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We help you achieve successful business transformations to renew and strengthen your company's offerings and positions.Successful business transformation
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22 September 2021
Successful business transformations renew and strengthen company offerings and positions.
Organisations can benefit significantly from successful transformations. But achieving a successful business transformation requires strong strategic logic, a significant investment of time and money and immense involvement of stakeholders.
From years of research, we see that the success rate of business transformations is consistently low – in fact, less than 30 percent succeed.
Successful business transformations can take many routes, including:
- Start-up to scale-up
Read our article on how to work with Agile teams in product development here - Business turnarounds and rebounds
For more on turnaround management, read about our turnaround toolbox here. - Changes in business models and product portfolio
Read our article on product complexity management here
Read about Blue Ocean Strategy here
- Merging and creating industry-leading companies
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So, what makes a successful business transformation happen?
The key to any transformation is to be clear on a winning target and direction as well as a strategy for how to make this happen. In our experience, it takes a movement to make a transformation strategy come alive. To help “make this happen”, we see four key enabling factors:
- Clear leadership – Unite and enable leaders across the organisation to take full ownership for spearheading the business transformation and inspire energetic conversations about the direction and change.
Get insights into what leaders really do to lead change.
- Organisational engagement – Engage the organisation and communicate effectively to build and sustain the importance of the transformation implementation.
Get five principles to ensure profitable change communication here.
- Project portfolio – Design a transformation project portfolio to target high priority impact areas and ensure these are set-up for success with clear aligned ambitions, plans and ownership as well as impact follow-up and support.
Dive into our article on how you avoid making project portfolio complex here.
- Action impact – Design and deliver the right solutions deployed in agile projects with dedicated teams to deliver fast and sustained impact.
Read more about Half Double, a methodology that helps you do just that, here.
CEOs’ point of view on transformation
To explore this further, we have interviewed successful transformation CEOs and asked them to elaborate on how they succeeded or set themselves up for success in their respective past or in an ongoing business transformation.
Prony resources
Transforming mining operations to become profitable, sustainable and serve the electric vehicles evolution
From this interview, the key learning is the importance of the three cornerstones of an organisational transformation:
- Adjust and align your offering to evolving market dynamics and customer priorities.
- Paint a common vision that involves all key stakeholders.
- Work with speed and boost progress further by linking up with value-adding partners.
Prony Resources is a nickel and cobalt mine in New Caledonia that, among other things, is supplying electric vehicles with unrefined nickel. Their transformation is on several levels. They became independent from the Brazilian mining group Vale in April 2021 following a carve-out and are also aiming for carbon neutrality by 2040. Both endeavours call for organisation-wide changes, including going from being loss-making to profit-making and from being a supply unit with no proprietary customers to a standalone company in all respects.
To date, their journey has been impressively successful. They have started selling directly to customers with a positive margin, launched their own external communication channels and gained Tesla as their strategic partner – to name a few. Nonetheless, all grand ambitions come with several challenges that need attention.
We hope you enjoy this interview with Mr. Antonin Beurrier, CEO of Prony Resources, and we look forward to connecting with you regarding the topic of driving successful transformations.
VOW
Transforming a small technology provider into a globally recognised leader driving the waste valorisation and green transformation agenda
From this interview, the key learnings are the three pillars of sustainable growth:
- Develop and maintain leadership in the core business for sustainable, profitable expansion.
- Grow the business around a broad but unifying why; a purpose that is not limited by the current organisational scope.
- In a nascent technology market, keep a balanced focus on innovation, business models and customer needs.
Vow has undergone a remarkable development journey to become a globally recognised leader in driving the waste valorisation and green transformation agenda. The origin of Vow can be traced back to Scanship, a Norwegian producer of solutions that purify wastewater, convert waste into valuable resources and generate clean energy for the cruise industry. In 2017, Scanship decided to put a strong focus on serving and developing their customers in the cruise segment. In doing so, Scanship developed market leadership after being a small company with limited growth for many years.
With leadership in the core business and a strong why – to eliminate pollution and enhance the circular economy – Scanship set an ambition of moving from sea to land. In 2019, Vow was formed after the merger between Scanship and ETIA, a French engineering group specialising in land-based waste valorisation applications.
Today, Vow remains the global market leader in the cruise segment and faces numerous opportunities to continue to lead the green transformation on land through their strong capabilities in waste valorisation, decarbonisation and circular solutions with many applications in new markets.
We hope you enjoyed this interview with Henrik Badin, CEO of Vow that we have worked together with in developing their “playing to win strategy”, and we look forward to connecting with you about successful growth journeys.
