Many businesses face an irony in Business
Strategy.
On one hand there is a need to be flexible,
nimble, to embrace change and circumstance. On the other,
businesses need to maintain consistency, to create a
corporate culture, and achieve economies of scope, scale and
experience.
Is Planning possible?
Sometime referred to as the ‘Ansoff Vs.
Mintzberg’ debate, how can senior managers navigate this
contradiction? Is planning possible?
We certainly live in times of rapidly
changing technology, social values, and global influences.
These processes have been accelerating and appear to
continue to do so. But with change comes opportunity,
especially (here’s the irony again) if the change can be
anticipated.
Anticipation months or even weeks in advance
has far higher value than ever before since greater ability
to rapidly commercialise products exists. Time to market is
weeks or months rather than years. Given that time itself
becomes a strategic asset, rapid implementation is key.
Purely on timescales, and risk, it is far quicker to put an
executive interim manager in place and for that person to be
up-to-speed than to recruit, select and commit to bringing
in a new Senior Manager.
"Timescale is an asset"
This is true not just of launching new products but anywhere
along the product life cycle. Managing a product or market
in decline may present challenges unfamiliar to a management
team weaned on expanding in a growing market. Increasingly,
mentoring senior executives is often quicker and less risky
than replacing them.
Interims typically specialise in getting things done,
quickly, with minimum risk and disruption.
Rarely do interims hold formal authority – normally, they
exert power through influence. It is for this reason that in
the most sensitive situations, interim are deployed for
mentoring senior executives.
Bridging Change
Returning to our theme, whilst core
competencies should dictate what competitive battlegrounds a
company fights on, it isn’t always that simple. One option
is to retreat altogether or to outsource areas outside the
core competency to other companies, however strategically
that, too, can spell problems.
An alternative to consider is to bring in a
temporary executive interim manager that can ‘bridge’ between the
existing experience, values, skills of the management team
and the problem in hand. Recruiting a permanent manager at
senior level for a single, short-term situation is probably
not the right move – unless strategically that person or
those persons have other application. Besides an executive
interim manager has specific objectives and is responsible and
accountable to achieve them. They possess the specialist
skills, competencies and experience sought.
Diagnosis and Execution
Most executive interim managers are tactical, rather
than strategic. However, some specialists in the Executive
Interim Management market are now helping organisations at
the strategic level too. This includes applying leading edge
diagnostics and deploying a whole team of specialist
interims. For example, Dr Alf Oldman specialises in the
Financial Performance Improvement Programme (FPIP). This
has been successfully deployed in some of the World’s most
complex organisations. Based upon his research and
successful deployment, Dr Alf Oldman has developed a simple
questionnaire to see whether FPIP is appropriate to your
organisation:
Has there been a pan-functional or
pan-organisational record of failure?
Have ten of millions of Dollars been
invested without benefit realisation?
Have major consultancies been deployed
and failed?
Is the situation potentially embarrassing
to senior management?
Are reputations at risk?
Are there multiple stakeholders to
satisfy?
Do line executives have conflicting views
on solutions?
Is the issue multi-functional?
Is there a strong financial dimension?
Is there a critical IT or systems
involvement?
Is there a need for change at the
house-wide level?
Built
by Amicore eBusiness 
