Strategic business restructuring for enhanced resiliency and effective turnaround in driving sustainable growth
Around the world, CXOs trying to accelerate their xxx transformation face barriers in addressing a range of shifts. Could reconfiguring the trade-offs be the catalyst for raising the odds of outperformance?
At most acting schools, acting is taught from an opposite spectrum. Budding actors learn how to create an effect, how to use costumes, how to stand so that the light catches their eyes, and how to speak so that they are heard, etc. These are all critical, but they are external variables. The actors should not dismiss any one of them. However, the real spectrum of acting begins with the internal workings of an actor—Naseeruddin Shah, Masterclass with Naseer at the Film and Television Institute of India.
This beautiful perspective explores the impact of the right spectrum and the adequate needs for the proper growth of an actor and the art.
CXOs are the actors. Every xxx transformation is a new action. Any action is not an end; it is a culmination of a series of exercises that begin with the imagination of these actors—an anticipation, the probability that strengthens the actions they perform every day, such as analyzing the headwinds and mobilizing the tailwinds.
What impedes the growth that actors imagine, anticipate, and commit to? Energy prices hitting their peak, unwanted inflation adjustments, the October 7th, 2023 event, and tensions thereafter in the Middle East, along with similar macroeconomic turmoil, test these actors. But these are external variables. Gen-AI, mRNA, gene editing, and sustainability are becoming key fuerzas de disrupción for the balance sheet reset. These are yet again external variables.
Like in acting, these are critical and can’t be risked. The growth-boosting spectrum, however, lies in the internal workings of the actors in the theater of business. The internal workings impact the value delivered and value realized. They help navigate the optimism and pessimism of these actors by:
- Playing offense and optimizing capex.
- Raising the odds for competitiveness in every new industrial geometry.
- Influencing talent mindsets for velocity to value.
What are the paths of trade-offs for xxx transformation immunity? The xxx transformation patterns continuously reconfigure trade-offs in search of the path to immunity. The reconfiguration, like a pendulum, shifts between influencer alignment and influencer diversification. The degree of reconfiguration depends on the actor’s imagination, anticipation, and commitment to cultivate the trade-offs for building new memory muscles and embracing evolution.
To understand and calibrate the speed and direction of the value chain shifts, immunity contours concentrate on resilience fragmentation, which involves imperfect but quantitative implications of funding, implementation, and impact, instead of:
- Change intensity due to trade-offs.
- Horizontal and vertical spread.
- Intra- and inter-organization trade-offs.
Making a case for the missing growth:
Disclosure: I am not offering an answer but attempting to make a case for actors to explore reconfigurations and trade-offs to strengthen and reinforce the associated experiments for scaling and influencer participation across internal workings and external variables (read: actions).
Establishing the common base:
xxx transformation success relies on a comprehensible approach and the number of actions the actors take throughout the lifecycle of the transformation. The higher the volume, the higher the average success rate.
According to a McKinsey global survey, actors who take fewer than 16 actions per xxx transformation have an average success rate below 20%. However, just a small increase in volume—say 17-20 actions per xxx transformation—results in an average success rate of 31+%. When the volume is increased to 21-24 actions, the success rate jumps to over 50%. Every single actor that hits 24+ actions maintains their velocity to value with a success rate of 59+%.
Legend: What is an action? McKinsey defines actions across three stages of transformation—goal setting, design, and implementation. Action examples include target setting, objective clarity, roles, incentives, communication, time to impact, resource allocation, role modeling, embedding change, and risk management.
The proposal:
No transformation action tracker will determine systemic success or failure; however, I am confident that prioritizing a few can surely deliver the most value potential of any xxx transformation. Transformation complexities can portend chronic inequities. Critically, correlating opportunity and embracing meaningful outcomes, it’s imperative to launch an intervention for the right growth of the actors in the theater of business:
- Start with the influencers – the team that makes it happen. Most actors (generalizing to senior executives) assume that a single message broadcast from their inbox—“from the desk of…”—or maybe a Barney Family Townhall (all “ha ha he he he, I love you; you love me, we are…”) is sufficient to cement the gravity, connectedness, impact, and relevance of any xxx transformation. It’s proven otherwise, always. My recommendation: Influence the talent mindset with “Why.” Connect with them to establish the behaviors that make or break the “What” and “How.” Eradicate one-way communication across the velocity to value influencers.
- Play offense – play bottoms-up to validate customer desirability and emotional impact. Typically, the actors write a big check to well-known thought partners, apply some hypotheses, draw out models, roadmaps, blueprints, and structural changes based on what the actor wants for the business. What gets left out are external influencers—the customers who pay, struggle, and need solutions for legacy and/or current problems. My recommendation: Among your internal influencers, get the casting director who spends most of their time dealing with poor corporate health and varying degrees of customer disability. Don’t ask the tribe; engage and observe that community of customers—how many, who, and what they know. If they struggle, you know what to de-risk first. Pay close attention to emotional cues and conduct careful analyses of behavioral signals. This validation will be your call to action for elusive growth.
- Compete graciously – play the infinite game with a finite goal. A preoccupation with competitors is a distraction for the actors. Most often, actors become rogue, beating their chests to be #1, which drains the life from influencers who must keep up with positioning, damaging the very fabric of the game for short-term TSRs, and killing inclusive customer journeys by orchestrating unauthentic, inorganic user flows, plus over-indexing forced or paid referrals. My recommendation: Adopt an infinite mindset—no one actor or company wins. Ignore who is #1 in this and the leader in that. Mobilize and incentivize an authentic, organic, and inexpensive new industrial geometry that centers around a common denominator: people—customers and influencers alike.
Conclusion
In the current business environment, xxx transformations are essential for actors’ success, particularly for small and medium enterprises facing unique challenges. The endurance of influencers and the conviction of actors should not be compromised. Actors must embark on the xxx transformation act with serious focus to reinforce an infinite mindset, playing offense with faith in customer desirability and emotional impact through the powerful forces of influencers. Actors must address the building blocks of growth by demonstrating an uncompromising belief to de-risk change intensity, horizontal and vertical spread, and reconfigure intra- and inter-trade-offs to capture velocity to value and satisfy the desire to mitigate the associated risks through effective business restructuring.
– Manav Ahuja
Co-founder & Managing Partner
Stratgyk Consulting Inc.
