective funding, etc. They ‘kind of thought’ and ‘knew in their hearts’ that they weren’t getting the expected results and that they had very little sight of how change projects were performing as the business environment changed around them. An external organization was used to provide the objectivity and challenge to their thinking that they knew was critical to improving their capacity to change. So, being very … Continue reading
There is lots written about how hard/challenging/difficult transformation/change/innovation are in companies – the bigger the more difficult – but there are two key issues which don’t get raised enough (in my view).Hard decisions and transparencyFirst – hard decisions. A couple of years ago I attended a Financial Times Innovate conference in London. The speaker that stood out was Syl Saller – the Innovation Director at Diageo (it owns Guiness, Baileys, Smirnoff etc) and her honest insights into innovation and change in global companies. Syl described a series of key meetings about what they were going to invest in to support the growth of new global brands and what they needed to stop in certain countries where investments were being made in local brands. The (relatively) easy bit was where to invest – the (really) hard bit was agreeing on what to stop.Being a big company metrics drive behaviour so country … Continue reading
