Revisiting the organisation 

Revisiting the organisation

Introduction
I think a lot of our clients are revisiting their whole notion of the way their organisations are structured and how they’re operating in doing business now for some very, very good reasons. Not least of all a lot of their competitors are. They need to understand the ways people are going to structure themselves in the different markets that they are competing in.

Strategy
I think when we look around our client base, there are a number of questions that are quite literally keeping people awake at night. Some of those are to do with strategy, fundamentally have they thought about their strategies now in a way that suits the world that we’re in. As we shift, increasingly the focus of growth in business from West to East- that’s always been around, but it’s a very, very true thing now, truer than it ever has been. Companies are asking themselves have we thought about that in the right way? For example, one of our clients, a drinks manufacturer, was asking themselves how do I increase the sales of whiskey in the Chinese market and compete with the white spirits led market? It turns out that they think that’s the wrong question. The question they should be asking is how do I grow myself into the white spirits market because that’s what it takes to compete there, that’s the product that those people are consuming, and therefore I need to be doing that, not taking something from the West and trying to enforce it on the East.

Risk, control and transparency
I guess another type of issue that people are keeping awake at night about is simply risk and control and transparency. One of our clients, for example, is expanding their manufacturing base in northern China. They are a traditional European based business. They are having to ask themselves now do we really understand that? They are not making stuff in China to bring it back, they are making stuff in China to serve the Chinese market, and they don’t really understand the supply chains that lead into that manufacturing base much. They in fact don’t really understand, as much as they ought to, the distribution that’s coming out of them. They don’t have an innate feel for that because they haven’t been operating there for thirty or forty years. So they have to ask themselves how do we answer that question, how do we develop our business and structure ourselves so that we do develop that knowledge and that we are successful in that going forward.

We see our clients thinking about delivering value and underpinning the delivery of value in a number of their investments and changes that they’re making in a couple of different ways. Clearly, on one side most of these things have a market aspect to them and you can’t really control that. You can make bets about that and you can make assumptions, but you can’t control how that’s going to come out. But you can de-risk the delivery of your initiatives, your restructuring, your moving into different markets in a number of different ways.

Efficiency
One way to think about underpinning delivery is to think about efficiency; have I understood what it really takes to be successful in a number of different markets. It will not be the same operating, or rolling out a business in Europe as it is in China, or South America, or India. And we see our clients getting a tremendous amount of value working with us to understand the local conditions. We have a very large international network of business advisors who can help say what is going to be different about China, what is going to be critical about succeeding there and how might that be different to a company’s experience in the United States for instance.