Strategisation: The art of mobilising people to implement a winning strategy

Introduction

If you are a leader responsible for strategy development and its implementation and you want to have the greatest chance of success, then read on!

Without the emotional and intellectual investment of the people in your organisation backing the implementation of your strategy, the risk of failure is high. ‘Strategisation’ is a term we have coined to encapsulate the idea of merging strategy and mobilisation. Whether you’re the leader of a large multi-national organisation or a small business, ensuring your people are mobilised to be on board and fully committed to acting in alignment with your strategy means you have strategisation.

This book is about mobilising the people in your organisation so that together you can win in the marketplace. It provides some simple, scaleable guidelines and practical tools to help you evaluate your strategy and ensure its effective and successful implementation.

As a leader, you need to focus yourself and the people around you, provide direction, empower, and embed accountability into your organisation. The strategy sets the course, but often it’s too theoretical and impractical to implement. Mobilisation is the beating heart – galvanising people into action, bringing the strategy to life, and determining its success.

My interest in delivering a winning strategy, and the part that mobilisation plays in achieving the win, comes from 35 years of working across multiple functions, countries, and roles with various consumer goods companies. I have always sought to understand why, in an organisation, it is so challenging to get different functions working together for the collective good, with everyone aligned and customer-focused rather than competing against each other inside the business.

Perhaps my viewpoint stems from my multi-disciplinary background. With a degree in chemistry from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, I started work in 1987 in the Quality Assurance laboratory at Reckitt & Colman in Auckland, then moved into Research and Development. From testing Dettol Antiseptic, Colman’s Mustard, Gaviscon, and Harpic Toilet Cleaners to procuring the chemicals and food ingredients that went into these brands as a buyer, I moved into Marketing. Working across functions gave me quite a different perspective from most of my colleagues on the challenges and opportunities across the business.

While Reckitt’s in New Zealand was small, it was part of a much larger global organisation. It was a perfect training ground, and I got to know everybody, from factory floor staff to the Managing Director. The interdepartmental soccer games were fun, too, if not a little brutal.

But even in this small, close-knit business with most people working in the same location and a shared Kiwi culture, gaining alignment on common objectives wasn’t always easy.

John Matthews (the MD) was a great leader. He spent a lot of time reminding us of the big picture and helping everybody understand their role in bringing the strategy and priorities to life. He and another of my early mentors, Neville Anderson, introduced me to the principles of total quality management. I feel very fortunate to have learnt these fundamentals at the beginning of my career.

In 1995 I had the opportunity – with my wife, Lorraine – to relocate to London and run ‘Global Best Practice in Marketing’ for Reckitt & Colman. Now I was a tiny fush (did I mention I’m a Kiwi?) in a large pond.

For the first six months, it was a real culture shock for both my new colleagues and me – they hadn’t encountered a boisterous New Zealander and his accent in the office before. The warm beer and cold pork pies took some adjusting to. I found myself working in a much more complex environment, with cross-functional relationship challenges complicated by different cultures, geographies, languages, and time zones.

Reckitt & Colman was transitioning through a significant strategic change internationally, moving from geographical and regional structures to a global, integrated business. I was part of the team responsible for developing and implementing this new ‘Global Transformation Strategy’.

It was a fantastic team from diverse cultures and backgrounds. The differences and similarities between us were fun to observe. From the Americans in the group who couldn’t cope with the strength of French coffee to the French and Spanish who couldn’t stand a weak English brew! This small multi-national team was a microcosm that provided me with great insight into how enormous the task of globally implementing this strategy would be.

How would we get people to change their attitudes and behaviours, and to think and act beyond their geographic boundaries? There were challenges just having a cuppa. How could we leverage the power of the diversity in their cultures and the innate differences while aligning them on working together in new and different ways?

Unless we had a critical mass of people (in every business, in every country) on board, it was clear it would be almost impossible to successfully roll out the strategy on such a considerable scale. We needed to ensure that everyone understood their role in the change and why it was essential to our organisation in a fast-changing, globally competitive environment. They needed to know the personal impact and benefits to them to gain their support.

It was at this point that I became acquainted with the superhero of strategy implementers everywhere: mobilisation.

So much more than just good communication, mobilisation provided a name for the process to align people in the business. It involved engaging with them intellectually, emotionally, and providing compelling reasons that would galvanise them to take the required action in their roles to implement the strategy.

I also learned the power of having a clear vision and strategy conveyed with consistent communication. The Chief Executive Officer, Vernon Sankey, is one of the most inspirational business leaders I’ve had the privilege to work with. Vernon must have presented the same vision and strategy over 200 times across the business in a year. I can still remember the core of it: ‘To be an outstanding global company, with leading brands and exceptional people, that together really make a difference.’

I’d just got my head around the wonders of mobilisation and how to work with it when I was mobilised, this time to Paris, working in toilets. Really – the European Toilet Cleaner category team. (Sharing the psychology of people’s interaction with la toilette, with all those germs under the rim, is a story for another day.)

It was an exciting opportunity, fraught with challenges – we moved with an eight-week-old baby and not much working French. The business culture was incredibly hierarchical, which took some adjustment. During the following 18 months, I gained great insight into how different cultures think and interpret behaviour. I also gained quite a few kilos by immersing myself in the business of consuming French wine and cheese.

An opportunity for a role on the Executive Leadership Team as Marketing director, Spain arose in 1998, in Bilbao, Spain – ‘au revoir’ France, ‘Hola’ Spain. Our time in the Basque region was among the best years we had in Europe.

Following the merger of Reckitt & Colman and Benckiser, we moved to Barcelona in 2000. As Marketing Director, I was responsible for assimilating two very different business cultures. Aligning them and getting them to work together as one cohesive team provided some invaluable lessons and strengthened my belief in the importance of having a focused strategy, clear goals, and empowering people to get the job done within strategic guidelines.

Winfried Hopf, my Managing Director, showed me first-hand the importance of effectively cascading corporate strategy into a local business, and the benefits of getting a cross-functional leadership team aligned and supporting each other.

After seven years in Europe, our homeland was calling. We mobilised our squad of four, packed up our lives and moved back to Wellington, New Zealand. My role with newly formed Fonterra (one of the world’s largest dairy companies) was as Global Marketing Director for the consumer business.

It was here that my next two big business lessons came:

The excessive influence of high-end global consulting firms who charge millions to go into a business, tell you what to do, offer impractical strategies (because they don’t understand the business as the people at the coalface do), and leave you to it. A grenade with the pin pulled.

The negative impact of having a board that made decisions without understanding the different capabilities and cultures required to run an effective commodity ingredients business and a branded consumer goods and foodservice company.

In this case, the big-name consulting firm sold an unimplementable strategy to a board so far removed from the day-to-day operations that they didn’t understand the practicalities (or lack thereof). This created a platform for significant shareholder value destruction. Consultants should consult! When people aren’t consulted at the coalface or are ignored during the strategy development process, it becomes a theoretical exercise with little likelihood of success. Ignore the people who know the business best at your peril.

This experience highlighted the disastrous consequences of not having a sound approach with all stakeholders aligned, committed, and understanding their role in strategy implementation.

In 2007 I became Group Executive – Marketing and Innovation, with National Foods (then the largest food company in Australia). Under the leadership of CEO Ashley Waugh and alongside a supportive executive team, we proved the hypothesis that ‘mobilisation and alignment have a critical role when implementing strategy’. The result of this approach stood us in great stead when we acquired and integrated the Dairy Farmers business in 2009. (I’ll share more of this experience later.)

I moved on from executive roles in 2012 and became part of the XPotential network, consulting and advising organisations big and small. The founder of XPotential, Steve Sowerby, and I had worked together on the Reckitt & Colman mobilisation team back in 1995, and were aligned in the belief that the most important assets of a business are its brands (or reputation), and that people are the most important resource in building brand value. Many of the practical lessons learned from our corporate careers have influenced how we work with our clients. They’ve also formed the basis for the tools I’ve developed and used over the ensuing 10 years. I’ll share many of these examples and lessons throughout this