The Soft Landing book explains how obstacles prevent implementation of changes to reduce environmental risks, and proposes strategies to overcome them.
This paper describes the global environmental status and trends, offers some explanations for why responses are slow and weak, examines the implications for New Zealand, and proposes a strategy development agenda to reduce risks and take advantage of opportunities.
Rick’s thesis argues for revision of the dominant paradigm that provides the default assumptions used for theoretical and policy analysis that affects long-term economic and environmental outcomes. The proposed paradigm changes can be used to develop a theoretically sound strategy to reduce the risk of environmental crisis.
The report proposes 14 policy directions to improve the success of internationalising New Zealand businesses.
This report assesses New Zealand’s economic performance and identifies priorities to improve prosperity.
The paper proposes that accelerated roll-out of e-learning to low decile schools and improving the school-to-work transition will materially reduce youth unemployment and resulting social issues.
This report describes opportunities for New Zealand to realise economic benefits from an improved innovation ecosystem and increased investment in R&D.
Single measures (such as Gross Domestic Product per capita) are really important, but they can never tell the whole story. New Zealand need to understand that whole story if we’re going to be able to identify linkages, set priorities and make good choices. The NZahead report card therefore seeks to arm New Zealanders with a Big Picture view of our overall, long-term performance – social, economic, and environmental.
Addressing climate change, and meeting New Zealand’s Paris Agreement commitments, will require our electricity system to begin planning and adapting for the future needs of our country, today.
What challenges and opportunities lie ahead? How can we enable our country’s sustainable energy future?
The Port Future Study recommended a long term strategy for the provision of facilities to accommodate sea-based imports and exports and the cruise industry flowing to and from Auckland and its wider region in an economically, socially, culturally and environmentally acceptable manner, taking into account competing uses for city centre waterfront space and the various impacts of options.
This paper aims to provide background information for those conducting the 2013 review of New Zealand’s retirement income and for New Zealanders who wish to participate in the consultation processes. The content will also provide other interested New Zealanders with a perspective on the implications of global trends for the long-term future context for retirement in New Zealand.
Our work with a leading consumer services company resulted in a doubling of EBITDA and an increase in net promoter score of 20% over 2 years. We diagnosed the challenges facing the company, identified opportunities for improvement, developed a portfolio of initiatives and upskilled the client team to deliver them effectively. Outcomes included strengthening competitive advantage, restoring profitability and renewing growth, while maintaining morale through the transition.
A leading consumer services company was experiencing intensifying competition and deteriorating profitability. Over the course of 12 months, we worked with the client to strengthen competitive advantage, restore profitability and renew growth.
We started with a thorough diagnostic of the situation to determine where the focus of effort should go and to build the case for change. Our investigations revealed that the falling profitability was driven by rising costs and flattening revenues, despite investment in added capacity. The reduction in revenue growth was due in part to increased competition from new entrants, and exacerbated by insufficient customer orientation.
Competitor analysis revealed that new entrants were creating a direct threat, and also increasing price competition from existing players who were caught in the middle.
We identified and qualified a range of opportunities to address this competitive challenge, including improving customer orientation, new product offers, pricing changes, reducing costs, , and streamlining the organisation. Once future profitability was assured an outlet growth strategy was launched.
Our client offered a high quality product and good customer service, but we identified that they were not customer-oriented. Opportunities for improvement included more user-friendly sales processes and terms, and enhanced focus on the customer experience.
We found opportunities for cost reduction in branch operations and central support. At the branch level, we increased transparency and effectiveness of performance incentives by initiating improved metrics. By de-averaging costs, we were able to assess each outlet, identify best practice, and adopt it across the organisation. At the centre, we identified opportunities for overhead reduction and more effective, centralised and systematic purchasing processes.
Although the competition was increasing, our analysis demonstrated that there were opportunities to profitably increase our geographic footprint. By focusing expansion efforts tightly on target customers, we were able to identify where best to locate branches to serve untapped markets.
Competitor and market analysis also revealed opportunities to initiate new outlet formats, varying outlet size, fit-out and offerings.
A legacy organisation structure had led to considerable inconsistency across the company. We worked with the client to harmonise job roles, titles and remuneration; initiate a new organisation structure; develop metrics linking operational and financial outcomes; and identify, agree and adopt best practice.
We worked closely with the client to co-develop a suite of projects to capture these opportunities. This entailed:
- Approving the overall programme
- Identifying and agreeing high-level goals
- Confirm programme branding, performance metrics, values and style
- Establish programme reporting and monitoring, including Steering Group
- Identify and recruit module leaders (mostly client staff) and team members
- Schedule and plan module launch meetings
- Develop launch material to mobilise and train team members
- Establish project modules, develop module plans
- Appoint team leaders and teams, providing appropriate training
- Launch projects
As part of our collaboration with the client, we provided a range of tools and training in how to use them. These included: project management disciplines, such as rules of engagement and work planning; strategic frameworks, such as pricing strategies and process re-design; analytical tools, such as competitive benchmarking, process analysis, conjoint analysis, and cost analysis; performance metrics, such as Key Performance Indicators and plumbing charts; and research methods, such as surveys, focus groups, and shop-alongs.
Our collaborative and pragmatic approach delivered immediate and sustained improvements to the client’s performance, and maintained morale through the transformation.
In the words of the client’s Managing Director:
The positive commercial impact of the Stakeholder Strategies programme of work was significant. More importantly, 24 months on the organisation continues to leverage it and the confidence in the ability of the business to deliver increasing sustainable profits has put us firmly back into expansion mode.
