Change Costs Something Even When It Works

About this collection

An organisation can be right about its strategy and still lose the people who have to carry it. Organisations in this position are not asking for rescue. They are healthy businesses deliberately taking themselves apart and rebuilding while they perform, on the belief that concentrating capital and leadership on stronger activities produces better growth and better returns. Usually that belief is correct, and the numbers support it quarter after quarter. The cost of the strategy sits somewhere the financial statements do not reach. A disposal reads as discipline at group level and as a question about next year at a site two thousand kilometres away. Both readings are accurate. Only one of them tends to get explained. A continental structure adds a second layer. More than thirty countries, several operating histories, and a matrix deliberately strengthened rather than loosened. Reporting lines change quickly. A shared way of working takes considerably longer, and it gets built in ordinary decisions rather than announced in them. What follows is not a diagnosis of any one company. These are the questions a leadership team is in the best position to test for itself, and the speakers on this page have each worked on one of them from inside an organisation rather than alongside it.