Corporate Strategy Advisory Service: An organization’s strategy describes how it intends to create value for his stakeholders, customers and citizens. In our experience, we observed that no two organizations look at strategy in the same way. Some describe it by their financial plans, revenue and profit, while others by targeted customers and still others by process, quality, human resource etc.

We believed, executives and employees paid attention to what they could measure and people could not manage well what they were not measuring. As a consequence, executive’s attentions were overly focused on influencing short term financial measures and insufficiently on investing and managing the intangible assets that provided the foundation for future financial success. Without a holistic performance measurement system, executives would not develop and mobilize their internal assets effectively, thereby forfeiting major opportunities for value creation.

We recommend that organizations retain financial measures to summarize measures on actions already taken but should balance these outcome measures with non financial measures in three additional perspectives – customers, internal processes and learning and growth. This is the foundation of ‘Balance Score Card’. The deep problem, however, that most companies encounter in adopting the BSC paradigm, is their inability to execute successfully. Employees were suddenly inundated with words like mission, vision and strategy statements but could not understand what these words meant.

Companies who’ve adopted the BSC projects have shown remarkable transformations. In the BSC paradigm the two key elements of success are ‘alignment’ and ‘focuses’. BSC enables companies to align all their key resources, executive teams, business units, support groups, information technologies, employee recruitment and training to focus intensively on implementing their strategies. Successful adopters follow five management principals to become “strategy focused”

• Translate strategy to operational terms
• Align the organization to the strategy
• Make strategy everyone’s everyday job
• Make strategy a continual process
• Mobilize change through executive leadership

In addition to how to choose management principals to become strategy focused, it’s also important to learn to how to choose measurements that would be more meaningful to executives and employees. Measurement is directly linked to what you’re trying to accomplish. Objectives should be linked in a cause and effect relationship. This approach of linking cause and effect relationship among the objectives in the four BSC perspectives is the strategy map. Strategy map has turned out be an important tool used by adaptive and successful organizations. Executives find the visual representation of strategy map both natural and powerful.

In Transnational, we facilitate our clients, mostly middle market companies, through this journey towards a holistic approach to strategy creation and strategy mapping.

Our advisory service would include:

• The traditional Strategic Planning advisory (mission, vision, business plan, etc)
• Balance Score Card / strategy mapping
• Transition Strategy (startup, realignment, turnaround, accelerated growth and sustaining success)