Clarity at the Highest Levels® for CXO's

CLARITY
AT THE
HIGHEST LEVELS®

FOR CXO'S

Crisis Guidance

Re/Alignment

Transactional Strategy

Litigation Oversight

Internal Dispute Resolution

Red Flags & Solutions

Business Model Re/Construction

Turnaround

NEGOTIATE THE PATH

FOR YOUR BUSINESS

BEFORE CHANGE

MAKES A PATH

THROUGH YOUR BUSINESS,

PERMANENTLY.

AT THE TOP, BUT SURROUNDED:

It is notoriously lonely at the top, but when you are making decisions, the data and the opinions roll in from all sides. When you are dispensing bonuses, the participation rolls in from all sides. Doesn't everyone want to be a friend? All the time? And so, are you getting realistic information? Does the exclusively positive report take precedence over the mixed report? Does anyone tell you anything but the good? Which path is the right one to take when all paths are assured to be rosy? How far down do you have to drill to get real analytical information? In some companies, basic questions of function, process, development and risk get pushed down to the lowest levels of companies where staff have neither the business experience nor the business history to get the questions right, let alone the answers. Top management only assumes that its calculus is complete on the basis of the right questions--and answers. What are the real answers? What will happen to the bottom line? Write details.

LEAD ON TO DESTINY: Innovation & Synergy

Destiny is innovation and synergy. Innovation is a variable mix of invention, creativity and even rebellion, the "thinking out of the box" which refuses status quo and does it differently. Synergies of strategic alliances enhance products, lever research, create efficiencies in sales, marketing and distribution. Innovation and synergies fill gaps and build tomorrow. Unfortunately not all innovation is created equally. Innovation is not all good. Disruptive technology may be exciting and satisfying, albeit sometimes in a conspiratorial counterculture way, but when you come right down to it, the disruption may be a distraction and accretive to losses, not profits. Strategic alliances can be just as tough if they fall apart, transferring technology and your competitive advantage without deriving valid benefit. How do you tell the difference, particularly with in-house factions heavily bought into some new plan or some new project? I have seen a lot of technology and businesses and their models over the years.

I can see the opportunities and risks which are off your radar or in your blind spot. Let's find good innovation and synergy. But let's think critically. Let's pull on the central inventive thread at the heart of the innovation and see if the model unravels. Let's look again at form, function, reliability and usefulness to the end user, for this is so often the business's blind spot, to not see that there is really no future for the innovation, that no one can really use it. Let's strategize through the evolution of the strategic alliance and see whether it generates true synergies or merely uses up your energy and productive currency. Let's find innovations and synergies which work.

Image © ALX.Fotolia

IS EVERY DAY A WAR OF NERVES?

Does your legal counsel go around trying to figure out what is going on? Are people covering their hand for fear of being told "no" or being billed? Let's develop a cohesive plan for maintaining counsel's involvement day to day and educating your troops in the need for confidentiality, responsibility, reliability and physical asset and intellectual property protection and security. Part of what makes your life so difficult is the arrogance of management from managing director up. They're so impressed with where they have gotten that they forget how far down can be.

Long before our day, Noel Coward asked the musical question, "What's going to happen...when there were no more grown ups?" Recession is a good time to remind everyone to grow up, get down to business and understand the value of what the company owns. All too often employees and management up to the very top do not understand even the layman's version of the legal rules. They walk around with their encapsulated version of those rules, or rather what they think the legal rules should be--orthey fear the legal rules are. They have not even understood your own rules.

Rules have a place. The rules set a level playing field; they keep the competition fair and reduce personal and professional injury. The fun should not be in evasion, dismissal or letting lawyers clean up after employees, managers or even the top business teams have made a mess; the fun should be in achievement. Reduce the war of nerves by educating the company. Top to bottom. Educate the Company on the Rules of Engagement.

Image © Gyula Sarudi.Fotolia

WRESTLING WILD HORSES OR TILTING AT WINDMILLS?

Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. The harder you work to do the deal or build the project, the more you have committed to making it work. Yet sometimes if you step back from your staff, all of whom want to please you, you are wrestling so hard to make it work when it won't. Meanwhile,projects and developments which really work get handled loosely and teams turn to capturing the value only after it has become tangled or even escaped. Collaborative technology is a particular threat, undermining the trail of who invented what when and how so that you might neverrealize true value--at least not without an expensive fight. Or you may have a product which is as good as gold, but as complacency sets in, everyone forgets to think about obsolescence and overshadowing by technology from completely different quarters. And Marketing can muddy all of the above by not understanding the rules and their variations. It's not just a technicality and can cost you not only the value but fees. Let's analyze and develop further your barriers to entry, capture your developing IP and secure it, and determine the residual value of projects and products which are biting back.

Image © David Serenyi.iStockPhoto

DYSFUNCTIONAL COMMUNICATIONS, or IT'S TOO TECHNICAL

It was in the context of identifying distressed power assets and renewable energy technology for acquisition that I first came across the condition which cripples operations and development and is very much at the root of today’s banking, business and global economic crisis: Business and technical teams are dysfunctional in their communications, both unable and, more seriously, unwilling to understand the work and concerns of the other. Too often, critical knowledge and discernments are passed over or rebuffed as being the technical mumbo jumbo or neurosis of the other. Points are missed. Risks are unassessed. Business issues are overlooked for failure or refusal to look complexity in the face and work to understand. Engineers do not want to understand the business model from the economics and legal risks to the depths of the customers’ needs and prejudices. Finance people just want to crunch the numbers. Researchers and analysts don’t want to manage people; they just want to see inanimate patterns. And the business people just want to keep moving, trouble them not about risk and regulation; send the complications back to engineering and have IT stay late to do whatever it is they do with code and networks. Marketing people just want to get it out there.

While a systemic problem, this communication dysfunction is considered far too much the normal course of management engagement (or nonengagement). It is a complex problem rooted in attitudes towards risk, planning, deal making and project development. It is a matter of silo-ization, specialization and insulation from all the moving parts of organization, market and product. It actually requires not only education but re-education and attitude shifting (let's not use the word ‘alignment’) to face the issue and resolve the conflict. It takes not just communication across and within all the parts of the organization and its outside consultants and stakeholders, it takes movement. It takes getting up and sharing to know and do what is done throughout the organization and its associated parts and interfaces. It now takes daring to say " No, I don’t understand” or "How does that work?" or “Should it?” and “And then what?” It takes daring to say the emperor has no clothes or the CDO is bare. And it should not... Let's get your teams talking technically and productively.

Sigrid Caroline Schroder

(877) 462-4035

Unlike other consultants, large and small,

I don't slide you off on staff or a network.

Who you meet is who you get.

What can I do for you?

Clarity at the Highest Levels® Critical Guidance

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Reconnaissance Relativity & Revival® Develop Your Model

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I SPOT WHAT OTHER EXPERTS MISS....

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Sigrid Caroline Schroder - US/CAN (877) 462-4035 - Assessment & Intervention