After CNA and Connecticut General merged (Cigna), management needed to reduce expenses. Major consulting firms had already been through both companies several times but more cost reduction was needed. Additionally, morale was poor, fear was high and that was affecting the new company’s performance.
We had been developing an employee engagement process called IdeaSystem with Maritz Motivation that loosely “Americanized” the Japanese Kaizen. We successfully operated this unique employee process at Cigna and in just 12 weeks produced almost $50 million in documented savings for the company. Morale soared. The success of this program demonstrated that often employees know more about their company and their job than management or outsiders.
IBM was already 2 years into their restructuring. The HR department had engaged Watson Wyatt and Hewitt to make compensation plans for IBM North America Sales more performance driven. They came up with a comp plan of over 100 pages. The following year, IBM’s employee surveys indicated few sales people understood the plan or were changing their behavior as a result. Various communications firms were consulted to improve the presentation of the plan but IBM still wasn’t satisfied with the results.
We were hired to make sense of all these reports and plans. We knew that plan complexity confused salespeople. So we vastly simplified everything. We redesigned the plan so sales people could understand it and be motivated by earnings opportunities they understood. We rewrote the comp plan from 100 pages down to a 7 page 4-color booklet that employees loved and senior management adopted worldwide.
Later, IBM Software in Europe was losing market share to Oracle. The IBM software outperformed the oracle software in every test. IBM hired Mckinsey to analyze the EMEA marketplace to find out why IBM was losing market share to a competitor with an inferior product. $15million later, McKinsey delivered their report and began implementation across Europe. Nothing happened. More changes were made and still nothing happened. So IBM started firing software executives.
We were introduced to the newly hired VP EMEA Sales.We told to him there was a solution that everyone else had overlooked. He hired our team and 15 weeks later, having visited every key market city in the region, we presented our report. 15 months after that, IBM had gained 12 market share points from Oracle. This represented more than a billion dollars.
The specifics of our report are not as important as the methodology we used. Our point of view was that those IBM employees on the ground, facing customers and facing Oracle could tell us what they needed to win against Oracle. We had to create an environment where they felt willing enough to tell us. Our ability to create such an environment was the key to the successful turnaround of the software company.
Recently, we developed and sold the energy development deal between Doosan, the US Navy and local utilities to build a green $30M utility-scale generation project for the US Navy Resilient Energy Solutions Department at the Navy’s nuclear attack submarine base at Groton, CT. We obtained creative financing for the Navy and a PPA acceptable to the utility.
Today, we’re still focused on sales force effectiveness ,green energy development, consulting and employee engagement. We have comprehensive industry experience in Renewable Energy, Healthcare, Technology and start-up companies. We use the concepts of Team, Speed and Simplicity to get you on your way, right away.
We are equally at home in the boardroom or the boiler room.
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