Corporate Transformation – A Guide to Survival and Success

by Daniela Long | Jun 24, 2021 | Blog Post

As we catch glimpses of a post pandemic world, we see the world is changing rapidly and radically, in ways no one could have imagined.

In response, business leaders talk almost nonstop about how their organizations must be transformed: some to survive and others to excel. What they mean by transformation varies. Some intend to pursue a high- risk overhaul of their failing business. Others want their companies to “go digital” or “become agile” or realize their strategy, but they don’t always have a clear idea of what they hope to accomplish. Regardless of their intention, very few actually know how to effectively execute a transformation. In fact, one recent study found that 7 out of 10 corporate transformations fail to reach their goals.

All these failures are expensive. Direct costs include wasted resources, strategic plans not being achieved, business objectives not being met, and (most likely) a loss of jobs. Indirect costs are more insidious but may ultimately be even more damaging: lower organizational morale, less confidence in leadership, and (most damaging of all) an increased resistance to the next change initiative.

What goes wrong? People often blame rigid employees or entrenched legacy systems, but the truth is that the failure generally begins much earlier and frequently at the top of the organization. As quality guru W. Edwards Deming once noted, the “success or failure of any process is determined within the first 18 percent of that process.” Often, the executive team lacks the fundamental know-how to create and sustain a true Corporate Transformation, or they are not at all aligned on the imperative to transform. They may not have done the upfront planning or developed the kind of agile leadership style that is a prerequisite for a successful transformation. As one CEO confessed, “I don’t know where to start to get this transformation off the ground—I feel like a centipede with one thousand legs, but I don’t know which leg to move first to go forward.”

Over the past ten years four industry leaders, the authors of this book have helped executives at 14 companies in a variety of different industries lead successful transformations. Collectively, these transformations have delivered over $9.8 billion in incremental revenue while achieving productivity gains between 20 to 40 percent, true transformations. When this book’s authors began to compare notes about their histories in helping companies execute transformation campaigns, they found six common elements that played a role in the success of every campaign.

Those six elements which comprise a new macro business process are described in detail in Corporate Transformation. Danny Strickland, the noted innovation thinker whose resume includes successful stints as chief innovation officer at Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, General Mills and Procter & Gamble—describes the six elements revealed in Corporate Transformation as “a powerful guide to survival and success.”

Key Learnings:

There is a proven approach and road map to successful Corporate Transformations.
Six key elements have been identified that dramatically improve the probability of a successful Corporate Transformation.
The six elements have a natural process flow.

For your free copy of the eBook Corporate Transformation: A Guide to Survival and Success click here.