Case Examples

• Client challenge: Our senior team needs time each year to go off-site to review both our strategy and operations. We need someone to help us put together our agenda and goals for that meeting and to facilitate the process to ensure it is a productive session and we meet our goals.
  
• Clients and industries: Usually the CEO, general manager or head of strategy – across all industries
  
• The work: We interview each participant to understand the issues and concerns that are most pressing. With the CEO or VP of Strategy responsible for the meeting, we summarize what we think are the challenges the group should address and propose a meeting structure and agenda that we together craft into the meeting design. We then prepare background material to generate or support discussions, including assigning work to all or specific participants. The design of the meeting usually includes pre-work for the participants such as reading of case studies, preparing presentations or exercises on specific topics. We establish a concise list of goals and make sure that we achieve them by the end of the meeting. We summarize all meeting discussions and results for future reference.

• Client challenge: We are a powerful player in our industry but our innovation is limited by the large companies that incorporate our semiconductors into their products. How can we force these companies to speed up their own product innovation schedule so we are not held up by their inefficiency?
• Client and industry: CTO, semiconductor manufacturer
• The work: This work required understanding both the dynamics of market power and the specific control points in the technology. We mapped the coalitions of players in the industry to find logical allies in the desire to make the big players change. We then devised a disruptive strategy that included an open source layer promoted initially by new entrants that were not the typical partners of the firm.
  

• Client challenge: We were first to market with a proprietary technology that became highly penetrated in our industry. Now, however, new entrants are offering products that are almost as good as ours – and all their interfaces are open so that they can “mix and match” with other companies’ products. Our control over which products fit with ours has been a central part of our business model. Do we open up our own technology – or figure out a way to continue to have control?
• Clients and industries: CEO, VP marketing and strategy in both specialized computer hardware and medical devices
• The work: We sought to help the client pursue a dual strategy: maintain proprietary control through innovation while at the same time developing self-disrupting capabilities that would allow them to start participating in the new business model. In addition to figuring out the specifics of the dual strategy, the hard part was designing the organization that had the proper incentives and culture to allow both, competing strategies to thrive.

• Client challenge: We need to get more out of our engineering investment – our products change too incrementally and we’re not seeing excitement or a return from the market
• Client and industry: CTO and EVP Engineering, Software
• The work: We helped our client design a new organization centered around a small number of “super powered” product managers who were able to run their set of products like businesses – managing their product set’s P&L and changing the game on the focus on specific customer segments. We helped design these new roles, restructure the previous organization around them and recruit new people. We functioned in the role of Acting VP of the new organization role while we recruited the new head of the organization.
  

• Client challenge: We have acquired a company for their advanced technology in which we want a market position. How should we use the existing team and how should we structure the group to work most effectively?
• Client and industry: Division president, medical devices
• The work: We first had to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the newly-acquired company and the specific players on the team. We identified a set of process and management gaps in the acquired company for the purposes of the new parent company. We then proposed a new organizational structure that would make best use of current leadership and a phased approach to migrating the new division to one that would fit within the global strategy of the parent company.