This is a Guest Blog by Mukesh Mathur, Senior Partner – BOD Consulting
The world of business undergoes constant changes every day – changing markets, technology, and customer preferences. Given the pace of change, traditional strategic planning and goal-setting approaches often fall short of adequately and appropriately addressing these demands. This is where the concept of Goal Based Strategy Office (GBSO) emerges as a beacon of adaptive and impactful growth.
GBSO is a breakthrough approach pioneered by BOD Consulting that enables organisations to achieve their highest impact goals for driving growth and sustained success. It follows an expert-led hyper-focused approach to help organisations achieve what matters most, right now.
The Need for GBSO
High Impact Goals (HIGs) lie at the heart of GBSO. HIGs are foundational outcomes that an organisation aims to achieve for sustained success and growth. GBSO follows an SOP-driven approach to set up new systems and build capabilities specific to organisations – be it transformational goals like business turnaround and brand transformation or creation goals like new business creation and new market creation.
The strength of GBSO lies in its three pillars.
The Three Pillars of GBSO
GBSO is built on three guiding pillars that form the bedrock of its success:
- Identifying and Prioritising Goals
The first step is to understand the ambitions of an organisation and then break them down into sharply-focused and easy-to-understand prioritised goals.
There can be three kinds of goals –
- Lifetime Goals: E.g., To be amongst the leading personal care companies in India with several category-leading brands in the portfolio
- Long Term Goals: E.g., To build a portfolio of successful personal care brands in the Indian Market.
- High Impact Goals in the Short Term: E.g., To launch and scale any one personal care brand
While the first two are aspirational goals with a timeline of 5-7 years, the third one refers to immediate goals that can be achieved in the next 1-2 years.
- Instilling Strategic Thinking and Planning
Organisations need to unlock strategic thinking and planning. GBSO complements leaders in evaluating options and identifying the right strategic initiatives for achieving the defined goal.
Providing research-based strategic inputs and driving alignment between teams for improved planning is the main focus of the implementation phase. This ensures that continued laser focus is maintained and bottlenecks are resolved timely.
- Institutionalising Systems and Processes
An integral part of strategy execution is defining suitable systems and processes. This facilitates a seamless structure and provides higher visibility to the leaders. Proper management of review systems, process workflows, team training, and the like ensures that everything runs smoothly without any breaks midway.
Once these systems and processes are institutionalised, the role of the Strategy Office is to track the progress of the strategic initiatives and how they impact the end goal. Timely strategic inputs are then provided as required, often necessary for course correction based on current realities.
GBSO in Action: Real-world Examples
The Dairy Dream
A regular dairy player emerged as a Top #2 brand alongside Amul in Uttar Pradesh by adopting the GBSO approach. By strategically developing specific goals and determining their timelines, for instance – Emerging as a preferred brand of milk and milk products in Central and Eastern UP, gaining dominant market share in Lucknow, a market where sales were stagnant for three years etc., the brand achieved 80% growth in sales within five years.
The D2C Journey
By diversifying into its first consumer-centric venture, the brand launched five stores within the first year, along with a mobile app, a web store and an at-home service creating a truly omnichannel digital-first experience, a first of its kind in India.
Following the GBSO approach can help organisations to achieve high growth as they achieve their well-defined goals with a strategic plan.
How to successfully implement a goal-based approach to growing the organisation?
There are three options available to leaders for implementing a goal-based approach to driving growth in their organisation –
- Manage without a separate team for driving goal-based strategy execution
An organisation can invest in coaching its leadership and training the management team on goal-based strategy execution. Together, they can ensure that the end goal is achieved.
- Set up an Independent Strategy Office
An external expert team can enable a goal-based approach to drive growth. The team will work closely with the business and functional leaders to define the strategic initiatives, ensuring seamless execution for achieving the end goal.
- Build a Strategy Office in-house
This requires hiring a Chief Strategy Officer along with 2-3 strategy managers and analysts to conduct studies, propose recommendations and drive strategy execution for achieving the end goal.
While all methods work, the objective is to select the most effective and efficient option from these.
Conclusion
The Goal-Based Strategy Office is a revolutionary approach that empowers organisations to bridge the gap between vision and reality. The approach equips organisations to identify, prioritise, and execute transformative goals precisely, enabling them to navigate rapidly changing landscapes with agility and purpose.
