Overcoming a Culture War Avoided Tens of Millions of Potentially Wasted Costs at French Consumer Goods Company
A global leader in fast-moving consumer goods needed to reinvent key decision-making processes for the entire company in only three months. This imperative stemmed from a reorganization initiative that would require the creation of a new structure of governance.
Over the first quarter, the 50 top leaders of the organization transformed the key governance structure of the organization. Simultaneously, the group set to instill key principles to establish the necessary culture in terms of transformation.
Participants learned to re-establish individual accountability, abandon strictly functional points of view and behaviors, encourage risk-taking without fear of negative consequences in one’s career, declare breakdowns, and think from the future rather than by comparison with the past. As a result, these leaders executed the design in a collaborative, cross-functional, cross-geographical manner in record time.
The result was the creation of and alignment upon key processes including the strategic planning process, resource allocation for R&D projects, the budgeting process, new processes to allocate investments, and the governance of decisions between operations, brands, and markets. This avoided tens of millions of euros of potentially wasted costs and inefficiencies over 2019 valued at 50x ROI. The cross-functional nature of the process-design exercise embodied, for the first time, the new organization and culture that the company desired.
