To succeed with innovation initiatives and transformations, companies often rely on support and partnership with consultancies. This external support normally provides advice, competence and extra capacity to realise the strategic goals, and to do so faster and at lower risk. Choosing the right partner or partner constellations often makes the difference between success and failure and can cost companies millions and millions if not making the right choice. It can also cost decision makers their jobs when strategic goals are not met. So what are the Top 5 mistakes when choosing the right partner?

Warm welcome to our webinar the 19th November: Managing the Cost of IT Spend in Manufacturing.

As we return to the workplace and attempt to emerge from beneath the shadow of COVID-19 we will see that, for most organisations around the world, the pandemic has laid waste to the P&L and Balance Sheet to the extent that they now both exhibit significantly more red than black. Undoubtedly, planning for and executing a successful recovery will cost money. So, every function in the organisation will now be under scrutiny. Not least those functions previously classified as “indirects” or “back office” such as finance, legal, human resources and information technology, etc. Because money is tight, and the capital markets are hesitant to lend on reasonable terms in the present uncertain times, all internal costs will become a focus of attention.

At the forefront of COVID-19 responses our internationally recognised experts in business transformation have provided an array of thought leadership articles to help you identify, prioritise and launch your own individual solution to the recent crisis. Each of the articles deal with a particular aspect of the business transformation you will need to undertake as a matter of some urgency in order to rapidly emerge from COVID-19, begin trading and position yourself to win in the “new normal”.

We have entered into a major shake-up of the economy, possibly of a magnitude of the great depression or the post WW2 period. Although major corporations have published better than expected Q2 reports recently, the market situation has made many companies insolvent and several governments have introduced legislation to avoid hostile foreign take-over’s of their countries’ otherwise proud and normally thriving businesses.

Many are worried that sustainability will not be prioritised as societies and businesses are gradually recovering from the effects of the pandemic. Such concerns are based on the observation that companies as well as consumers are struggling just to survive and that any investments whatsoever in sustainability will be considered a non-affordable luxury.

As we emerge from beneath the shadow of COVID-19 and return to the workplace our thoughts begin to embrace the uncertainties that confront us. More especially, how best to quickly restart our organisations in an environment where the rules are yet undefined, but likely to be very different than before. What this pandemic has taught us is that we need to configure our organisations differently. They need to be much more agile, yet inherently more robust. And, we need to accelerate our restart process to claim first-mover advantage in a marketplace that will very likely be much smaller, more selective, more aggressive, and very much more competitive than before. All this speaks of an organisational model that has an inherently flatter structure, distributed leadership, wider spans of individual control, devolved authorities and accountabilities, higher levels of visibility and rapid decision-making capabilities. Intuitively, this means the business can be continually tuned to operate at maximum effectiveness as a closely knit entity without the historical stove-pipe behaviours, tribes and process encumbrances that have existed before. It also requires a closely aligned, properly integrated technology infrastructure to help support, enable and drive it. Welcome to digital acceleration!

Without a shadow of doubt COVID-19 has been the most devastating circumstance to hit the global business environment since The Great Depression which began in the USA on 4^th September 1929 with a sudden dramatic fall in stock prices and subsequently led to the Wall Street stock-market crash of 29^th October 1929 (Black Tuesday). Depending on who’s commentary you believe, the austerity caused by The Great Depression lasted up to the beginning of World War II, some ten years later, and drove down world GDP by an estimated 15%. By contrast, COVID-19 has been with us now for only six months and is widely being forecast¹ to drive down the GDP of some major industrialised nations² by almost the same percentage in 2020 alone. The ongoing effects will be felt for some years to come with uncertainty in the financial markets making access to capital increasingly difficult for businesses attempting to emerge from under the cloud of COVID-19 and return to full trading status.

As business leaders we have all spent time postulating what the next “disruptor” might be and where it might come from. A “game changer”. Something that will create for us a “paradigm shift” in the business ecosystem.  Well, COVID-19 has certainly achieved all those benchmarks, though with none of the desired upsides we originally had in mind for the concept! Whilst we believe its origins to be in China, the virus has swept at enormous speed across the globe with a consummate disrespect for international borders like a tyrannical version of the “invisible hand” first described by the renowned economist Adam Smith in his magnus opus “The Wealth of Nations”¹. Only this time, it was acting with malicious intent, toppling corporate empires as it went leaving behind it a wake of destruction and uncertainty in the economy. For most organisations demand has dried up as customers tighten their belts, operations have been suspended as they go into lockdown, people have been furloughed or lost forever to the job market, the supply base is falling into terminal disrepair and the best laid strategies, plans and aspirations of corporate executives in every sector lay in tatters before their eyes.