WHAT'S YOUR
TRANSFORMATION
NORTH STAR?
Set your sights on transformation success.
12 percent of business leaders in a recent survey said they believe culture is a factor that drives transformation success.
12%
33 percent of respondents in a recent survey acknowledge that experience is a challenge to address in transformation.
33%
25 percent of respondents in a recent survey acknowledge that people are a challenge to address in transformation.
25%
48 percent of leaders acknowledged in a recent survey that transformation delivery has a significant impact on transformation success.
48%
74 percent of businesses said in a recent survey that they feel prepared to address ways of working.
74%
45 percent of business leaders who responded to a recent survey said they believe operating models and organizational structures have an impact on transformation success.
45%
35 percent of businesses we surveyed acknowledge process as a challenge to address within a transformation.
35%
61 percent of business leaders we surveyed acknowledge data and technology as a challenge within a transformation.
61%
41 percent of leaders we surveyed say “increased revenue” is the second-highest catalyst for transformation.
41%
57 percent of business leaders in a recent survey said that they believe strategy and purpose is a challenge in their transformations.
57%
To propel continuous transformation, companies must configure systems and structures that enable them to adapt. Making these systems and structures work together effectively begins with culture.
For a Europe-based pharma company,
being intentional about culture made all the
difference in its multi-year transition focused
on instilling new ways of working.
To support continuous transformation:
Your culture must cultivate courage throughout your organization.
01
02
03
There must be alignment around culture among leaders and between teams.
Your culture must empathize and evolve with customers' needs and values.
Applying insights and recommendations from a series of Futures Sessions, the company asked North Highland to create a roadmap for the customer journey, a supporting operational structure, and the structure for an e-commerce tool. The tool transformed how the company engages customers and significantly increased the number of customers served.
For a leading provider of perforating and well completion systems, getting experience right helped it enter a digital future and launch a comprehensive e-commerce platform.
To power continuous transformation:
Treat experience like a form of financial currency.
01
Put experience into proper perspective to understand how it shows up along the transformation journey.
02
Embrace radical empathy and create meaningful moments.
03
Click here to read more about these foundational strategies. Then go beyond the basics and keep exploring here.
Click here to read more about these foundational strategies. Then go beyond the basics and keep exploring here.
North Highland helped ensure the firm took people along the transformation journey. Together we conducted collaboration sessions with leaders and employees to gain insights and feedback that informed our approach. We helped keep employees plugged in to the process with clear, informative, and engaging communications and content for go-live.
For a global beverage company, prioritizing people made all the difference when launching a new Performance Enablement practice to transform its feedback process.
To power continuous transformation:
Prioritize people by focusing on employee experience.
01
Ensure leaders show up for employees in new ways—with more flexibility, emotional intelligence, and empathy.
02
Build future-proof skills to create more adaptive workforces.
03
Click here to read more about these foundational strategies. Then go beyond the basics and keep exploring here.
It takes a particular skill set to create a strategic vision, but it takes an entirely different one to align that strategy to delivery in a way that drives value at every stage. By focusing on the transformation ecosystem, capability, and empowering the transformation delivery team, you’ll find new opportunities ripe for the taking.
At the same time, the company wanted to strengthen its ability to transform on an ongoing basis. The transformation office needed to drive business-wide initiatives while holding teams accountable to the long-term strategy. North Highland worked with the company to develop repeatable processes to identify, assess, order by priority, and deliver complex initiatives that brought its long-term vision to life. Along the way, we also built up the company’s capability and change management competency. By focusing on skill development, knowledge transfer, change enablement, and new process adoption, we helped the company build a sustainable engine for continuous transformation.
After going public, an established consumer-packaged goods company wanted to create an enterprise-wide transformation office to identify, select, and execute strategic growth initiatives.
To power continuous transformation:
Champion the change first by taking on new ways of thinking, working, and behaving.
01
Strengthen your transformation ecosystem.
02
Secure future-forward expertise
and bolster
internal teams.
03
Click here to read more about these foundational strategies. Then go beyond the basics and keep exploring here.
Ways of working dictate how teams get work done. When leaders are intentional about ways of working, they prime businesses to learn, improve, and transform.
Through a test-and-learn approach, our team worked directly with the client’s leadership team and 500 patent examiners to test hypotheses with patent examiner teams; create a tested, evidence-based roadmap of medium and long-term recommendations with detailed scoping and scaling across the organization; increase patent examiner capacity by 57 percent; and develop sustainable momentum within several groups of patent examiners by deploying different recommendations. By building hypothesis-driven practices into ways of working, we helped the client create momentum and the internal capabilities required to support ongoing change and improvement.
We partnered with a government agency responsible for intellectual property and patents. The agency needed to reduce its patent backlog and limit future backlogs.
To power continuous transformation:
Evolve ways of working more effectively by understanding what makes your culture unique.
01
Focus on behaviors (change capability) to establish new ways of working that stick.
02
At the employee level,
cultivate the skills that can
help fuel continuous
learning and improvement
in ways of working.
03
Click here to read more about these foundational strategies. Then go beyond the basics and keep exploring here.
Your operating model connects strategy to delivery by detailing how the transformation will be realized, including how all the various aspects—including people, structures, processes, governance, technology, and data—interact and intersect.
The company partnered with us to stabilize operations and modernize its operating
model for a dynamic—and uncertain—market. We helped the client reimagine its
strategic vision and objectives. Then, we designed a suitable operating model that
positioned the company to realize its new vision. The new operating model included
clear and actionable initiatives that would serve as the company’s foundation for
growth—during the pandemic and beyond. Overall, our work saved $85M in costs
and gave the client a more focused roadmap for growth. To ensure this work
actually led to lasting change, we also identified culture impacts (including
mindsets, behaviors, and competencies) and change management
recommendations (including leadership alignment and change
saturation analysis), as well as areas needing
cross-functional leadership coordination.
Having been hit hard financially by the
COVID-19 pandemic, a hospitality company needed
to redefine its annual strategy and make decisions
about its structure and operations in relation to
financial targets and its obligations to shareholders.
To power continuous transformation:
Treat your operating model and organizational structure as an essential pair.
01
Your operating model should address customer, workforce, and operational needs, creating value for people and your business.
02
Infuse your approach with design thinking, change management, and culture management.
03
Click here to read more about these foundational strategies. Then go beyond the basics and keep exploring here.
Processes are the critical link between strategy and value—they’re what allow you to do the things that you set out to do, and they’re the ties that bind the technologies, systems, and employees that make up your organization. Your processes will either power your transformation or hold you back from growth.
After several weeks of process discovery, North Highland brought stakeholders together in a two-day session to design a new process that saves the company substantial time and ensures alignment with agency partners to deliver marketing strategy.
A global pharmaceutical company’s
annual scope of work (SOW) process for strategic
marketing agency projects took nearly six months
due to complex procedures, a highly-matrixed organizational structure, and multiple approval steps.
To power continuous transformation:
Define the vision for your processes and ensure it supports your overarching transformation goals.
01
Prioritize the process
improvements that
matter to really
move the needle.
02
Stay on top of the health and effectiveness of your processes by establishing strong process controls.
03
Click here to read more about these foundational strategies. Then go beyond the basics and keep exploring here.
You must fundamentally reimagine your data and
technology architecture and supporting organizational
capabilities across every business area to compete and
win. We bring together this architecture and group of
capabilities under one concept: the digital core. This is
an integrated system that powers your ability to sense
change through data and respond to it effectively
through capabilities—ranging from your technology
and your operations to your people.
By implementing a centralized data store for customer and operations data, and a solution to integrate key data points across business systems, we helped the organization power continuous transformation through its digital core.
Bringing the blended expertise of our
Data & Analytics and Technology teams, we
partnered with a leading food services, facilities, and uniform services corporation to deliver the complex IT modernization at the heart of digital transformation.
To power continuous transformation:
Drive customer engagement with data and technology.
01
Empower your workforce to enable your digital core.
02
Unlock your digital
potential with
operational excellence.
03
Click here to read more about these foundational strategies. Then go beyond the basics and keep exploring here.
On any transformation journey, revenue-and-cost impact is the fundamental barometer of success. A more holistic, adaptive, and people-integrated perspective moves your business toward value.
For this organization, monthly bills were a critical element driving operational performance. We identified a two-cent improvement per bill which, when multiplied across all bills, amounted to significant, sustainable improvements.
In working with a telecom provider, our
Operational Efficiency Review identified improvements totaling $88 million, with $28
million of those improvements being in-year.
To power continuous transformation:
Reframe the business case by understanding every source of value.
01
Optimize revenue and
costs by leveraging people
to power an adaptive
transformation portfolio.
02
Align your workforce and operating model to best manage revenue and costs.
03
Click here to read more about these foundational strategies. Then go beyond the basics and keep exploring here.
The right strategy and purpose give you a compass that points your organization in one decisive direction. By integrating and aligning your strategy and purpose across three lenses—customer, workforce, and operational—you can activate organizational clarity, focus, and drive on the path forward.
Sales were impersonal, digital interactions were limited, and customer interactions lacked personalization. We worked with the company to design a data-driven strategy and experience that would exceed customer expectations. We helped the organization create a nimble environment that delivers deeper insights with third-party data and a more holistic understanding of customers. Then we surfaced valuable data to assist in product creation and enhancement, extracting valuable insight from customer interactions. Now, the company is equipped to identify sales opportunities proactively, enhance the new owner experience, identify owners at risk of selling their timeshare, and reduce extraneous or duplicate efforts.
A global hospitality company struggled to evolve its timeshare business to meet customers’ growing preferences for seamless, tailored interactions.
To power continuous transformation:
Ensure customers are the focal point of your vision, from which strategy and purpose stem.
01
Tap into your workforce to attain your vision.
02
Design an operating model that blueprints your journey from vision to value.
03
Click here to read more about these foundational strategies. Then go beyond the basics and keep exploring here.
How can environment,
rewards, and recognition
make your culture
transformation-ready?
How can investing in experience drive growth and profitability?
How can you maximize
the talent potential of your people—both employees
and leaders?
How do you make sure your strategy connects to the work that gets done?
What sort of ways of working
do you need to support your
operating model?
What are the changes to your operating model required to bring strategy to life?
How can processes
support your goals for operational efficiency?
How can your tech stack
help you become more
responsive and adaptive
to the market?
How can you ensure
that your approach
meets your growth and
efficiency objectives?
How can your strategy
help you balance
customer, workforce, and
operational needs?
back home
culture
As part of a global initiative to move to an “activity-based workplace,” the US office for the firm needed a change management strategy. The client wanted to be deliberate about the way in which cultural values and behaviors were embedded in the employee experience.
North Highland’s culture assessment concluded that a concerted focus on Teamwork, one of the eight culture drivers, would have the most impact. We provided actionable insights and realistic recommendations to inform the Change Strategy for the Teamwork culture driver plus the five supporting drivers that address related employee needs.
PEOPLE
TRANSFORMATION
DELIVERY
WAYS OF WORKING
Operating Model & Organizational Structures
PROCESS
DATA &
TECHNOLOGY
REVENUE
& COSTS
STRATEGY
& PURPOSE
Experiences are created through discrete interactions and culminate in a longer-term, end-to-end relationship. In today’s world of personalization, connectivity, and immediacy, there is little debate that experience is a vital source of differentiation—including along a transformation journey.
The people within your organization will make or break your ability to transform. They enable new ways of working, put processes into action, and adopt the necessary skills to bring your vision to life, forging an essential link across strategic aspirations, actions, and outcomes. By unleashing the power of your people, you can maximize the value of your transformation efforts, achieve your strategic aspirations, and strengthen your organization's muscle for adaption.
CULTURE
OPERATING Model & Organizational Structures
experience
process
TRANSFORMATION
DELIVERY
DATA & TECHNOLOGY
WAYS OF WORKING
REVENUE & COSTS
STRATEGY & Purpose
PEOPLE
EXPERIENCE
CLICK
GET STARTED
next
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
BY THE NUMBERS
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
GETTING STARTED
IN ACTION
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
BY THE NUMBERS
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
GETTING STARTED
IN ACTION
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
BY THE NUMBERS
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
GETTING STARTED
IN ACTION
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
BY THE NUMBERS
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
GETTING STARTED
IN ACTION
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
BY THE NUMBERS
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
GETTING STARTED
IN ACTION
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
BY THE NUMBERS
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
GETTING STARTED
IN ACTION
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
BY THE NUMBERS
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
GETTING STARTED
IN ACTION
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
BY THE NUMBERS
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
GETTING STARTED
IN ACTION
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
BY THE NUMBERS
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
GETTING STARTED
IN ACTION
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
BY THE NUMBERS
BY THE NUMBERS
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
WHAT WE KNOW
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
GETTING STARTED
IN ACTION
BY THE NUMBERS
WHAT WE KNOW
IN ACTION
GETTING STARTED
back
12%
CULTURE
experience
process
DATA & TECHNOLOGY
STRATEGY & Purpose
PEOPLE
WAYS OF WORKING
OPERATING Model &
Organizational Structures
TRANSFORMATION
DELIVERY
REVENUE & COSTS
June 2021 North Highland-sponsored survey of 200 business leaders at
organizations headquartered in the U.S. or U.K. and with annual revenues > $1B.
June 2021 North Highland-sponsored survey of 200 business leaders at
organizations headquartered in the U.S. or U.K. and with annual revenues > $1B.
June 2021 North Highland-sponsored survey of 200 business leaders at
organizations headquartered in the U.S. or U.K. and with annual revenues > $1B.
June 2021 North Highland-sponsored survey of 200 business leaders at
organizations headquartered in the U.S. or U.K. and with annual revenues > $1B.
June 2021 North Highland-sponsored survey of 200 business leaders at
organizations headquartered in the U.S. or U.K. and with annual revenues > $1B.
June 2021 North Highland-sponsored survey of 200 business leaders at
organizations headquartered in the U.S. or U.K. and with annual revenues > $1B.
June 2021 North Highland-sponsored survey of 200 business leaders at
organizations headquartered in the U.S. or U.K. and with annual revenues > $1B.
June 2021 North Highland-sponsored survey of 200 business leaders at
organizations headquartered in the U.S. or U.K. and with annual revenues > $1B.
June 2021 North Highland-sponsored survey of 200 business leaders at
organizations headquartered in the U.S. or U.K. and with annual revenues > $1B.
September 2020 North Highland-sponsored survey of > 700 business leaders at organizations headquartered in the U.S. or U.K. and with annual revenues > $1B.