Executive Development Program

Rethinking Business Strategy: From Insight to Implementation

Rethinking Business Strategy is a hands-on executive development program offered by our Consulting Alliance partner, Strategy Partners Group, LLP. It is about developing a strategy that is powerful and realistic — a strategy that your management team “owns” and believes in. Rethinking Business Strategy explains how to set your organization on a path to higher growth and profits – how to overcome obstacles, and deploy resources to achieve your highest priority objectives.

This program is perfect for any manager who has responsibility for or participates in strategic planning. This includes executives who want to take a fresh look at their strategy, members of the planning staff looking to update or enhance the existing strategy process or division managers looking to upgrade their strategic planning competencies.

Program Description ... Program Topics/Outline ...
Open Enrollment Program Particulars
(Cost, Dates, Location) ...		 Relevant Experience ...

Program Description

This program provides real-time experience with the tools and techniques that will enable your organization to:

To achieve these results, during the program you will learn how to:

Rethinking Business Strategy includes:

In Company Programs

We will tailor an in company session for you and your team. We can design the agenda to meet your specific needs and issues, and then help you reach consensus on an action plan. The structure and cost will depend on your specific focus and the amount of preparation required. However, the typical length is three to four days over two meetings.

Open Enrollment Programs

You can attend one of our open enrollment programs. Some clients prefer this approach because it enables them to evaluate how they might apply our methods to their businesses up front. Others enjoy exchanging ideas with managers from a variety of different businesses. Open enrollment programs are three days in length and is competitively priced at $1,795 per person. Call us to obtain available dates.

Strategy Roundtable™

In addition to SPG’s proprietary tools and techniques, each program participant receives a single user license for Strategy Roundtable™—state of the art strategy implementation planning and tracking software. This special offer is exclusively available through SPG’s strategic partnership with Gryphon Systems (which currently licenses the software standalone for $2,995.) The software integrates with Microsoft Project© and provides an automated system for tracking strategy implementation against strategic objectives.

To download a demonstration copy visit www.GryphonSystems.com/products/products.shtml.

In addition to strategy programs, we can also help lead your executive team through a complete strategy formulation and implementation planning process. Some of our clients prefer this approach because they believe that leadership by an unbiased experienced third party is the most effective forum to work through tough strategic decisions. Furthermore, they believe that makes better use of their senior management time by, in effect, outsourcing the more labor-intensive parts of the process including structuring meetings, summarizing strategic intelligence, and drafting a final strategic profile.

Back to Top

Relevent Experience

Our tools and techniques have been used successfully with hundreds of management teams: entrepreneurial/established, private/public/not for profit, product/service, high tech/low tech in many different industries.

Rethinking Business Strategy: Case Studies

The Rethinking Business Strategy program includes an in depth examination of the concepts and methods that will enable you to successfully develop and implement a winning strategy. The following case studies describe the types of results that our clients have achieved applying these tools.

Business miscue

After an initial infusion of capital and the extraordinary reception of their skiwear designs, a fashion start-up found itself in trouble. The company had grown too fast, lost control of distribution, and found itself unable to manage capacity. Management thought the solution was to seek additional capital to increase manufacturing capacity, but the capital markets saw the company as too risky.

The management team used SPG methods to review the company’s business model and participation in the value chain. The company’s initial strategy had been to own manufacturing and outsource distribution to multiple third parties. The new solution was to do the opposite — to outsource manufacturing overseas and to control distribution. The company discovered that its relationships with customers were more important than owning manufacturing plants.

By selling or redeploying most of its equipment and leasing out space, the company raised significant cash. Their need changed from capital equipment finance to trade finance (on significantly increased sales volume). The company was now more liquid; its needs were more modest; and its financial statements looked much better. Putting a refined business model into action enabled the business to tap the capital markets and to fund what was now carefully managed growth.

Turning a business around

A portfolio management company bought what appeared to be a promising financial printing company. Eventually, they realized that this acquisition was foundering—out-gunned by better-funded competitors. Management was unwilling to invest more and unable to fund the level of investment required to compete directly with current competitors.

The management team used SPG’s approach to find a new way to compete with the resources available. They helped develop a new business model that leveraged emerging technology. Competitors that were heavily invested in the old way of doing things found it difficult to respond.

This turnaround effort launched the company from last among the Top 10 national companies to a strong second place within just a few years. The company found itself growing faster and competing on a very different basis than the number one company. In addition, these results were achieved with no significant new investment of their own capital: their prime customers funded the bulk of the cost, and recovered their initial investment from the savings achieved.

Attracting investment

An entrepreneurial team had a revolutionary idea on how to better privatize health clinics in third world countries. They needed access to a renewable stream of incremental capital, but were unable to describe their complex solution in a way that captured investors’ interest. After shopping the idea around in several countries for over a year with no success, they realized that help was needed.

The entrepreneurial team used SPG’s approach to put their business insights into more easily understandable terms. Their approach was reframed—from a speculative offshore investment in an unproven area to a low risk /low capital investment that was supported by a government-guaranteed revenue stream, co-investment with teams of participating doctors, and a value proposition that relied on a relatively simple proven technology that they alone had already used successfully in Latin America.

The company went from two guys with a great idea to over fifty offices in eleven countries within two years.

Intrapreneural

A steel company had a problem child. One of its businesses (in the reinsurance industry) was pushing the company’s risk tolerance to its limits. Furthermore, the management of this business seemed beyond control.

SPG’s approach was used to assess the fit of the business with the rest of the parent’s portfolio and made it analogous to their own outward reinsurance requirements and the potential value such new classes of coverage would have to their own core businesses. Upon closer examination, they discovered that this London market business was not so far afield after all.

Drawing parallels to their own changing reinsurance needs, they could see that this imaginatively managed business was discovering new and potentially revolutionary opportunities in an old and staid industry. Armed with a better understanding and new respect for its problem child, the parent company repositioned the business within its portfolio as a business unit that served the needs of companies like itself. The parent encouraged the business to develop alliances with other companies who were market leaders in similar specialist underwriting lines. Over time, what was once a renegade operation became the cutting edge, reinventing the overall strategy for its international insurance subsidiaries.

Mergers and Acquisitions

The executive team for a bank was very averse to cross-border acquisitions. The team had little experience with acquisitions and knew that most fail. Instead, management tried to grow through joint ventures and branching. But despite best efforts, the bank ran into regulatory barriers, and their growth in the local market stagnated.

Using SPG’s methods, the management team developed a systematic approach for making prudent acquisitions. Management’s initial response was to make their acquisition criteria so stringent that no one in the market place could satisfy them. But after SPG consultants helped them to prioritize these criteria in line with their strategic objectives, they began to find significant opportunities. The candidate that the bank finally acquired was not only congruent with its management philosophy but also offset its weakness in the local market (both corporate and consumer).

After the acquisition and with no additional capital infusion, the bank was able to reposition its local currency business as the domestic counterpart to the parent’s world-class dollar-based services. On the strength of the foreign acquirer’s name and operating prowess, the acquired bank leapt from the bottom ten percent to the top twenty percent of competing domestic banks in that market within three years.

Back to Top

Program Particulars

Rethinking Busienss Strategy is offered in both in-house and open enrollment formats.

To obtain dates for future offerings or discuss an in-house program, please contact us.


© 2007, Gryphon Systems, Inc., All Rights Reserved