CASE STUDIES

Below are some of the stories shared when asked about new ways of engaging in creating strategy or strategic planning. Thank you to all of you as each story helped piece together the above.

Kumud Kalia, CIO, Guardant Health: Quarterly Reflection with True Openness to Shifts

Kumud Kalia, a member of the Samudra Digital Leadership Trust, is the CIO at Guardant Health - a purpose-driven organization which is dedicated to helping patients at all stages of cancer live longer and healthier, through the power of blood tests and the data they unlock. 

Despite being 10 years old, Guardant Health works to maintain cultural elements from its startup days such as scrappiness and the ability to react because for them "pretty much every quarter something changes, sometimes it's minor, sometimes more major." For example, an FDA approval may not come through on an anticipated timeline impacting the readiness of the commercial team. 

To support this flexibility, like many organizations, the executive team gathers quarterly. But rather than a QBR, evaluating progress against the annual plan, they engage in reflection, considering what has occurred over the quarter and what has been learned, and then asses if the strategy or strategic plan should be changed. They then build a communication plan to let everyone know what the change is, why the change is happening and the impact on them.

One period of major change was Q2 2020. As the pandemic began, it was important to Guardant to keep their labs open because patients were depending on results, so they quickly implemented safety protocols that included weekly testing. At first Guardant leveraged a third-party test. While Guardant itself was a testing company, it assumed that larger testing organizations would step up and provide COVID testing. But it didn't happen, and supply was short. As a purpose-driven company, the executive leadership team asked themselves the question 'What can we do?' They decided as a certified lab, trusted by the FDA, they would put out a COVID test to serve the community - with no intention of making a profit from it. Tactically they decided to not devote a lot of internal resources so they wouldn't deviate from the main mission of the organization. It was a short-term strategic shift, a hobby project for some employees - and it taught Guardant something important about itself.

Once there were other commercially available tests, Guardant stopped producing COVID tests, realizing it was never long-term strategy, and it was taking too many resources. However, at a quarterly review, executives discussed the learning that they were able to create an entirely new product within a single quarter. The strategy toward their vision had been to be a single product company, however, this experience led to a strategy change to launch multiple products in 2021 - unprecedented in their industry in such a short time. Which also led to multiple reorganizations.

When asked how the employees of Guardant weathered so much change, Kumud shared that there had been attrition, but many employees were energized: “People are willing to embrace the change mostly, I think, because there's some belief that it's the right thing to do.”

Mary Ann Godwin, Strategy Consultant, ZS Associates: Agile Strategy Review Every 90 days

Mary Ann Godwin is a Principal and Strategy Consultant at ZS, management consulting and professional services firm, where she focuses on biotech. Mary Ann is not a member in any of the Samudra Trusts, but was asked to contribute because of her expertise in strategy.

Advancements in technology, plus an increasingly competitive market, led one of Mary Ann’s clients to shift their strategic planning processes 6+ years ago.

Mary Ann’s client has adopted the mindsets of agile, increasing the frequency of setting, reviewing and, possibly, updating strategy, as well as shifting the level of rigor in strategy creation - moving from being deeply analytical, in an attempt to be “right”, written up in a massive strategy document, to agilely reviewing the competitive landscape and customer needs every 90 days.

She explains that the company still sets a 5-year vision, but in a different way:

For new products or rapidly innovating areas of biotech, the strategy itself is more likely to change more frequently because everything is new. However, when it's an established product or an area with minimal innovation, and there aren't any major events happening, the strategy itself is less likely to change, perhaps some tactics in response to customer needs. For example, nobody knew about restless leg syndrome (RLS), then all of a sudden, it was a thing. Ever since there has been a drug to treat it, there has not been much innovation. Whereas Alzheimer’s has new research and new companies trying to address it that emerge all the time. 

Mary Ann explained that it is imperative for organizations to be reviewing new information, close to real-time:

Her clients frequently review what competition is doing, plus they incorporate learning directly from customers. To learn from customers there are digital options: the explosion of digital channels, big data and artificial intelligence to understand customer behavior and needs. Then there are more direct human ways to gain information, such as having conversations, for example during product launches being in hospitals and listening. Plus her clients are increasing their co-creation efforts with customers. Customer insights may be shared at specific intervals, perhaps every 90-days or every 6 months. 

In contrast, Mary Ann works with another biotech client and she worries about their future:

Mary Ann explained that we can’t consider strategy in a silo, though. There are four key areas:

• Purpose – Your rallying cry. The benefit you bring to society. For example, ‘Improve quality of life of Alzheimer’s patients.’

• Vision – The more specific thing you are going to do to address an unmet need. For example, ‘Make it easier for Alzheimer’s patients and caregivers to have access to the drugs they need.’

• Strategy – This is about the tradeoffs, making choices about what specific problem we’ll solve first. When we do strategy sessions we look at ALL the things we can solve, then we consider our unique competencies compared to competitors. For example, ‘I can make it easier to use a drug. I can make a cheaper drug. I could provide services that help patients get to the drug.’

• Tactics – Steps you will try to achieve the strategy you’ve chosen. For example, ‘co-develop a drug that is easy for a caregiver to administer at home with a competitor.’

In addition, Mary Ann shared there has been increasing debate among her clients around where strategy should sit, how it should work and who gets to do it.

George White, Former CIO, Cantina: Purpose Must Guide Strategy

George White (a member of CLT) is the former CIO at Cantina, a consultancy that helps companies crack the code on innovation and deliver award-winning products and services. Cantina worked with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA) when they decided to open an innovation center.

One goal of the innovation center was to interact with the public.

As the Cantina team led a service design engagement, helping them think through content design, staffing plans and much more, it became apparent that those behind the idea for the innovation center had put strategy and tactics before purpose. While they had articulated that they wanted to engage the public, they had not stopped to consider why (or if) people would come to a BCBSMA innovation center, or what experiences they would like the public to have while there.

For example, they made a tactical decision to staff the center with interns to interface with the public. However, that meant that visitors were interacting with people who did not know the Blue Cross business, and may not know much about innovation or health care. 

As conversations deepened, the Cantina team was surprised to learn that even senior executives had uncertainty about the center.

To help the client come to clarity on the purpose and vision of the center, the Cantina team wrote two fictitious reviews of the innovation center, one that was positive due to the transformative experiences the visitor had, and one that was negative because of a lack of features and positive experiences. This allowed the BCBSMA team to pause tactical execution and back up and consider what future they wanted to build and what experiences for the public they wanted to enable.

Once the team established clarity on their purpose and the future state they wanted, then the things they needed to do to get there were clear. 

Before working with Cantina, the BCBSMA executives shared only minimal information about the center and its purpose with the broader staff. So employees didn’t know why time and money was being spent on it, nor why it was a priority for an insurance company. The Cantina team helped the executives create a video explaining what the innovation center way and why they were doing it.

George White, Former CIO, Cantina: Connect Explorers and Executors to More Quickly Integrate Changes

George explained that a structure that can help businesses more quickly transform is to pair those with skills more aligned to exploring, with those that have stronger skills in exploiting and executing.

Julie Vens - De Vos, CEO, Nexxworks: Developing a Deeply Aligned Purpose and Strategy, and then Sharing it Across the Company

“’Who do you want to be in the day after tomorrow?’ is what I ask companies.”

As the CEO of nexxworks, Julie Vens - De Vos (a member of CLT) helps companies to think and be future proof, via a lens on the continuously, rapidly changing world they operate in.

Julie led an engagement where the client was considering how they could create a better future for a person that does not have access to financial means. The organization had a technology-driven, short-term strategy focused on building infrastructure and nexxworks challenged them to focus on the larger context of the target group.

nexxworks created an “unusual learning expedition, inviting executives to think and learn together with a brilliant, curated community, about a specific collective challenge - not to solve that challenge, but to identify pivotal insights and a new way to position it.” The goal was to help the executive team imagine, or reimagine, the future (new purpose & vision) and then build a path to act on it (aligned strategy).

It was a 6-month journey broken into 3 parts:

1. Connecting with one another and discussing what they were working toward together.

2. Learning from a variety of people from engineers, to technologists, to engineers – each who could bring a different set of information and perspectives.

3. Bringing in experts who could frame what they’d learned in different models to help imagine a different solution or future, acknowledging that because they were tackling a problem no one had yet addressed, there may not be a model that exists today that would be ready to use.

By the end of the project the organization’s primary purpose shifted from ‘How can we set the best technology to this problem?’ to ‘How can we empower our primary customer, and her network of entrepreneurial women? How can we connect them better?’ Once that became their primary purpose, their strategy shifted accordingly.

nexxworks suggests to all clients that they invest 10% of their time in ‘the day after tomorrow,’ in different ways, combining high intensity moments like deep immersion, with exploration of customer needs and different perspectives.

And for this attitude to take root, leadership must transform appropriately. No longer can the CEO assume he downwardly dictates the ‘right’ strategy. Executives need to embrace vulnerability and acknowledge there are no absolutes and they can’t ‘know’. Today’s leadership must embody the mindset: “I don’t know yet how we’ll get there, but that is what we are going to figure out together.”

In addition, leaders must become storytellers to help people across the company connect with purpose and adopt new information, new strategies and new tactics.

Melora Zaner, SVP Head of Customer Experience, U.S. Bank: Transforming Culture and Connection to Purpose First

Melora Zaner, a member of the Catalyst Leadership Trust, is the SVP Head of Customer Experience at U.S. Bank. She has spent years in the banking business which has clung to traditional business models and hierarchical structure that have created top-down strategy that employees feel disconnected from.

The pandemic became a magnifier and an accelerator to see these issues that predated 2020. The virtual world exacerbated communication breakdowns, and created an increased sense of disconnect from community and a decreased sense of empowerment. A “victim mindset” began to set in and people began to leave because they felt so hurt.

When Melora started in June 2021 she realized that the most important focus area was culture and giving people a sense of empowerment:

The World Cafés created optimism and shifted people’s mindset from that of a complaining victim to an empowered solutioner.  Survey results in December 2021 confirmed that people were feeling more hopeful.

The cultural shift has also been embedded in communication and meeting structures.

The changes take time. Melora explained that it is a sense of purpose that helps people be willing to stick it out.

Tim Lyons, Founder, TTL Ventures: Adopting a Purpose and Employee-Based Approach

Tim Lyons, founder of TTL Ventures and CLT member, shared that an organization had 20% of its workforce resign when they forced employees to return to the office within two weeks.

Traditionally organizations have been prescriptive and hierarchical. Now is an opportunity for companies to reimagine how they build strategy.

Shifting to a customer and employee-based approach will require organizations to be able to respond more quickly, which requires mindsets and a culture that embrace iteration. a CEO he knows recently had a scrum and agile training for leadership that was not just about some potential product development projects but more about the leaders ensuring teams of people are working together in small groups, where they are accountable to one another and accomplishing things, moving away from hierarchy.

And finally, Tim shared that purpose is pivotal to their openness to change:

Toby Eduardo Redshaw, CEO, Versus Advisory: Reward and Build Structures to Support the Culture You Want

Toby Redshaw, CEO of Versus Advisory (and CLT member), advises clients on strategy, transformation and digitalization. In our discussion about shifts in strategy, Toby shared wisdom about organizations doing the real work to build culture.

Toby drove a mindset and culture change, during his time as the Global Chief Information Officer at Aviva, an insurer and asset manager with $800B under management.

You can't just talk about it you need set a real example. In 2008 Aviva was going to spend $80 million with a large integrator to build an intranet over 18 months. Toby realized this was an unimpressive, under-promise over-deliver, over-priced program. . He told them his team would spend half the money, get twice as much done, in less than half the time. Under-promise/over-deliver is a dilutive disease inside not smart cultures that think action versus plan is foundational and punish missing plan. This leads to the opposite of what is needed.

This goal was actually impossible. The agreement with the board was that this experiment would show that setting a big stretch goal and rallying the team to execute would deliver a far better result even when they missed the target. You cannot just do this randomly it has to be in domains where you have a deep understanding. The idea was that we would reward the results even though technically they would come in a bit late. This was the behavior we wanted to reward and make a board level example.

Toby told his team he wanted it delivered in just 125 days and made them rebid the project with that timeframe and twice the ask including a full knowledge management/collaboration platform across 28 countries. Toby didn’t expect them to finish in 125 days, he anticipated 150-160 days. They came in at 142 days.

We selected Microsoft's platforms over the previous vendor. Steve Ballmer called our CEO and said that 142 days was the fastest scale implementation/scale change they had ever seen. He mentioned 300 year + Aviva as a key innovator in his annual earnings call.

While at Motorola the firm decided to shift from 12 individual silo-ed lines of business to a more modern common services, ecosystem, collaborative model. The hardest part of that is many of the original leaders did not match the new culture/mission that Toby knew needed to be built. In tech and B2B for example. So he made the difficult decision to let people go that had been high performers in ways that were no longer what was needed going forward. High performance was going to mean something different in the new culture:

Similarly, Toby shared that when you are driving change, shifting culture and structure, it is critical to have people shut down old processes.

Another recommendation Toby shared to help shift culture to new ways of working was to hire “accelerators” – while not a fan of 'consultants' in general accelerators are people that have helped companies through the type of transformation you are after many times. These people generally work at consulting companies. The other item is down in the trenches hire 'journey talent'. These are people who have simply gone on this journey before. For example, if you are going to integrate AI across an operation or go big on BPM/RPA hire folks that have worked at companies that have done that.

Ralph Loura, CIO, Lumentum: Processes, Tools, Structures and Culture Must All Change to Support the New Pace of Strategy Realignment

Ralph Loura, CIO at Lumentum, is a member of the Digital Leadership Trust (DLT). For many years Lumentum used the Hoshin Kanri methodology out of Toyota's manufacturing system.

In addition to needs and priorities changing rapidly, the CEO had been asking Ralph how his team decided which projects to do. As Ralph begun investigating the answer to this question, he realized that it had been “subjective, based on who yelled the loudest or who jiggled the numbers to be most compelling.” 

The quickly shifting landscape required a fast AND rigorous process that everyone could understand and participate in. Ralph’s team build processes and tools that provided clarity on how decisions were being made, introducing 8 dimensions that helped determine a project’s priority, and public interfaces where people could input and view.

The processes and tools that Ralph and his team have put into place now allow real-time reprioritization, as well as a way to align over regular conversations to discuss what has changed in the business, what new pain points exist or new gaps that require recalibration and what might need to move to the bottom of the priority list – both from bottoms up, as well as a way to review with top level leaders. 

This faster way of working has required restructuring the organizational structure, and the culture. No longer can waterfall, large-scale processes be leveraged. Most of IT now works in agile, small scrum teams, that are more informed, more empowered and collectively delivering value together.

Ralph also shared that it is important for organizations to be more thoughtful in their structure design regarding employee skills related to taking in problem-solving, synthesizing new information into actionable possibility and thinking out of the box (shifting right) and vs skills in execution and methodically building out processes (shifting left).