My consulting experience, though short and lively, has revealed some interesting insights. Contrary to big frameworks and theories, what is underlying the growth of some companies is that they seem to struck to some common sense approach. These companies have first understood where their strength lies, have chosen customers and markets where they could make a difference, have been respectful of the competitors and focused on their own processes for continuous improvement. Three elements of this mantra made lots of sense.
One the management invested in defining and explaining the long term vision of organisation to effectively communicate the goals and to align the resources (financial, manpower etc) to the objectives. Second, they ensured the right structure, process and incentives were available to support the objectives and revive the existing function to yield better results. One important lesson was about the resource. They all seem to have followed the dictum hire the resource only if the current resource is stretched by over 50% more than what he/she could optimally deliver. Another common elements is incentivising for each win asap and not going by QoQ incentive structures. Third, they de-risked from Market/product by appropriate diversification. Companies succeed by segregating the existing product into separate individual products catering to a larger customer base thereby increasing the probability of revenue.
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Pratibha Sharma