We will be talking a little about the growth operating model and I'll give the word to you, Roland. Roland Perikowsky, Ph.D.: Great. Thank you, Peter. So, hi, and welcome to our session on growth operating model. In the next 20 minutes, we will give you practical advice on how to rethink and perhaps redo your growth operating model. Let's start with a short inspiration. So organizations really do not accomplish growth. Strategies and plans do not accomplish growth either. People do. I emphasize this because often when you think of operating model, we think of processes, technologies, tools, et cetera, et cetera. Yet in my career as executive and as consultant, I've hardly seen that processes or smart PowerPoint tools really move an organization. No, it's people. It's people who bridge silos, people who build the required capabilities. It's people who align teams among them and who also share the intended behavior. So Peter, what's on the menu today for this short session? Yes, for the next 20 minutes, we will be covering various topics. We will come around some different typical challenges and opportunities. We will talk a little about how you can bridge your strategy to your results. We will give some typical questions from clients and share our experiences at the end. So a very warm welcome to every one of you. But before we get there, just a very brief introduction to ourselves. So my name is Peter and I work as a management consultant at Implement Consulting Group. And together with more than now a thousand other passionate people about change and transformation, I work with the commercial growth strategy practice and what that entails, including how to develop and calibrate your operating model. And prior to that, I have worked with various commercial roles at a global manufacturer within fast-moving consumer goods. And Roland, maybe you would like to give some words about yourself? Sure, thanks, Peter. So I'm Roland. I'm a partner at Implement, and I deal mostly with growth and transformation topics, one of which is, of course, growth operating models. Before my career in consulting, I've been an executive in large global companies, such as the Coca-Cola company and Red Bull. In Red Bull, I was CMO and global board member. So that means I also know really organizations from within, not just as a consultant. Right. All right. So let's move on with, I think, a very interesting quote from Gary Hamble, one definitely of the thought leaders in this space. And I must say, when he says, you know, in many organizations, he sees still principles of the sixes in place. I share his observation, actually. And it's not always so at first sight or at first glance. So if I sometimes go in, you know, big, let's say, B2B companies somewhere outside, an industrial part, I get in, then I see maybe a bit Google-inspired, you know, workspaces, a red sofa here, a cool co-working space there. Management might use all the contemporary terminology quite widely from, you know, from agile to tribes to what have you. But if you look a little bit deeper, you still find in many of those organizations, you know, bureaucracy, red tape, basically hierarchy, making decisions, not necessarily the best opinion or the best solution in the room and, you know, lack of ownership. So I think the essential question really is, you know, what growth operating model you and your company really need to be successful. Today and tomorrow. And quite often, you know, what made you successful in the past might not be exactly the right thing that you need also in the future. You have seen in the first session with Nikki and Frederick quite some, you know, challenges, opportunities in those uncertain times that CEOs sees. And it will be probably not surprising to you that you see some of them also here that we hear sort of the last few months over and over again. If I talk to CEOs and I hear a lot of this war on talent or, you know, actually three people told me, you know, the biggest thing that I really deal with and it keeps me up at night is, you know, how to get the best fitting people, you know, for my organization. Then the whole global versus local. I think that's quite a thing that we hear for a while, but it's now even more central. How can you actually balance? It's not global versus local or central versus the central. It's clearly global and local because you need to have the right balance between sort of coherence on one side, but also proximity to the market, to your client and relevancy, you know, on the other side. Yet another big topic and also not just since yesterday is those silos, you know, how can we overcome them? How can we build interfaces that glue them together? How can we have a coherence within the team to really march in one direction? Also, according to one strategy. So to inspire and actually execute one strategy. I think those are really topics that we see over and over again and where we know from experience that growth operating model can really be one part of the answer to address those. Now over to you. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Roland. So the question is, is your company actually set up to support your growth strategy that you have set? And at Implement, we believe that your growth operating model is the bridge between your strategy and your results. And we will stay on that theme about people that we have initiated with because, you know, a growth operating model is really all about unlocking your human potential to ignite growth for your business. So let's take a little look at it. This is what it looks like. And so what is a growth operating model actually? Well, it provides you an opportunity to design how the machine room for your organization is really put together to ensure really to deliver value to your customers and to deliver on your strategy that you have set. So it is really a complex task due to countless of interdependencies between the organizational dimensions. And this framework implement we have developed throughout the years, combining our inside-in approach with subject matter expertise and to cover the complexity of this. Really just to try to make it more simple and to understand better how you can address different dimensions of it. And this will really not be a theory session. And we will try to keep it quite short on this to give more insights from the real world. But just to scratch the surface a little bit, you see here six dimensions in the operating model in the inner circle and then some outer dimension that affect that. And if we start with people and leadership, it says. And that's really all about, as you also heard in the plenary session, that we need the right people with the right competencies to drive the organization forward. And typically, this will be around focused competency development, program development, or designing learning journeys. And then if we move left of the circle, you will see processes. So this is really about commercial processes that you will have in your business to respond to the market with speed and efficiency. And then we have organization and governance. And then this is all about ensuring the right accountability to make sure that you have the right governance structure in place. And then we move forward. We have something around performance management. And we really need performance transparency and a performance review structure to support desired goals and behavior. And typically, this will be around KPI structure and performance review processes. And then the last two, we have culture. And that's really about we need to have one culture to support the strategic objectives that we have in our organization. And this is all about developing a cultural value and maybe some culture building initiative that fit with the company purpose. And then lastly, technology. As also mentioned in the plenary session, that we really need technology to support the business with tools to enable to deliver the performance intended. This could be data models. It could be playbooks, templates, et cetera. And if we look a little bit on the survey, so what are the biggest challenges when navigating economic slowdown or recession? And some of the things we really want to point out is three of the top kind of standouts. And 41% of the CEOs believe that processes are among the biggest challenges for the company. Whereas if we go far right, then we see 34 of CEOs believe that organization and governance are among the biggest challenges for the company. But if we look at the middle here, we see that 36 of CEOs believe that people and leadership are among the biggest challenges for companies. And we really want to stay in this kind of area of people. So let's drill down a little bit on what has actually been said around this. And it is a little bit surprising, actually, that despite we are in a recession and we asked them, what are then the defensive strategy play within the next six months to really protect the business? And 23% said that they're rethinking and or freeze hiring in terms of what they have done previously in the short term. And that's around one fourth of CEOs considering that. And then only one sixth are thinking about that considering lowering headcount. And this really comes back to the paradox saying that, OK, companies are really thinking about should we recruit for commercial capabilities to get in the offensive, to respond to the market? Or should we build and maintain the capabilities that we have? Or maybe we should do both. And it really depends on a lot of factors. And there is no silver bullet that fits with all companies. According to our survey, as I also mentioned in the plenary session, that sustainability, pricing and digital are the three key areas around capabilities where there are super high focus at the moment. Let's translate it into that. OK, what are then the typical questions that we will get when relevant reviewing our client's growth operating model? And we do get a lot of questions around this. And they can be spanning from everything within the six dimensions. But let's take an example saying, how do we then ensure we have the right capabilities and the right teams? Well, as mentioned before, this would be something that would address the people and leadership dimension. That's an example. But what about how do we then grow and scale the business effectively? Well, this could be something about structuring the organization and governance structure for your company. But how can we have a synergies across units or markets? This could be around your commercial processes saying that, OK, maybe we can combine the different markets or different units in certain processes that would enable us to respond faster to market. How can we improve our sense of belonging for our associates? Well, this could be developing cultural initiatives. What can we do to increase productivity and decrease cost? Well, there could be investments, several investments in technology that can really be able to make sure that you spend time where it makes sense and automate your processes. It could be within marketing or it could be within production. It could be anywhere, essentially. And lastly, how do we then improve our time to market? Well, it could be reviewing your KPI process structure to ensure that we all work towards the same goal. So, I mean, there are different elements and dimensions to the operating model where it makes sense to focus on six different dimensions, essentially. And maybe, Roland, instead of typical questions, maybe you can share some reflections on some of our experiences. Absolutely. And this is a really real life experiences we had with clients that we want to share with you in a nutshell, a couple of those. So, in those four pillars that you see on the chart, let's maybe start with the first pillar. That was, you know, the idea that we really need to see growth operating model as a part of a longer transformation journey. And in this project with a large global company, you know, we set up a commercial growth operating model and it was fine. Management liked it. But what was a bit underestimated is, you know, that the management did not really prepare the organization for the subsequent steps. So, teams might have understood, you know, the model, but they did not really, really, you know, believe in it. They didn't really live it. They didn't really embrace and own it. And I think that's super, super important that you guarantee this and not just set up a model in isolation, but see it as a part of a longer transformation journey and secure the buy-in. Maybe in the third pillar about sprint-based learning loops. So, this is the idea that often an operating model can look quite as a big, big, big challenge. And how do you sort of manage it? Well, by slicing it into small pieces. And one of such pieces or slices actually to really work in sprints, right? And secure learning and adaptability as you go in a process. Sprint often sounds like speed, you know. And that's, of course, when you do the sprints, maybe two-week sprints, yes, you have speed. You have, you know, accountability within it. But we also have to understand that there's another, you know, learning from another project with it, where the client also realized, you know, the project team would go too quick. You know, they had good results and all of this. But again, the team was not really on board with it and didn't bring them along. And I think super important is here to understand that agility also requires stability. So you have to go fast in one parts, but you also have to make sure that people are along with you. Last pillar involves senior management. Also, I see this in many different projects lately where, you know, people maybe were not clear enough that this is a cross-functional thing. So you really have to have executives from the different departments into the loop and really also senior executive buying to really do something right. Because as a chain breaks in the weakest link, that's the same in a growth operating model. You really need to have this cross-functional alignment and really work on the interfaces that things work well. So also equally important, it's so important to stress that it's not about, you know, copying best practices. What maybe works for a small software startup might not be at all the right thing for you to do. So we really have to see what's right for your organization, for your team, and then embrace that. So we had, for example, a situation recently with a quite large company, Guru, very rapidly, where there was a very entrepreneurial, charismatic CEO. But we realized that as the company grew, you know, the structures didn't really follow up. So the challenge is now how to combine this entrepreneurial spirit with a structure that is adapted to the big size of this company today, which is more than 7,000 people. So those are the things that we see over and over again. It has to be all in sync. And as Peter showed, this wheel with all the elements, this has to be all sort of aligned. It doesn't work just to work on one. You have to work on several of these dimensions. So those were a couple of little snapshots of real-life experience that we had in the past, which maybe, you know, brings me to our last chart. And you might think, what the hell does a coral reef have to do with growth operating model? Well, you know, every metaphor has, of course, its plus and minuses. In the past, we maybe would have shown you a well-oiled machine, you know, that efficiently works for processes. Here is input and there is output. But I think today, you know, in these sort of uncertain times, you need definitely a more adaptable organization. And that's why I think this coral reef is quite a good metaphor of a living system, of a living organism, where every part of the system, being it's small or large, you know, has its function, brings something in, works with each other, to sort of, in an integrated way and to really make the system better. And also a system that is connected to the larger system at hand, not just in isolation, that an organization has to also link to its environment, being it stakeholders or clients alike. So how to uphold such a system is, of course, you need to work on it. You need to keep it current. And like a natural ecosystem here on the picture, also an organization can be, let's say, polluted, right, by wrong processes, by bureaucracy, maybe by, we call them energy suckers in the system, that do not support that everything works into place and interrelates with each other. So that's maybe just as a final thought, you know, how we can work or look at an organization. And I hope we could give you some inspiration bites in these last 20 minutes. And of course, today was a bit of monologue. We at Implement prefer dialogue, true communication, listening, discussing. So here you are invited very deeply by Peter, myself, to get in touch if you like, contact us, and we can continue the conversation in a more mutual perspective. Thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you for listening.