“To give away money is an easy matter and in any man’s power. But to decide to whom to give it and how large and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man’s power nor an easy matter.” Aristotle

Corporations can be a source of grant funding. Corporations and local businesses donate grants because they care about some particular issue or issues to the point of wanting to get involved. They have the financial capacity and they want to contribute to the community or society and see positive outcomes.  Oftentimes, these efforts will be aligned with their Corporate Social Responsibility programs.

Corporate grant programs sponsored by large, multinational corporations may look identical to the grant programs run by foundations. This includes a formal application process and well-defined programmatic areas. Other companies choose to limit their giving to a handful of local nonprofits with support consisting of one-time cash gifts or in-kind donations of goods or services.

Organizing Corporate Giving Programs require serious study and consideration. Companies have to properly define their objectives and the reasons why it plans to come up with giving programs. Setting up a Grant Funding Program requires having sufficient understanding, knowledge, and systems in place to make it run successfully.

Corporate Philanthropy: Taking the Right Journey

Corporate Philanthropy is the act of corporation in promoting the welfare of communities through charitable donations of funds or time. Corporations must be clear on what type of support it will offer and the ways of promoting these programs. When this is done, it is most effective for the company to establish its Corporate Giving Program and set the right direction for its Corporate Philanthropic Journey.

Having a good understanding of the types of Corporate Philanthropy can better guide corporations to take a good start in its Corporate Philanthropic Journey. Corporations can have a choice of whether they provide cash gifts, non-cash or donations of goods and services.

Either way, corporations initiate giving programs to achieve specific objectives and reasons. Corporations differ from foundations. Foundations make grants to further a mission that has a social good at its heart. On the other, corporate donors make gifts to complement or advance business interests.

Jumpstarting the Corporate Philanthropic Journey

Every corporation dedicated to undertaking its Corporate Philanthropic Journey wants to give it a good start. Hence, it is important for corporations to engage in various ways to promote its Corporate Giving Programs. Creating awareness is essentially important as it creates interest from target beneficiaries and moves them to action.

Corporate Giving Programs can also be promoted through partnerships and collaborations. It is a tactical way of directly informing target proponents of the company’s Corporate Giving Program.

Creating awareness of the Company’s Corporate Giving Programs can be achieved using six strategic approaches.

Interested in gaining more understanding of Corporate Philanthropy? You can learn more and download an editable PowerPoint about Corporate Philanthropy Primer here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a management consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Most Transformation initiatives fail to achieve their anticipated objectives.

Change Management is all about engaging and rallying people — at all levels in the organization — to make the transition and sustain that change. It is critical to ensure that the entire workforce is eager and ready to embrace the required new behaviors. More often than not, the technical side of a change initiative is well planned, but it’s the implementation part that fails — particularly, changing the mindsets and behaviors of the entire workforce to enable change to stick.

Managing change is not an occasional affair; it is an iterative process that works on motivating human behavior to accept and adjust to a desired state of mind. The process is naturally evolving as it adapts in accordance with the feedback from the people.

Change Management demands a thorough yet organized approach to enable the “people side” of change to work — essential for accommodating and sustaining Business Transformations. This entails assisting people incorporate new mindsets, processes, policies, practices, and behaviors.

A methodical approach to make the entire workforce accept and support change constitutes 8 critical levers:

1. Defining the Change
2. Creating a Shared Need
3. Developing a Shared Vision
4. Leading the Change
5. Engaging and Mobilizing Stakeholders
6. Creating Accountability
7. Aligning Systems and Structures
8. Sustaining the Change

Now, let’s discuss the first 4 levers in detail.

1. Defining the Change

The first step entails outlining the rationale, scope, and results of the change initiative for the enterprise, key departments, and roles. There is a need to define critical elements, including the requirements from the initiative, the execution planning, and the adjustments needed to encourage people to work better.

The project sponsors need to clearly outline the essence of the proposed Transformation initiative, to realistically embed Change Management into the design of the program, and develop effective Change Management plans. An initial baseline of the expected effect of the program on people should be performed. The baseline also helps analyze the impact of the change program — in terms of skills inventory, head-count indications, adjustments in accountabilities and relationships, shifts in incentives and pay structures, and future learning needs.

2. Creating a Shared Need

Once the change and its impact has been delineated, the next thing to do is to create a shared understanding of the rationale for Transformation across the organization. To create a shared need for the Transformation endeavor, the change sponsor needs to build awareness of the necessity for change amongst the senior team, key stakeholders, and the entire organization; demonstrate to the people the benefits of change; and set up a feedback mechanism across the organization. The alignment afforded by developing a shared need for change helps build a strong footing for Transformation.

3. Developing a Shared Vision

An essential element of implementing transformation entails delineating a clear vision that outlines critical actions and the anticipated outcomes. It helps in encouraging and involving the workforce in the Transformation initiative, giving them a sense of purpose by becoming a part of something bigger. The vision of the organization after Transformation should be coherent with the company values and mission.

4. Leading the Change

This lever entails developing change leadership and implementation skills needed to drive and enable sustainable change. Engagement and commitment of senior leaders is essential for leading change. They are responsible for planning their and the entire workforce’s actions, demonstrating or role modeling the new mindsets and actions, designating program sponsors — e.g., business unit leaders who are enthusiastic about the Transformation initiative and also act as change agents — motivating others to support transformation, and setting up a road map for the change leaders to steer the organization to achieve the anticipated performance milestones.

Interested in learning more about these levers to Change Management? You can download an editable PowerPoint on 8 Levers to Change Management here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Going into a Merger and Acquisition (M&A) is never an easy task. The process of M&A is like trying to complete a large puzzle when your right hand and your left hand have never worked together. In fact, Mergers and Acquisitions revolve around a plethora of moving parts. Going into this direction can be complicated. Suddenly, there are two companies and additional stakeholders that now need to fairly and seamlessly work and communicate together in order to bring the deal to completion.

But what happens after the deal has seemingly crossed the finish line. When this happens, there is the Post Merger Integration or M&A Integration. After the financial transaction, Post-merger Integration (PMI) is the process of bringing 2 or more companies together with the aim of maximizing synergies to ensure that the deal lives up to its predicted value. However, easy as it may seem, there are problems in Mergers and Acquisitions that can often cause deals to fail. Companies do not want a deal that only looks good on paper or results in a semi-integrated company.

To be able to live up to predicted value, a Post-merger Integration Planning must start right at the beginning of the deal.

Understanding Post-merger Integration

Post-merger Integration (PMI) or M&A Integration is the process of bringing 2 or more companies together.
It is what happens after the deal has crossed the finish line. In the PMI, our objective is to maximize synergies to ensure that the deal lives up to its predicted value.

In starting the PMI, Post-merger Planning should be done at the beginning of the deal and must be established before the deal closes. Any problems that may arise in Mergers and Acquisitions must be dealt with immediately since failure to properly address them can cause deals to fail or unable to extract true value from deals.

The 4 Types of Post Acquisition Integration

It helps a lot if we have a good understanding of the different types of Post Acquisition Integration to better manage deals.

Understanding the different types of Post Acquisition Integration will give the organization a better idea of what direction to take when it comes to Mergers and Acquisitions. It is best for companies to have a good hold of where they want to go and want to achieve taking into consideration current conditions and business considerations. When these are all laid out, greater are the chances that the right type of Post Acquisition Integration is undertaken.

Taking the Right Step Forward to Mergers and Acquisitions

Taking the road to Mergers and Acquisitions requires organizations to keep away from common mistakes. This is possible with the use of M&A Integrated Solutions.

The use of M&A Integrated Solutions and Post-merger Integration Tool allows organizations to increase the chance of a successful Post-merger Integration. With the use of these tools, users are enabled to plan properly from day one and the very beginning of the diligence process. Teams have access to all files and data prior to the deal closing to spot areas of concern and plan accordingly. Further, users can set cross-stream dependencies across multiple functions.

With M&A Integrated Solutions, it facilitates the use of a better process that maximizes deal value. Organizations just need to have a good understanding of the Post-merger (M & A) Integration Process to get the greatest value.

Interested in gaining more understanding of Post-merger Integration? You can learn more and download an editable PowerPoint about Post-merger Integration (PMI) Primer here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a management consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Transforming a product-driven firm to a customer-driven enterprise is inevitable in order to stay ahead in today’s extremely competitive markets. The days of mass marketing, mass media communications, and little-to-none direct interface with customers are long gone. The emphasis, now, should be on maximizing customer relationships and becoming customer-driven organizations rather than merely selling products. The technological advancements of this age offer potent tools for organizations to utilize in order to engage with the customers directly; gather and mine information; and tailor their products and services appropriately.

Leading organizations are making huge investments in data analytics and transforming their strategies to focus on the customers’ evolving needs. They are striving hard to improve their customer retention and deepen their relationships utilizing rich customer insights, tailoring products according to the personalized needs of the customers, and presenting the offerings in a variety of store formats.

The Customer Department

To become customer-centric organizations, companies need to transform their traditional marketing function into a new unit called the “Customer Department.” The Customer Department should be created to deliver maximum profits to the customers and nurturing customer relationships instead of pushing products.

This necessitates transforming the organizational structure, culture, strategy, and reward programs in line with the shift in focus from managing transactions to cultivating customer relationships. Specifically, there is a need to add the position of Chief Customer Officer (CCO) — under the CEO — and various Customer Managers underneath the CCO. The roles and responsibilities of these positions should be:

Chief Customer Officer (CCO)

The most prominent shift in a customer-centric organization is replacing the traditional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) role with the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) role. Reporting to the CEO, the CCO is primarily responsible for devising and executing the customer relationship strategy, directing all the client-facing roles, and fostering a customer-driven culture in the organization. The main tasks of the CCO position include ensuring smooth flow of customer information, increasing productivity utilizing various metrics, and regularly interacting with the customers to understand their concerns.

Customer Managers

In a customer-centric organization, the Customer Managers (CMs) are in charge of various customer segments. They are accountable for enhancing the value of a customer relationship by ascertaining customers’ product needs. To make this role effective, there is a need to realign resources — people, budgets, authority — from product managers to the CMs.

The main tasks of the CM position include defining customer needs, extracting and interpreting customer insights utilizing various sources — e.g., mining customer forums, blogs, and online purchasing data — , and striving to improve the lives of the customers.

Additional Responsibilities of the Customer Department

Customer-centric organizations make the Customer Department accountable for some of the critical customer-facing functions which were once considered an integral part of the Marketing Department. These functions include:

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
2. Market Research
3. Research & Development (R&D)
4. Customer Service

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Traditionally, the CRM function belongs to the Information Technology Department owing to the technicalities involved in managing the CRM systems. The function demands evaluating the customer requirements and behaviors — which is a core function of the Customer Department alongside gathering and analyzing data necessary to execute a customer-development strategy.

Market Research

In customer-centric organizations, the Market Research function goes all the way from the marketing unit to other units that deal with customers — e.g., Finance for payments, Distribution for delivery. These organizations take a more granular view of customers’ behaviors, and gather and incorporate clients’ feedback to further improve customer lifetime value and equity.

Research & Development (R&D)

The R&D function should also report to the Customer Department, as, nowadays, the traditional R&D-driven new product development models are conceding to creative collaboration between the client (users) and producers. It’s not a good idea anymore to pack tons of features into a product and cause feature fatigue to customers. What’s more appropriate is to seek and incorporate customers’ input into product features by involving them into the product design process.

Customer Service (CS)

CS is another function that should be handled by the Customer Department to guarantee quality of service and to nurture long-term relationships. This important function isn’t worth outsourcing overseas as this often causes negative impact to the clients and organizations alike, due to poor customer service.

Interested in learning more about Customer Metrics, Customer Department, and Customer-centric Organizations? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Customer-centric Organizations: The Customer Department here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Companies face increasing pressure from governments, competitors, and employees to play a leading role in addressing a wide array of environmental, social, and governance issues in a company’s supply chain. It could range from climate change to obesity to human rights.

For the past 30 years, companies have responded by developing corporate social responsibility or sustainability initiatives to fulfill their contract with society by addressing these issues.

However, gathering the data needed to justify sustained, strategic investment in programs can be difficult.  Yet, without this information, executives and investors often see programs as separate from a company’s core business or unrelated to its shareholder value. While there are companies that have made progress tracking operational metrics or social indicators, they have difficulty linking such metrics and indicators to a real financial impact.

Needless to say, there are companies that are creating great value through environmental, social, and governance activities.  Increased sales, decreased costs, and reduced risks are being achieved.  Environmental, social, and governance programs can create value in many other ways. We just need to know where and how.

What is Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or sustainability initiatives are undertaken to fulfill contracts with society to respond to environmental issues. Environmental, social, and governance refer to a broader set of CSR Programs.

Sustaining strategic investments in CSR Programs can be a challenge but there are already leading companies that are generating real value through environmental, social, and governance activities.

The Dynamic Ways of Creating Value

CSR Programs can create shareholder value. It is just important that companies must broaden their legitimacy in societies where they operate.

1. Growth. As a source of value, Growth can be expressed in terms of New Markets, New Products, New Customers, Market Share, and Innovation. When this is created, it can deliver higher brand loyalty, reputation, and goodwill with stakeholders.
2. Return on Invested Capital (ROIC). ROIC is generated when there is operational efficiency and workforce efficiency. When this is achieved, it can result in better workforce skills and increased productivity through participation in ESG activities.
3. Risk Management. Risk Management is a source of value. It can be achieved when risk is lowered when compliance with regulatory requirements are achieved.  Public support is achieved and the ability of your company to secure consistent, long-term, and sustainable access to safe, high-quality raw materials and products are established.
4. Management Excellence. Management Excellence can have an impact on leadership development, adaptability, and long-term strategic view. These are 3 key areas that investors consider most important when evaluating potential partnerships.  With Management Excellence, a value can be generated from these areas.

A Look at IBM: A Clear Example of CSR as a Source of Value

IBM has been recognized globally as one of the leading companies when it comes to Information Technology.  In creating new markets, IBM used Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Toolkit to develop a track record with local stakeholders, including local governments and NGOs.  Free web-based resources on business management were provided to SMEs in developing economies. A total of 30 SME Toolkit sites were developed in 16 languages.

As a result of this initiative, IBM’s reputation and relationships in new markets improved.   Likewise, the relationship with companies that are potential customers was developed.  The strategic approach of IBM in creating markets through its CSR has provided IBM much value in creating and developing relationships which are essential in new markets.

Interested in gaining more understanding of sources of value to CSR programs? You can learn more and download an editable PowerPoint about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): Sources of Value here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a management consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Changing the behaviors of people is the foremost issue with every transformation initiative.

Nudge theory is a novel Change Management model that underscores the importance of understanding the way people think, act, and decide. The model assists in encouraging human imagination and decision making, and transforming negative behaviors and influences on people. The approach helps understand and change human behavior, by analyzing, improving, designing, and offering free choices for people, so that their decisions are more likely to produce helpful outcomes for the others and society in general.

Nudge theory helps reform existing (often extremely unhealthy) choices and influences on people. The theory is quite effective in curtailing resistance and conflict resulting from using autocratic ways to change human behavior. The model promotes indirect encouragement and enablement — by designing choices which encourage positive helpful decisions — and avoids direct enforcement. For instance, playing a ‘room-tidying’ game with a child rather than instructing her/him to tidy the room; improving the availability and visibility of litter bins rather than erecting signs with a warning of fines.

Organizations are increasingly using behavioral economics to optimize their employee and client behavior and well-being. Nudge units or behavioral science teams are being set up in the public and corporate sectors to influence people to address pressing issues. For instance, to increase customer retention by changing the language of support center staff to motivate customers to consider long-term benefits of a product; or to make employees to follow safety procedures by placing posters of watching eyes to remind them of the criticality of the measure.

An effective Nudge initiative necessitates much more than deploying a few experts in heuristics and statistics. The senior leadership should lay out a conducive environment for successful behavioral transformation. This entails assisting the Nudge unit to focus, place it appropriately, create awareness, train and de-bias people, implement effective rewards, and follow high ethical standards.

The leadership needs to think about and prepare to tackle 6 key challenges Nudge units face when implementing effective behavioral transformation initiatives:

1. What should be the focus of the Nudge unit?
2. Should the Nudge unit be placed at the headquarters or at the business unit level?
3. Which resources be made part of the Nudge unit?
4. What are the critical success factors to consider for the unit?
5. How to communicate the results and early wins?
6. What should be done to tackle skepticism and resistance to change?

Leaders who are able to confront these challenges improve the chances that the unit’s nudges will cause real change in the organization and in its productivity.

Let’s, now, dive deeper into the first 3 key challenges.

What should be the focus of the Nudge unit?

The foremost action in creating a Nudge team is to clearly spell out the value proposition for the unit. The leadership needs to define the purpose of creating a Nudge unit. They need to clearly outline whether the Nudge team will focus on employees, on customers, or on both. For instance, the purpose of its creation could be to deal with workforce motivation, to make better decisions in boardrooms, to increase the internal capabilities, or to improve the behavior of employees. The focus on customer issues, for example, entails encouraging better pension provision, inculcating behavioral science into the marketing mix, or to analyze the experiences of customers and employees — e.g., in-store service initiatives, digital operations, and HR processes.

Should the Nudge unit be placed at the headquarters or at the business unit level?

The second challenge is to decide where to deploy the Nudge unit. The placement of the Nudge unit depends on the strategic purpose of creating the unit. At some companies, it is housed centrally within the corporate headquarters as a global Nudge operations center; a few have accommodated the unit within the R&D or marketing department; some have benefited by moving the unit away from the corporate center so as to be closer to products and services; whereas other practitioners believe that the customer-focused behavioral science team should sit within the product management domain.

Regardless of where the Nudge unit resides, its flexibility and assimilation with other methods of behavioral change — e.g., cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, and personality-trait science — are critical.

Which resources be made part of the Nudge unit?

Another critical element for the success of the Nudge unit is hiring and deployment of right resources. At the commencement of the program when key capabilities are typically not available in-house, most organizations hire people from the outside for their Nudge units. A few companies have recruited solely from the in-house due to the criticality of institutional knowledge and the long learning curve required to acquire it, whereas some have recruited across different geographies. On average, the unit comprises of 3 to 8 members, however, larger organizations can have more people scattered globally.

The ideal composition of the Nudge team is to include behavioral scientists and specialists in psychology, marketing, and advanced data analytics. The team should include people with the right attitude and abilities — e.g., curiosity, can-do attitude, problem solving, entrepreneurial mindset, ownership, and communication skills.

Interested in learning more about the Nudge Theory? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Nudge Theory: Key Challenges here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Organizations struggle to develop a simple set of guidelines that makes it easier for employees, regardless of position or level, to be confident of their decisions to meet competing standards of organizations for effective and ethical decision making.

The traditional decision making model taught in most business ethics programs is often beyond the reading comprehension of 25% of the employees’ population. Hence, an alternative model is necessary.

Employees are called upon to make decisions in the normal course of their job. Organizations cannot function effectively if employees are not empowered to make decisions consistent with their positions and responsibilities.

Further, the decision maker has to be confident in the soundness of his decisions. Every decision should be tested against the organization’s policies and values, applicable laws and regulations, as well as the individual employee’s definition of what is right, fair, good, and acceptable.

With these realities, an alternative decision-making model is imperative to address current realities.

The Rise of the Ethical Decision Making Model

To become an Ethical Organization, having a decision making model grounded on foundational ethical decision making is paramount.  An Ethical Decision Making Model ensures that the ethical issues inherent in a routine business situation could effectively be surfaced while making it easy for people in the organization to understand and use. To make it more effective, PLUS filters must be embedded within the process.

The ethical component of the decision making takes the form of a set of filters. At key steps in the process, considerations are run through the filters and separate the ethical conations from the remainder of the decision.

The PLUS Filters: What Really Are They?

PLUS Filters are ethics filters that have adapted to mnemonic word PLUS. PLUS is the mnemonic of Policies, Legal, Universal, and Self. The integration of PLUS Filters in the decision making process is best achieved when there are effective communication and formal mechanism in place.

The PLUS Filters are applied in each of the steps in the decision making process.

P = Policies

• Is it consistent with my organization’s policies, procedures, and guidelines?

L = Legal

• Is it acceptable under the applicable laws and regulations?

U = Universal

• Does it conform to the universal principles/values my organization has adopted?

S = Self

• Does it satisfy my personal definition of right, good, and fair?

The PLUS Filters and Its Application

Integration of PLUS Filters in decision making is best achieved with effective communication and formal mechanism in place.

Let us look at the first step: Defining the Problem.

In defining the problem, we aim to define the difference between the expected and/or desired outcomes and actual outcomes. With the PLUS application, PLUS surfaced the ethical issues and ask the question, “Does the existing situation violate any of the PLUS considerations?”

When the PLUS Filters are applied, this determines if the ethical components of the decision are being surfaced or satisfied.

The use of PLUS Filters in the decision making process can be your barometer in determining if decisions made are within accepted ethical boundaries agreed upon by your company and the environment that the company revolves in.

Interested in gaining more understanding of creating an Ethical Organization through the PLUS Decision Making Model? You can learn more and download an editable PowerPoint about Ethical Organization: PLUS Decision Making Model here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a management consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Value-Based Management (VBM) has been regarded traditionally as a tool to help investors evaluate firms, optimize performance management, and maximize shareholder value.

However, there are mixed opinions on whether to utilize VBM as a mandatory investment or management tool. Many investors, analysts, and executives, to this day, are skeptical of the influence and role of VBM in confronting the dot-com bubble or other financial downturns. They are even cynical of the efficacy of VBM as a robust management approach for the future or its effectiveness in creating competitive advantage for them.

The following are some shortcomings associated with the traditional VBM approaches that leaders should negotiate:

• An inadequate link between VBM practices and capital markets realities — absence or lack of analysis of the capital markets to expose gaps between a company’s intrinsic value and actual stock price.
• Aligning VBM with the organizational systems and its culture for value creation.
• A broken process for managing the controls that govern value creation — traditional VBM offers rich insights on managing economic principles, but lacks a process on how to further align strategic, cultural, and behavioral levers.

Value Creation Framework

The lack of trust in the effectiveness of VBM necessitates formulating a more thorough, fact-based approach to executing VBM. In developing a value creation agenda, it is quite uncomplicated to conceptually convince managers and employees that it is their main shared focus, but the core challenge is to devise a practical and integrated implementation approach.

The Value Creation Framework depends on 4 value creation levers that senior management can pull in order to effectively achieve their value creation goal. These levers are not autonomous and need to be activated in tandem:

• Operational Effectiveness
• Competitive Strategy
• Portfolio Management
• Investor Strategy

The framework first stresses the management team to agree on the shared aspirations, prioritized levers, and how the headquarters activities are to be aligned with the business units. This entails revisiting the assumptions, priorities, decisions, tools, and culture at all levels across an organization to harness VBM to achieve improved value creation. The framework warrants the VBM approach to be embraced as a culture to maximize value creation — which is measured in Relative Total Shareholder Return.

Relative Total Shareholder Return (RTSR)

Focusing and aligning the organizations around a shared mission is important for the leadership. Clearly laid out, compelling vision and aspirations — that are reinforced daily — have a profound positive impact on an organization’s value creation potential.

Value creation best practices necessitate establishing a single, long-term goal — the Relative Total Shareholder Return (RTSR) performance. The Relative Total Shareholder Return reflects a firm’s capital gains plus dividend yield relative to a peer group or market index.

The RTSR concept is not new, but practically most companies find it hard to implement RTSR as a goal-setting tool. The RTSR should be clearly quantified and communicated across the board as a long-term goal. The RTSR aspirations motivate and empower line management to work as entrepreneurs to achieve it, set objective targets, and connect business unit management to capital markets discipline. If done right, RTSR is a useful method to specify and communicate a firm’s objectives and the supporting execution plans.

Measuring RTSR Objective

Measuring the RTSR goal achievement at the corporate level can be done by ranking a firm’s TSR against its peers TSR. A RTSR target can be set to analyze the effect of corporate and business unit plans. This can be done by quantifying a subjective goal — e.g., top half or top quartile TSR — into a specific number. The calculations warrant developing a forward-looking RTSR target on the following 3 footings:

• Anticipated 5-year company cost of equity — to gather an investor’s view of the risk-adjusted average expected return that a firm or market index is priced to deliver.
• Anticipated spread to achieve relative TSR goal — calculating stretched, above-average TSR goal needs personal discretion. It can be done through superior performance improvements instead of maintaining superior absolute levels of performance.
• Forward looking 5-year RTSR target — calculation of this goal requires 2 key considerations: RTSR probability of reaching above-median TSR and benchmarks to meet a cumulative top quartile TSR target over different time periods.

Interested in learning more about the Value Creation Framework? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Value Creation: Relative Total Shareholder Return here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

In today’s business environment, management consulting firms must be ready to address client challenges and needs that will transform their business by 10 or 100 times. Tools and methods must be scaled up to ensure applicability to the widest possible audience globally.

The Consulting Workshop Series provides a good understanding of the 10 Methods of conducting Workshops that are custom designed to fit specific workshop objectives. Different methods are developed for the purpose of providing organizations the most appropriate tool necessary to support organizations to achieve their strategic goals and targets.

If it is the management’s goal to facilitate collaborative dialogue and the sharing of knowledge and ideas to create a living network of conversation and action, then the World Cafe is the perfect method to undertake.

Discovering World Café

World Café is a creative process for facilitating collaborative dialogue and the sharing of knowledge and ideas to create a living network of conversation and action. Its primary objective is for ideation and to share ideas.

World Café is a simple, effective, and flexible format for hosting large group dialogue. By using World Café, organizations can plan meetings and gatherings where a unique environment is created with surprising and useful outcomes occurring.

In a nutshell, World Café is a process of helping people to remember what they already know how to do: to convene conversations that matter.

The Approach to World Café

World Café can easily be organized as it just needs one person to put all preparations together: the Café Facilitator.

1. Preparation. As in every event, preparation is the most critical. In World Café, everything hinges on Café Facilitator. Hence, it is important that enough time is spent in the selection of Café Facilitator. A Café Facilitator sees to it that the guidelines for dialogue and engagement are put into action. He/she is responsible in so many ways. There is a need to work with the Planning Team to determine the purpose of the Café, the name of the Café, and framing the invitations. When everything is organized, the Café Facilitator is the one in charge in posing the questions or themes for rounds of conversation and make sure that the question is visible to everyone on the overhead, flipchart, or on cards at each table.  Playing a vital role in World Café preparation and actual event, the Café Facilitator can make the difference between an interesting conversation and a breakthrough thinking.
2.  The World Café Event. This is your main event. The World Café is focused on facilitating collaborative dialogue. Conducted in several rounds, it makes sure that sufficient ideas are generated and shared.

The application of World Café is so vast in terms of use. It is very useful when there is a need to engage large groups in an authentic dialogue process. When we need to generate input, share knowledge, stimulate innovation thinking, and explore action possibilities around real-life issues and questions, World Café is the most suitable amongst various methods in the Consulting Workshop Series.
World Café can even deepen relationships and mutual ownership of outcomes in an existing group. It can create meaningful interaction between a speaker and the audience. In fact, it can effectively engage people in authentic conversation whether they are meeting for the first time or have established relationships with each other.

Like any other approaches and methods, World Café is also most suitable for specific conditions and less in selected conditions. When you are already driving toward an already determined solution or answer, World Café may not be one for you.

Interested in gaining more understanding of the World Café workshop technique? You can learn more and download an editable PowerPoint about Consulting Workshop Series: World Cafe here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a management consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is an organization’s commitment to produce an overall positive impact on society. CSR encompasses sustainability, social and economic impact, and business ethics. It makes a company socially accountable of its operations, stakeholders, and the public. Businesses undertake CSR programs to benefit society while boosting their own brands.

CSR affects every aspect of business operations and functions. Encouraging equal opportunities; partnering with organizations practicing ethical business methods; putting part of earnings back into environment, health, and safety initiatives; and taking care of communities and charity are all examples of CSR initiatives.

Communities, customers, employees, and media consider CSR vital and gauge companies based on these initiatives. Executives of leading companies consider CSR as an opportunity to deal with critical issues innovatively, reinforce their organizations, and serve the society simultaneously.

The Need for CSR Implementation

Organizations need to come up with a robust approach to unlock potential benefits and value from CSR for them and for the society. The organizations practicing Corporate Social Responsibility do that with one of the following 4 objectives in mind:

• Philanthropy: These initiatives (e.g. corporate donations) make the companies and society feel good, but produce low value for the business — questionable repute building benefits to companies, but offer much to society.
• Propaganda: These CSR initiatives are predominantly geared towards promoting a company’s standing, but offer little real value for the society. This form of CSR is more of advertisement and becomes risky if there are any gaps between the firm’s commitments and actions.
• Pet Projects: Some companies engage in CSR initiatives that support the personal interests of senior executives. These initiatives are much touted about, but are actually of little value to the business or community.
• Smart Partnering: These initiatives concentrate on common themes between the business and the community. Organizations, in this case, create innovative solutions by drawing synergies from partnerships to tackle major issues concerning all stakeholders.

Among these objectives, Smart Partnering offers maximum opportunities for shared value creation and finding solutions to crucial business and social challenges. Whereas for the society, smart partnering helps create more employment opportunities, improve livelihoods, and enhance the quality of life.

Guiding Principles for CSR Initiative Selection

An effective way for the companies to maximize benefits of their CSR efforts is to map the current initiatives; identify the objectives, benefits, and resources responsible for realizing value from those initiatives; and define the projects valuable for addressing key strategic challenges.

Pet projects, philanthropy, or propaganda are easy to plan and execute. However, the real issue is to implement CSR opportunities that bring value for the business as well as society (smart partnering). This goal can be achieved by applying these 3 guiding principles:

1. Focus on the right segments

Real opportunities lie in the segments where the business collaborates with and influences the society the most. These segments help the business interpret mutual dependencies and uncover maximum mutual benefit.

2. Recognize challenges and benefits

After finalizing the opportunity segments, it is imperative to appreciate the potential for mutual benefit. The key is to find the right balance between the business and community and recognize the challenges that both sides face.

3. Find the right partners

Collaboration with right partners — who benefit from business endeavors and capabilities of each other — creates a win–win situation for both sides and motivates them to achieve mutual value. Sustainable collaboration demands long-term alliances and deeper insights on the strengths of each other.

These principles are helpful in selecting appropriate CSR opportunities, identifying societal and business needs to be addressed, and the required resources and capabilities.

The Case for CSR Benefits

The goal of unlocking mutual benefits — associated with CSR (specifically Smart Partnering) — is critical for long-term success of the program. As required by any other strategic initiative, the mutual value creation objective needs to be carefully assessed based on the true value-creation potential, prioritized, designed, staffed, and audited.

The next step is to outline the list of potential benefits for the business and community. A well-defined business case and a compelling story immensely helps involve and gain commitment from the senior leadership, investors, and employees.

Interested in learning more about how to tap CSR opportunities effectively? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Opportunities here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.