Leveraging M&A strategy, deal sourcing, and integration management to accelerate growth for small and medium enterprises
Value, the potential one, begins to decrease from day one in the tough and uncertain digital ambition—transformation—with the buzzword: velocity; velocity to bring change, velocity to reduce risk, and velocity to optimize costs. The transformation ambitions lose velocity by ignoring the critical priority of core capability building in the target and goals commitment-setting phase.
According to the McKinsey Transformational Change Survey 2021,
Financial business benefits drop 22% in the target-setting phase, 23% in the planning phase, a whopping 35% in implementation, and 20% in the after-implementation phase.
This results in an exhausted organization, particularly among small and medium enterprises, which often struggle to find consistency in their growth management strategies. Crucially, they are searching for their distinct Velocity-to-Value strategy.
The Velocity-to-Value strategy falls into one of four categories: value-chain based, technology-focused, customer experience driven, or capability driven. What enables transformation or confronts long-term competitive advantage is the organization’s core existential purpose—Total Shareholder Returns (TSR), revenue, or customer experience.
Suffering organizations, especially small and medium enterprises, must resist the temptation to search for digital building blocks through short-term moves to defend and expand their core business. Such actions only recreate the very silos they are trying to break apart. Moreover, these moves divert investments into default behaviors—perfectionism and caution—rather than adapting to shifts in customer experience, industry, technology, or culture. For example, exhausted but perfectionist organizations often find it uncomfortable to reconcile the definitions of a minimum viable product and the compromises in between.
This frustrating reconciliation requires a discovery and adaptation process toward a velocity-to-value perspective, which brings structured predictability to the cultural change game plan. This perspective allows for a range of possibilities instead of prescribed compliance, creating a game plan that is living and breathing—capability laced with creativity and flexibility. Such capability encourages collaboration, rewards value, and abandons a narrow focus on productivity.
Despite the compelling opportunities, in the pursuit of building a sustainable and explicit link to the Velocity-to-Value business case, organizations—especially small and medium enterprises—must reconstruct commercial benefits with resilient business conditions that shift toward:
- Establishing foundations for an organizational “right-to-win” category correlated to their Velocity-to-Value strategy.
- Breaking down internal clusters to unpack “customers” rather than focusing on the competition.
- Implementing a stable structure for predictability in the organizational cultural change game plan.
To stay ahead of threats, embedding exit barriers, uncovering commonalities, and untapping efficiencies for velocity and value is not a luxury—it’s a necessity.
– Manav Ahuja
Co-founder & Managing Partner
Stratgyk Consulting Inc.
