That Telecom Strategy post below isn’t just some mindless rant. (well no more than normal)
The Evergreen Project, which I led for a while at McKinsey (and which turned into a book) may give some context for those comments.
The Evergreen work was an enormous quantitative and qualitative effort, which took millions of dollars and a number of years.
The core finding was basic:
Companies that succeeded in the long run did four things really well versus their peers: “Strategy”, “Execution”, “Culture” and “Organisaton”.
Strategy means understanding what is happening in your industry, and responding with a well defined strategy, communicated well internally and externally .
Execution means doing the basics well – it’s about having quality products that customers like or love, it’s about sticking to your core business.
Organisation is having a flat and fast structure, free of bureaucracy, allowing the company to be nimble.
Culture is about having a culture of success – about people being aligned towards the company goals, and being rewarded for great performance.
How does Telecom line up against these four?
You decide
The research showed that if a company wasn’t strong in at least 3 of these, then they did not perform.
More importantly, the research showed that if a company was very poor (as opposed to OK) any of these four, then they did not perform.
“Did not perform” means they did not perform over a 10 year period in Total Shareholder Return, EBIT, NOPLAT, on whatever financial metric we could think of.
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