More than 80% of the organizational change efforts around the worls happen under new leadership. There is a reason for this. We are all very bad at changing the things that we ourselves have built. By comparison, changing something that someone else has built is always relatively easy. The road is not without its challenges, though. Most of the people that you find in the organization will be the same ones that created the reality that you want to change. Things that seem obviously wrong to you will seem reasonably right to them.

Whenever you feel that the energy of the people in your organization is low, that they settled in a routine, that things go well, but without drive, it is time for revisiting your vision. In our view, a good vision should consist of three parts: a purpose, an ambition and a philosophy. The purpose should answer the question “why”, to the employees of the company and to its customers.

Values are probably the least understood and the worst managed part of an organizational architecture, and it shows. Many organizations complain that their people do not work well together, but then do nothing about supporting and emphasizing their values. All groups need to have two things in common, in order to be called a team: values and goals. Groups with values but no goals are fraternities. Groups with goals but no values are packs. We need both.

Changes in strategy are usually triggered by changes in the external environment. We can help you understand how these changes affect the competitive landscape and how the market trends influence your strategic advantage. We can also help you develop a new strategy, with a new ambition, purpose and philosophy that would build on your core competences and capture the opportunities in the future. But, most importantly, we can help you design and build the organization that will deliver this strategic ambition.

Everybody knows that large organizations can not be run the same way as small ones. They require large numbers of people to work collectively to a common goal, therefore they need a lot of structure, rules, processes and operating procedures in order to function. However, at one point in the life of the company, this vast infrastructure that supports the organizational effort becomes too heavy. People feel disenfranchised by the bureaucracy and politics that come with such an approach and the energy level decreases.

Peter Drucker once famously said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Despite the fact that the assertion is largely accepted, and despite the fact that whenever mergers fail to deliver the expected outcome culture clash is almost always cited as the main factor, precious little is done in M&A processes to assess cultural differences and to address them. In addition to the normal transformation process, a merger situation will require a cultural due-diligence to be performed on both merging organizations, with potential sources of conflict identified.