Strategy

  • What is your digital transformation strategy ?
  • Is your strategy designed to outperform your competitors, or to fundamentally change your business?
  • How often do you revalidate the crucial assumptions your strategy is built on?
  • Do you know the profit pool of your industry, and its distribution among the value chain?
  • Is your strategy just a set of ambitious goals or the set-up of your company to get there?

Agility

  • How agile are your company's strategy, structure and minds?
  • Has your organization a deeply embedded sense of urgency?
  • When facing change, is your company naturally trying harder or smarter?
  • Do you foster a culture of experimentation and testing?
  • How dynamically do you reallocate resources when necessary?

Resources

  • What are your company's Crown Jewels, the unique resources your success is built on?
  • Which of your current assets may turn into liabilities tomorrow?
  • Do you exploit the full potential to upgrade and leverage your assets?
  • To what extent can you turn your company asset light and asset flexible?
  • When restructuring, are you burning the fat or cutting the muscle ?

Alignment

  • Are all the relevant areas aligned to the strategy, or are there inconsistencies between two or more elements?
dimensions of alignment

Simplification

  • Have you clearly defined your company’s trade-offs – what deliberately not to do?
  • Have you reduced the complexity of a strategic problem to make it as simple as possible, but not simpler? (tribute to Albert Einstein)
  • When you add an activity, product or service, are you consequently reducing or eliminating another one?
  • When have you applied the Pareto Principle for the last time?
  • What percentage of your company's committees and reports are useless?

Transformation

  • Has your transformation program all the relevant requirements defined and set?
    • Need for change / "Burning Platform"
    • Consistent strategy and ambitious targets
    • Top Sponsor and Coalition for Change
    • Committed leadership team
    • Exciting story
    • Compelling business case and clearly defined economic levers
    • Roadmap / Action plan

Rewards

  • Are change-makers being rewarded or sanctioned?
  • Is the bonus system of your company strictly linked to the relevant KPIs?
  • Do you make the tough calls to rigorously sanction dysfunctional behavior?
  • Does every employee know how to contribute to the overall goals?
  • Do you pinpoint the goals, or do you set a target corridor?

Organization

  • Is your organization effective in terms of
    • clear roles and responsibilities
    • decision making
    • reliability and quality
    • flexibility and learning
    • cost
  • Is your company’s informal organization even close to the formal one?
  • Have you got the right balance of centralized and decentralized decision making?
  • Have you eliminated all the silos?

Scorecard

  • Do you mainly rely on past financial data, i.e. driving with the rear-view mirror?
  • How good is your early warning system?
  • Do you know the real profitability of your customers, product lines, sites, segments, and how to improve it?
  • Are the KPIs designed to steer your company directionally right or precisely wrong?
  • Do you measure symptoms, or do you tackle the root causes?
  • What is the maximum negative impact your company can survive?