Business Survival, Innovation and Growth: Secrets of the Leading Management Consultants: Volume 1 (The CXO Diagnostic Series)

Today many businesses are struggling to survive and grow, larger organisations have become bloated and over-complicated. They need to simplify and rationalize the way they operate in order to lay a foundation for sustainable growth that delivers long term business success. In theory this sounds easy but in practice major transformational change is required to address the cultural, political, human, process and technology factors that constrain successful change. This book aims to provide the tools, techniques and approach to self-diagnose and solve the problems constraining the organisation. The book is designed to be used by CEO’s and their senior management teams (referred to as the ‘CXO’s’ group throughout the book) to initiate and run corporate diagnostics to pinpoint problems, challenges and opportunities from which the business case and roadmap for change can be built to turnaround, stabilise, optimise, transform and/or grow the organisation in line with the preferred strategic direction. The book is designed to be short, sharp, easy to read and simple to navigate around. My hope is that you will refer back to it regularly as a source of reference to aid your thinking and analysis when wrestling with complex problems and challenges. Today far too much attention is given to cost cutting, redundancy, restructuring and reorganisation and nowhere near enough attention is given to growth, innovation, creativity, resiliency and agility. Deliver success by constantly focusing on doing the right thing for the business as a whole with the long term future of the organisation in mind. I would urge you as business leaders to drive the change in language, culture and mind-set needed to take your business to new levels of success and my hope is that this will provide a useful support and reference point for the journey that you are embarking upon. This book is designed to help organisations to reduce their dependency on external consultancy support and instead take more direct control, ownership and responsibility for solving their own problems. This is not saying that third party advice is not helpful nor required, it is merely providing a means for the organisation to choose whether it solves its own problems directly or not. The book is also designed to help sales professionals to improve the way they engage with CEO’s and their senior management teams by improving their understanding of the typical daily challenges, topics, concerns and considerations that CEO’s are wrestling with. From a sales executives’ perspective this will help them to consider how their product and service solutions can best help the organisation to solve the specific problems and challenges they are wrestling with or enable the organisation to take advantage of opportunities collaboratively together. This provides the foundation for moving from a supplier to a trusted advisor / partner relationship by getting closer to clients and truly understanding their specific needs and perspectives. The book will also help smaller consultancy firms and independent consultants who will find the book a useful source of reference for pin-pointing issues to discuss with their clients and help their clients to develop a plan and business case for resolution by applying the ASPIRE Performance Improvement Diagnostic Approach outlined. The approach and supporting collateral can be sub-licensed to organisations and individual consultants to save considerable time and effort by avoiding reinventing the wheel and building their own approach from scratch or developing on a live client engagement. Aspiring managers and senior managers who wish to become the next generation of CEO’s and CXO directors will benefit from understanding the breadth of issues and complexities that they will have to develop knowledge and understanding around in order to be able to serve in the role they aspire to grow into.