A Year in the Life

By Peter Holman

Our value proposition to our clients is about ‘Focusing Strategy, Engaging People and Driving Improvement’. Here is some of what this meant in practice for me this year:

The leader of a unit of a major energy company wanted help with changing the way his management team looked at their business. This sort of language is often code for “I want them to think and behave differently but I don’t want to tell them that, I want them to discover it for themselves.” I designed and led three workshops with this team over a five month period, during which time it was satisfying to hear them talk about this being the first time that they had really been involved in developing strategy. I then persuaded them to hold three big regional events to engage all their global managers in strategy delivery. It was great to hear this wider audience talk about this being the first time they had really been given the opportunity to work out what it meant for them.
Having changed the roles and responsibilities of businesses and geographies in their complex matrix organisation, a major multinational wanted to improve the way that strategy was implemented in a consistent way across the whole corporation. As Quest had helped many individual units and functions with strategy implementation over the last decade, we were asked to help design and kick off the new corporate-led approach. After years of trying to sell this way of thinking to this client, it was very satisfying to see the whole corporation finally adopt it!
The Corporate headquarters of another multinational wanted to get everyone’s attention on Emerging Markets, and needed help to develop a radically different event in Delhi. Two months of intense, sometimes chaotic, but ultimately fruitful work. Big team, big result.
A major client acquired a new leader who wanted help with promoting his change message to his top 100 managers. We designed and ran the two day event and have since done another seven. At the time of writing this we have just been asked to help with their most ambitious yet, for several hundred people. We developed this relationship through referral from contacts in the same group – a great way of spreading the word, even if it did involve a lot of travel.
This work led to being asked for a business development workshop in Moscow. (No, I didn’t get to see Red Square. Too busy prepping, and the only night we went out, the taxi driver couldn’t find the kart track and then the traffic was so bad we gave up on the restaurant and ate in the hotel!)

When I joined Quest in the early 90s, clients were prepared to invest lots of time in major change programmes which might take several years to deliver major rewards. Now companies seem to have a frenzy of multiple change activities, but often suffer from the corporate equivalent of ‘attention deficit disorder’. Our biggest challenge is often in helping clients to appreciate the benefits of properly engaging their people with their ambitious strategies and that the results of our intervention will be rapid and sustainable.

I couldn’t predict the next twelve months – apart from travel, coping with ambiguity and hiring more good people – but they’re sure to be interesting.