Leadership Advisory

Insights

Change is hard

Changing how your company operates is hard, but can be done. You must create a whole-company focus to empower your people to be self-directed, to major on the cross-functional business processes necessary to create ongoing customer value, and to innovate to stay relevant as the market changes.

Action

Turning your company Digital

Digital disruption and the need to be wholly customer-centric is the new normal for many companies. Leaders must reimagine and reinvent the business itself. We discuss the challenges to operate, adapt and thrive in a rapidly evolving financial, political and social world.

Action

Finance Transformation Playbook

Every CFO needs to keep on delivering a high standard of service to the business. We discuss how to recognise the challenges faced, gain clarity on the ideal end-state design principles, through developing the target operating model, transitioning to new ways of working, and making it all stick.

Action

Making people redundant

With furlough ending, many organisations will make the difficult decision to make some of their workforce redundant. This is never easy, but by following best practice, the relevant laws and this playbook, the experience can turn out to be positive for all involved.

Insights

True North

All change is about people. Success means bringing together and leading many more strands of engagement than is often appreciated. You need clarity on where and how to start, the talent needed and the cognitive capacity to balance the dependencies of transformation. Then you can see your True North.

Insights

Why does my business exist?

Irrespective of market sector, delivering value to customers must be the prime purpose of any company, yet many companies struggle to differentiate or communicate their true value to the outside world.

Action

Financial Modelling

Financial modelling is essential to inform decision making, and to test scenarios in strategic planning. Right now we need to take action to address current concerns, identifying the financial and operational levers that can be pulled to conserve and generate cash and increase access to funding.

Insights

How do I know that my organisation is creating customer value?

All organisational activity should be about generating value for our customers. But few people are able to define ‘value’ as something that’s actually meaningful in the context of an initiative or a customer.

Insights

Customer-centricity - three ways leaders can embed competitive advantage

A culture of customer-centricity has given many leading companies success. By listening to prospects and customers, meeting their needs, driving engagement and advocacy, determined culture change, which puts the customer at the heart of the business, results in efficiency, growth and profitability.

Action

Working with Insolvency Practitioners

If your company is experiencing financial distress, you may be considering appointing the services of an insolvency practitioner to help you navigate your current situation. Aston Beck work alongside a highly respected and experienced restructuring and insolvency team, and can provide support.

Insights

How do I set and amend strategic direction?

Successful leaders understand that they need to find new ways to increase profits and reach new customers. There are numerous options available, but how do you know which one will work best for your organisation?

Insights

Managing Corporate Risk

To stay trading, organisational leaders must be supportive of lines of enquiry which uncover threats to the existence, products or profitability of the company, and take mitigating actions to reduce such risk.

Insights

Staying Compliant

To stay trading your company needs to be, and remain, compliant. Few business owners will say that they like regulation, but the consequences of not being compliant can stop you trading, so make sure that you have sufficient people making sure that you are.

Insights

Agile must extend beyond IT

When challengers start to deliver value to your clients, IT are often given the digital transformation brief. But while those outside IT may see their role as merely looking on from afar and tolerating the noise, much greater benefit arises when the rest of the value chain works in the same manner.

Insights

The new role of IT Leaders

When the autonomous delivery team work directly for the Product Owner – who is generally drawn from the business – what happens to the IT Director and the ‘Heads of’ the traditional IT functions?

Action

Turning a Company Around

When a business becomes financially distressed, turnaround involves making the changes necessary to solve the operational, strategic and financial problems that will restore the struggling organisation to trading viability. Turnaround is the final company-led chance to return to profitability.

Insights

Change and Transformation

The terms change and transformation are used interchangably by many, but there is a difference. If Change is about improving an aspect of a business, then Transformation is about renewing the whole company. Change initiatives tend to focus on people, Transformation is about delivery of value.

Insights

Five domains of corporate strategy that the digital world is changing

Embarking on any strategic journey is an enormously complex challenge. There are five domains of corporate strategy that the digital world is changing, each of which you must understand, embrace and show leadership in.

Insights

Communicating...and silence is still communicating

Many businesses stop communicating when faced with uncertainty, crisis or anxiety, but communication becomes ever more important. If you’re not actively communicating with your people, they’ll still be getting a message loud and clear – but not one you necessarily want them to hear.

Insights

Social Knowledge Management

Knowledge must flow freely across and beyond an organisation to get the best value from people. Knowledge management has been too constrained by the pre-determined path of a hierarchical structure, and leaders' concerns with losing control. We set out the benefits of becoming a social business.

Insights

The Universal Purpose of a Company

A single-minded focus on profits has caused shareholder capitalism to become increasingly disconnected from the real economy and societal impact. Stakeholder capitalism, which positions private corporations as trustees of society, is a strong response to today’s social and environmental challenges.

Insights

Why Digital Transformation Fails

Many organisational change initiatives fail. We discuss hostility and indifference, encumbrance by the past, making the true commitment, a failure to iterate, starting with technology first, and, biggest of all, strategy execution. Knowing the reasons for failure informs what to do to succeed.

Insights

Innovation keeps you Trading

Innovation is at the heart of any business. No company, however successful, can stand still. Change happens whether you want it to or not. Successful leaders must reimagine and reinvent traditional legacy businesses or face becoming irrelevant in the market.

Insights

Leadership Tensions

Most workers today would agree that org charts cannot even remotely describe the reality of working life. Hierarchy works for setting up corporate contracts and paying taxes. Over-emphasis on formal structures reduces effectiveness and inhibits innovation. There are alternate structures.

Insights

Chief of Staff

Your CxO can’t do everything themselves. There is so much noise in the world. They need someone to help manage strategy and innovation and to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. A Chief of Staff works alongside their Exec as a force multiplier.