A fund management business faced collapse, after some years of successful and profitable growth. (These companies invest your cash in equities and bonds to grow your wealth, often through pensions or other investment products. They mostly sell those products through brokers or financial advisors). How come? Let the good times…

Mostly we are concerned with relatively low-stress situations where management wishes to drive faster growth, avoid possible constraints, or reverse declining performance. Sometimes, though, organizations find themselves in crisis, with resources and revenues in sharp decline and financial losses that are worsening so fast as to threaten their survival. Drastic action may be unavoidable…
But what action?

Management is concerned about the quality of resources because it has a real impact on performance – better sales people win better customers, faster, better products drive stronger customer growth and sales, better equipment causes fewer faults, and so on.

Read on as we further build on the simple example of skills amongst call-center staff from Briefing 26…

The previous briefing looked at how adding larger customers and removing smaller ones can raise the average size of a firm’s customer base. To these mechanisms must be added a third element.
What is it?

It is not easy to understand and manage changes in attributes and the impact of those changes. Strategy must recognize and cope with change over time, so needs a method for quantifying both scale and speed of progress. Now we must not only work out how key resources are changing, but also the quality of those resources.
How is this done?

The briefings up to this point have put together the basic elements of the simple core system of how an organization functions and delivers performance that changes over time. This picture with numerical information on its performance is often enough to see big improvement opportunities. However, there is much more opportunity to use strategy dynamics to improve performance…