On Demand News: 07/11/18

Pardon Me, Do You Speak CEO?

11 July, 2018 // “Transformation” is a foreign language. You may not think of it that way, but if you’re going to sell change and improvement, you have to do more than just identify gains. You must translate that value into terms your organization can understand.

At Morgan, we talk a lot about transformation, because it’s our business. Yet, it’s important to understand that for most large, manufacturing enterprises, change is scary. So, the natural way for them to talk about improvement is in incremental terms.

“Give me a 5 percent improvement over last year” feels challenging but possible. “Let’s revolutionize the system” feels like something, well, a revolutionary might say. And revolutionaries, while they sometimes change the world, just as often get their heads chopped off.

If change is a requirement—and for virtually every complex, highly digitized manufacturing organization these days it’s a matter of survival—how do you speak that language to your various internal constituents? First off, understand that even inside your organization, not everyone speaks the same language.

The CEO: speaks the language of strategy and vision. He or she cares about the overall company health and growth. How do the changes you propose strengthen the company’s competitive and financial positions? Will they provide a sustainable advantage and superior returns on investment?

The CFO: hears the world in numbers. What’s the balance sheet argument you can make for eliminating operations costs and reducing inventory?

The COO and Operations Team: speak fluent efficiency. How will changes to the current model result in better visibility, orchestration of actions internally and with suppliers? Can you reduce the length of the supply chain or eliminate waste?

The Sales Organization: like, the CFO, understands numbers. But, instead of counting costs, theirs is a romance language. Sales executives care more about increasing revenue. How can your supply chain initiatives make more goods available for last-minute sales? Can you reduce damages and increase customer satisfaction?

Clear communication to all these folks might seem obvious, but we have seen plenty of optimizations ideas die because “just being an improvement” wasn’t good enough. The proposals’ backers simply didn’t speak optimization in a dialect that rang important or urgent for one or more of their constituents.

If you’re ready to take a transformational approach to your supply chain, we would be glad to help assess the potential to improve your in-transit processes and reduce your inventory.

If we find an opportunity, we can help you engineer the right solution, plan for a successful implementation and metrics. And, yes, even articulate it all in effortless CEO-speak.

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While You Were Shipping…

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