Doing nothing costs more

1

The dotted line represents the ever changing market place.

Time

The green line is a successful business. It chooses to keep pace, sometimes leading the market.The red line is a businesses resisting change. Cost is often why. However, there will be investments in analysis and false starts but no end-product. This stop-start is costing the business more, and preventing it from reacting to emerging threats or opportunities.

Conceptual representations of business keeping pace with the market

The amber line is a business realising it needs to keep pace, albeit late. Catching up after becoming stale is going to cost more than if the business had kept pace all along. Doing it now will save the business.

Businesses that incentivise a programme of change that keeps pace with the market and adapts to emerging threats and opportunities succeed.

2

Does this look familiar?

•Management Committee

•Group versus Local priorities

•Customers & Service Providers.

If the reasons for change are not discussed openly it will be impossible to move forward. The business will be paralysed.

Look for any areas of paralysis and get things moving forward again.

Attempt to understand what is causing the problems and ensure that people understand why this type of conflict is not constructive.

3

Strategy. Ask the level below Executive to challenge it. They really know what’s going on in the firm and will execute the plan. Once the strategy has been agreed, get on with it. It can be refined along the way if needs be. Keep making progress rather than documents.

Resilience. Stay focussed on the strategy, not just the project schedule. Find and empower your real talent. Listen to them, do not solely rely on opinions from individuals far from the detail.

Flexibility. Remain flexible. The environment will change and sometimes you have to invest in tactical solutions. However, a stop-start approach over long periods of time is dangerous. It will paralyse.

Success. Unless the business has invested in a continuous programme of change it is likely that success can only be achieved by a transformational change. Ensure your senior people are agile enough to run change alongside BAU.

4

Partnership gives a business the best opportunity to make the right decisions, make progress and deliver on time.

Embed partnership in the whole of the business and make it a key area of the performance management system.

Senior people who cannot partner, may be struggling to lead too. If blind spots develop those people will leave a trail of destruction behind them. Whatever they deliver will not last.

Invest in some training, set success criteria and ensure that everyone understands partnership is mandatory.

5

Relying on people who have no rapport with their colleagues and achieve by scare tactics or simply sit in a room doing it themselves is risky.

The real talent can innovate and execute on their own and in partnership. They do this to the timetable they agreed with you and within budget.

The real talent enjoy working together. They work together as a team, overcome almost any barrier and increase business agility.

6

‘False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward errors is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.’(Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man) 7