Consulting
Making Change
According to recent research by EY and Oxford University, 67% of senior leaders have been a part of one underperforming transformation in the last 5 years. Jennifer Davis has curated market-leading approaches to change management and transformation to help leaders and their organizations beat those odds. Starting with her book, Well Made Decisions, and joining with partners and leaders in their respective fields, these approaches are proven and can be deployed at scale to be transformative.
Business performance requires a lot of interrelated elements to go right. That is why leadership is required throughout. Yet, we find the key elements can boil down to four, overlapping areas necessary to make change happen and deliver the results you intended: Principles, People, Processes, & Projects.
Leadership is all about stewardship, and these form a framework that can be successful in thinking about this individually and across an organization.
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CEOs who care deeply about their customers, clients, and employees and seek to serve often find themselves with inefficient organizations that are not set up to scale and achieve their full impact. Jennifer’s services are best suited not to early-stage startups, but rather to those who have built a successful foundation and now find themselves wanting to grow, wanting to reduce employee turnover, expand to new audiences or product/service categories, consider inorganic strategies like acquisitions or partnerships, and generally accomplish more effectively with greater efficiency.
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According to Spencer Stuart, the CMO has the shortest tenure in the C-suite and the ambiguity around the role and its goals can lead to missed expectations or poor job satisfaction. New-in-role CMOs, whether they were promoted from within or hired from outside the company, must start their new role strong. Jennifer can work with you on an onboarding plan to match your ambitions that will get you on the right path. The sooner you engage and plan your onboarding approach, the better!
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There has been record-setting M&A activity over the last few years, which has left organizations and leadership teams with a mix of cultures, processes, customers, products, and go-to-market approaches. In each case, management together with the board and outside advisers, estimated what potential was possible. Most mergers fail to achieve those objectives. If you made an acquisition in 2020-2022 and you feel like you are reconfiguring a plane while you are flying it, then Jennifer can help you achieve synergies, retain talent, and deliver results. Applying her M&A integrations and divestitures best practices. Jennifer helps CEOs and their leadership teams navigate the highest-impact opportunities.
Principles
This element is the foundation for the others. It starts with understanding the starting place and vision for the future. That vision should be driven by customer insights and informed by the accelerant of technology. Every business who has experienced success is going through transformation of some type and change is hard. Principles are business strategy work, naturally, but also an exploration of the mindsets required for change to occur. This work gives the organization a common roadmap and vocabulary for the journey ahead. These principles should be bested and proven, not simply the musings of the clever. Well-made decisions - and the business results they achieve - require thoughtful and effective strategies.
People
At the heart of any successful innovation is customers! Nothing of significance happens for customers without your people working together and utilizing their strengths and talents. This element is not what is traditionally thought of “human resources” (although having enough of the right skills and motivations on our teams is important). This element is more about the strength of the relationships and the understanding of the personal and organizational motivations that will make change stick. From the board room to the conference room (ahem, Zoom call), it is people who are driving your business. They will grow best in an environment that hears and sees them as individuals and allows them to thrive together.
Processes & Projects
This is where the rubber hits the road with change initiatives. Once a strategic decision is made, then there are a host of workstreams that must be kicked off and managed to succeed. Often people skip to this step with a slick PowerPoint template or software tool without considering the context set by the other elements. Several key processes that have an outsized impact are given extra focus, including executive onboarding and early wins, customer obsession and corporate brand building, and relationship health. Also critical is the selection and fierce prioritization of the high-impact learning experiments or business bets that represent early wins and inform future success. A choice towards a strategy and vision spawns thousands of additional decisions that actually deliver the results.
See Booking for information about delivery methods and specific services offered. Reach out to Jennifer Davis to explore options in a free consultation by contacting booking@wellmadedecisions.com.
