Unlocking Creative Potential

CHALLENGE

To provide our client with a new pathway for new business development in a rapidly changing healthcare market space heavily influenced by shrinking profit margins and shifting patient expectations. Further, to provide the tools, insights and talent to help our client leverage its competitive supply chain advantage for the move into higher margin services.

ACTION

After our TRANSEARCH Sweden team successfully completed two replacement searches for CFO Logistics Managers for the company's Swedish subsidiary, the client saw our TRANSEARCH Orxestra© Method as a key to exploit a changing market landscape and achieve its new business development goals.

Given the nature of this logistics company's highly sensitive handling of pharmaceutical products, its business process and culture had evolved to the point of being highly process-oriented and regimented in terms of its approach to the market and qualifying new business opportunities.

The challenge of shrinking margins, intensifying competition and emerging market demands for new services only added ot the issues it faced and put the company in a difficult position to recruit creative business developers who could push for innovation and profitable diversification of our client's service portfolio. Further complicating the matter, the company's brand was not well-known despite its enviable market share.

Following a thorough evaluation of its market position and prospects for exploiting new market spaces, our TRANSEARCH consultants agreed to tackle this assignment only on the precondition that we would launch with a half-day cultural assessment workshop with the client's top management team.

Together, using our proprietary TRANSEARCH Orxestra© Method and tools, we uncovered why the kind of creative business developers the company most needed were actually quite likely to fail due to the inflexibility of the current corporate culture. We identified the reasons why there were serious cultural risks of the culture rejecting "new market mind sets" and innovations and blocking a successful landing and integration with the global client team.

IMPACT

Our joint examination of how the healthcare markets were changing, the opportunities that existed and how the company could capitalize on its logistics advantages led our client's top management to a true epiphany. The group realized that its dominant, uniform corporate culture simply would not enable new and creative business development and would, in fact, stifle such an investment. That was the big learning.

With this important lesson now clearly accepted by top management, the client team began a communications campaign that reinforced the notion that "one culture does not fit all" and granted different corporate functions the license to begin new business development initiatives without the baggage of preconceived outcomes or cultural baggage dimming the prospects for growth.

With this new revelation of how its management and corporate culture must change and operate outside the lines of its traditional market development process, our client found ways to nurture and reward new ideas. Its teams are more agile, more accepting of calculated risk-taking and poised to reduce process bottlenecks for the sake of moving quickly in the direction of new patient service opportunities.

CLIENT PERSPECTIVE

"Our journey in the rapidly changing healthcare logistics market continues to unfold in new and unexpected ways. We now have a clearer, consensus view of how our corporate culture must adapt in order to exploit new market opportunities. Our journey into new service markets has only just begun. Time will tell just how well prepared we are, but whatever the outcome, we will accept it knowing the challenge was to know ourselves better before would could know our customers and markets better."