MESSAGE FROM DIRECTOR

Welcome To Our Web Site! Before you explore the rest of the site I would like to use this message to expand on the issues raised on our home page.

Our Experience Says - Answers Lie Within - With all of our senior partners having been chief executives, we approach the management consulting practice with a special perspective. Our experience has convinced us that the answers to most companies' competitive problems lie within their own management and employees. Outside consultants can be useful, but we have achieved the most long lasting successes by helping our clients organize to better grapple themselves with the competitive issues at hand.

How Do We Need to Change to Compete Better?- Prioritizing the Issues The key to running any business successfully is getting the priorities right. We always counsel our clients, as a first-level pass, to think about their compete-better priorities in the context of the three-legged stool which every business rests on - strategy, execution and operations (i.e. the more generalized blocking and tackling capabilities - systems, policies, etc.). While in the long run, all three legs must be strong enough to keep the stool from toppling, in the short run most companies will be focusing on one leg more than the others. The team-based Ping Pong described below applies to any one of these three legs. It especially applies to high-speed execution.

sHow Do You Gain Execution Speed? Beyond the prerequisite of getting your strategy right, we find more and more CEOs asking this question. And most CEOs know the basics of fast, effective execution:

Priorities, Alignment, Moving to Frontlines - How best to do it? At the extremes, we know only two ways of getting at these three - either the traditional, top-down, "cafeteria-speech" approach, or a more collective, high speed grappling approach. Both are essential. The key is getting the right balance between the two.

Why Cafeteria Speeches Alone, Fall Short - There is nothing wrong with cafeteria speeches. Indeed they are essential and are a good vehicle for getting across what top management wants to say. However, they are not a good vehicle for harnessing the intellectual horsepower of those receiving the speech - i.e. those who must ultimately execute - to come back and help top management to sharpen both the priorities and the alignment, and then ultimately the execution game plan.

Moving the Needle Toward High Speed Grappling - Most firms operate closer to the traditional "cafeteria speech" end of that spectrum. We help our clients move the needle closer to center stage. Quite simply, we have found that more team-based grappling - with top management as the execution drivers on one side of the table, and teams of those who must ultimately deliver on the other side - does wonders in improving execution speed and effectiveness.