Reimagining growth based on bespoke diagnostics and co-creation

This client is the South East Asia business unit of one of India’s leading consumer goods companies operating in the beauty, health and wellness space. This business, based in Vietnam also operating in Cambodia, Malaysia and Myanmar, was acquired in 2011 and is a manufacturer of personal care and food products. It currently leads the male grooming product segment and has a premium beauty brand and a range of spices and sauces.

COrE Creators has been working with the parent company and since 2011, its South East Asian business unit, on a three-year rolling cycle, to partner in its growth aspirations and organization development efforts through diagnostics, co-creation and capability building.

The interventions typically focused on aligning the leadership team around their aspiration for business growth, analysing enablers and barriers to growth, determining three-year strategic initiatives and one-year cross-functional and functional execution roadmaps.

In 2018, COrE Creators had the opportunity to partner this business unit in a major reset. The combination of downward and more competitive market conditions combined with a business-as-usual focus to result in a drop in performance. This was a much more extensive exercise than previous interventions as it aimed at aligning and strengthening collective ownership of the entire organization to the new business direction and setting the stage for transformation in the organization.

Our Approach & Solution

A customized and system-wide diagnostic preceded the 2018 co-creation exercise. The objective of in-sighting was to gather and analyze multiple viewpoints on the company’s differentiation opportunities & vulnerabilities, what’s working/not working, what stakeholders want the company to stand for in the market place and for current and potential employees. The bespoke diagnostic featured:

  • Seven focus group discussions with 100+ employees resulting in 290 ideas categorized into 48 themes and 12 meta-themes;
  • Structured interviews with internal stakeholders and external business associates conducted by members of the leadership team to build perspectives based on an outside-in and inside-out view of the business, operations and culture;
  • An online custom survey on the vision and culture of the company with a response rate of 76% covering all functions and employee grade levels.

The design of the above in-sighting approach was based on COrE Creators’ Value Dynamics model of the three core, interdependent dynamics of Enterprise, Organization and Culture. The multiple diagnostic approaches whilst highlighting the consistent bright and hot spot areas also provided snapshots of the overall company Vision and Culture as well as function-wise heat maps.

The Results

The consolidated results of this approach formed the basis for designing the subsequent co-creation journey for the company in identifying the strategy, capabilities and culture toward becoming a winning business. Following the in-sighting phase, multiple co-creation workshops established the three-year company roadmap and functional execution plans that were then socialized across all functions, levels and locations of the organization. Execution monitoring, review and reporting mechanisms were the final piece of this co-creation journey.

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