Leading innovation

Innovation is multifaceted. New technologies are not always required to redefine market standards. Innovation is also the ability to anticipate market needs, to offer solutions instead of incremental product improvements, to develop new ways to reach out to customers, to combine proven solutions to new ones. Innovation necessitates an environment that fosters curiosity, versatility, and communication within the company, with its customers and suppliers.

How innovation is managed, controlled and practised directly influences a company’s innovation power. Over the decades, we have designed and enhanced numerous innovation projects. Stage-gate process? A thing of the past! Together with our customers, we work on embedding innovation in the company’s DNA. Innovation is not the task of a single department, but the entire organization. It requires flexible network structures that are both explorative and exploitative: discovering new opportunities as well as capitalizing on existing competencies.

We work with a variety of tools including scouting teams, boot camps, Silicon Valley expeditions, interlinked local innovation teams, think-in camps, innovation labs, local ambassador networks, satellite teams, ideation jams, customer experience journeys and innovation communities, to name a few.

Let us help you create your tailor-made Leading Innovation™ Initiative!

Boost efficiency

Corporate growth, whether organic or through mergers & acquisitions, requires continuous modifications of strategy and organization. Acquisitions, cooperations and integrations are complex processes, which can lead to inefficiencies, double structures, missing interfaces and outdated procedures. These adverse side-effects must be systematically examined and consequently eliminated.

With our proven and comprehensive efficiency enhancement programs, we provide you with a proven modular system for problem-solving. Within a clearly structured and synchronized process, performance and cost structures are examined, improvement measures are developed and swiftly implemented. Above all, it is essential to leverage synergies at the organizational interfaces and establish a sustainable process to ensure ongoing annual efficiency potential.

Efficient and effective processes are critical to success and rely on many factors. For example, the performance of an organization can be strengthened by proactively sharing the expertise of the individual areas and, thus, turning the efficiency initiative into a place of shared learning. It also promotes a sense of belonging within the company. As part of the efficiency initiative, we provide you with a variety of proven instruments at all levels, such as performance structure analysis, value creation analysis, total operational performance concepts or synergy performance processes.

Let us help you design your tailor-made Excellence™ Initiative to improve performance!

Redesign your organization

Dynamic and agile environments, sometimes require radical restructuring. Clear goals, quick decisions, as well as an understanding of those affected, are decisive for the implementation of such processes. Strategic changes and organizational adjustments, therefore, go hand in hand and must be coordinated in a meaningful way.

Successful implementation depends on clarifying challenging issues. Topics such as centralized/decentralized positioning, resource pooling, distribution of competencies, project-oriented vs functional work, local vs regional vs central synergies, the interplay of functions and creation of new units through spin-offs names just a few of these sensitive matters. Organizational and operational structures demand synchronistic design, and complexity can exponentially increase during this process. At K&C, we have decades of experience in designing sophisticated transformation processes. We know that a successful redesign can only succeed, if the top and middle management work together in a close and trusting manner.

Furthermore, it is also crucial to involve technical experts, even if they sometimes do not bear any relevant management responsibility. The better the alignment of relevant stakeholders in the design phase, the smoother and faster the implementation. Beyond developing organizational charts, we also cooperate with our clients to create structures that empower employees’ skills and expertise. We ensure this by tailoring our programs to the needs of our clients, e.g. through value mapping, RTSC concepts (Real-Time Strategic Change), Management Palaver, World Café, organizational surveys, radar interviews, various workshop formats and large group interventions. K&C possesses specific competencies to realize strategy development with large heterogeneous groups within a brief, compressed time frame.

Let us help you design your tailor-made Fit-for-Future™ Initiative to put your organization on solid footing!

Leadership & Performance

The strategy is in place, the organization is transparent, the processes are stable, the results are satisfactory. Nevertheless, you recognize your company has even more potential. Routine and everyday tasks are commonplace, people are satisfied with the status quo, and essential initiatives are only making moderate progress. You want to mobilize the organization to strengthen your vision for the future. You perceive inefficiencies in the teamwork, particularly at organizational interfaces, and in some cases, performance is lacking. You know where the journey must go, but you sense that your teams do not have the necessary drive.

With our Leadership & Performance Initiatives, we offer you a set of tools to solve this obstacle. The aim is to strengthen the leadership competencies of the management team and the extended leadership team: focus on the key leverages to improve performance. By working together with your team, we identify the relevant approaches to tune the organization for performance. It requires work on different levels and with various key personnel.

Clarifying the roles of managers is a solid basis for a joint alignment towards the defined goals. The objective is to “get everyone in one boat” and furthermore “ensure everyone is rowing in the same direction”. We use elements such as Think Week, Management Palaver, Leadership Summit as well as tools from our multi-layered modular system, which we use throughout our consulting portfolio.

Let us help you shape your tailor-made Leadership & Performance™ Initiative to make your company one of the most successful in the world.

Transform your culture

Soft elements are often those considered most challenging to master. How do you change a corporate culture? How do you change the values by which managers orient themselves? How do you encourage cooperation between areas that do not consider it necessary and worthwhile to collaborate? A factual dialogue lays the groundwork for cultural changes.

It’s about how to solve the tasks at hand. Cultural change is not independent of the work-related content. There is little contextual value in working on mutual trust in a high ropes course. Our cultural initiatives go directly to the core of your topics. We guide the organization to solve this challenge on its own by giving equal weight to the questions of what and how. Through this dualism, the organization learns how to solve problems more efficiently, thus applying its energy more purposefully.

The guiding principle of such an initiative can be diverse: It may aim to increase the speed and flexibility of the organization, or it may target how to deal with the increasing digitalization, or it may focus solely on the necessary collaboration in a particularly prominent project.

Let us help you create your tailor-made One Company™ Initiative to strengthen your business, and thus making it more homogeneous and resilient.