Listed industrial group · £1.4bn revenue
A strategy the organisation had quietly declined to implement
The board had approved a shift toward service revenue eighteen months
earlier. Service revenue had moved from 11% to 12%. Nobody had
refused; the sales incentive plan simply paid on equipment volume,
and every rational salesperson responded accordingly.
The review found four separate structures pulling against the stated
strategy — compensation, the sales pipeline definition, the
divisional P&L boundary, and the composition of the executive
meeting itself. We rebuilt the incentive plan, moved service into its
own P&L with a named owner, and changed what the executive team
reviewed first each month.
27%
Service revenue after 24 months
4
Structural blockers removed
Family-owned manufacturer · third generation
Two years of succession discussion, no succession
The founder's son was the presumed successor. He was capable and
nobody, including the non-family directors, believed he was the right
choice. The decision had been deferred at four consecutive board
meetings using increasingly procedural language.
The engagement was commissioned by the chair. The work was largely
conversational: separating the family question from the governance
question, and giving the board a defensible process for the decision
so it could stop being a personal judgement about a colleague's son.
11 wks
From engagement to decision
Retained
Family shareholding intact
External
Chief executive appointed
Healthcare services group · private equity owned
An executive team meeting that governed nothing
A newly appointed chief executive inherited a weekly executive meeting
of fourteen people running three hours. It reviewed performance
thoroughly and decided almost nothing; real decisions happened in
bilateral conversations afterwards, invisible to the group.
We redesigned the executive operating rhythm: a smaller decision
forum, a separate performance review, and a written decision log with
named owners and dates. The unglamorous change — the log — turned out
to matter most.
14 → 7
Decision forum size
−40%
Executive meeting hours
3.2×
Decisions closed per month