Tailored Guidance
Whilst its our experience that guidance is best tailored for each client’s specific needs and priorities, let’s start with our ‘off-the-shelf’ offerings:
1. Five things no one ever told you
This is a two-hour interactive workshop for boards of any enterprise – commercial or NFP – to equip them with an understanding of how the Business Excellence Principles should guide their policy and decision-making to help ensure that they meet their fiduciary duty as directors. It fits well as the opening session of an annual strategic planning day, but talk to us about how best to fit this essential learning experience into your board’s calendar. Read more …
2. Top quartile performance AND reduced risk
This is a short interactive workshop module designed to expand some of the key concepts from the ‘5 Things’ workshop with a particular emphasis on resolving the traditional paradox of performance vs risk. It’s designed as an easy add-on to a regular board meeting. To get best value from this, you need to share some of your current challenges with us, so contact us now for a discussion and quotation. Read more …
3. Governing risk and culture
Very topical! How can a board possibly be held accountable for the behaviour of their employees? And isn’t their first duty to maximise the profit of their company? Good questions – you only need an hour of your board’s time to find out the answers if you call us now. Financial institutions welcome . . . Read more …
4. Advanced enterprise improvement strategy – [Boards need to understand this so they can guide their enterprises to achieve outstanding results, but it’s a program of work involving all levels of management and your Transformation/Project people]
Got all that? Running lots of initiatives, but at an enterprise level, the real rate of improvement is less than you’d like or expect?
This is what the courses, consulting firms and case studies don’t tell you. It’s relatively easy to look at a specific operational issue and run a project to address it. A good project leader will also gather before and after data to validate success. If all your initiatives are run like this, you could be forgiven for expecting that the overall performance of your enterprise will reflect the sum of the benefits delivered by each project. It’s obvious.
But it’s quite wrong.
Systems thinking [see Principle 5] tells us that sustainable improvement at an enterprise level requires a focus on the whole system. You need to understand the interconnections and interdependencies of all of the people, relationships and processes. You need to address the underlying drivers and causes of failure. And you need to consider what has been learnt in the past and what is likely to happen in the future. The larger and more complex an organisation is, the greater the temptation for Boards, CEOs and Senior Executives to dismiss what is necessary as “impossibly expensive” and the benefits as “too distant” or “not tangible”. This thinking is unfortunately reinforced when key roles are seen as fixed term or vulnerable to summary termination based on political standing or short-term financials. Gare Corporate has the unique people and expertise to sort this out for you.
The result is that most enterprises follow an improvement path that has a ‘saw-tooth’ profile:
There is net improvement over time, but nothing like the sum of the improvements promised by each of the recent initiatives. If the industry is also evolving in complexity due to technology and globalisation, it may be that the rate of unexpected incidents is also spiralling upwards, sapping capacity to drive improvement.
But it’s OK as long as all the competition are doing essentially the same things . . . Isn’t it?
Of course, it only takes one enterprise in a competitive market to work out how to achieve real Enterprise Continuous Improvement, and the competitive advantage they will gain quickly becomes unassailable.
Less than 1 enterprise in 1000 succeeds in sustainably achieving this outcome.
Call today to find out how to make your business the one.