Strategy Consulting
Most likely your company is already doing excellent work in a range of important areas. In most cases, these initiatives are clearly good investments from a financial point of view. A prime example is energy conservation. That helps to diminish pollution, and also reduces costs. In addition, some are typically practices that are required to satisfy legal requirements, or to respond to established business and social norms.
Others, such as philanthropy and company-sponsored employee volunteer work, offer benefits to a company’s reputation and employee motivation. The returns may be hard to quantify, but the costs represent a small enough percentage of revenue that it would not be a major issue to incur them even if the payoff did not exceed the expenditures. In addition, as mentioned on the home page, executives typically want to contribute for its own sake, in addition to making money. The fact that there is a reasonable financial rationale for such initiatives, then, facilitates their making contributions to society that they wished to make in any case, whether consciously or not.
On the other hand, most companies have practices that are largely untouched by CSR efforts. These are typically seen as essential to survival and strong performance. It is generally assumed that there is no realistic way to avoid, substantially revise, or replace these activities in a way that maintains or augments profitability.
But that perception is a result of the assumptions discussed on the home page to the effect that a company can only be managed based on self-interest, and that consciously and deliberately setting out to do good can only end in sorrow. Once it is appreciated that there is a wider picture in which self-interest and beneficence (to use Adam Smith’s term) can be integrated to create solutions that are every bit as profitable, one is in a position cognitively to re-examine the situation and determine if additional options are in fact available.
The goal, then, is to identify areas that have appeared impossible to revise. Then to take a new look at those practices, under the assumption that there may be a way forward.
The intermediate result is a set of candidate areas for upgrading, prioritized on a preliminary basis. It is also a preliminary set of action items on selected candidate topics. In some cases, a given practice might require targeted analysis to decide if it is sensible to embark on work to upgrade it in the near to medium term. In other cases, it might be possible to identify a practical strategy without additional analysis.
From among the candidate areas remaining after any targeted analyses are completed, a limited number is selected for focused work.
More detailed plans of action are then created for the areas of focus. In certain of the most challenging areas, the strategy may well entail initiating a process of building alliances and influencing policy making and the like that will bear fruit over time. That is, it may involve doing some of the same types of work that are done to create a favorable environment for a company or an industry with respect to other goals it has.
The preceding work, then, entails an iterative and flexible process of analysis and strategy setting.
The next step is to mobilize the resources needed to execute on the select set of goals. The particulars of this step depend on the output of the analysis and strategy setting work.
Finally, the experience flowing from the initial implementation work is examined and used to optimize the process moving forward. At that point, it might be decided to continue focusing exclusively on the select set of initial goals for an additional period of time, or to add other goals.
To summarize, the work entails an iterative process comprised of four key steps:
o Analyze
o Strategize
o Mobilize
o Optimize
The process is flexible, to suit the circumstances of the company and the priorities of its senior management.