How Volvo Logistics saved over 400 million during a financial crisis

A well-structured change programme was the key for Volvo Logistics to succeed in saving more than 400 million SEK during the financial crisis 2009. All efforts were rapidly focused on savings for the whole organisation. How? Let’s take it from the beginning. Challenge As an effect of the 2008-recession Volvo Logistics saw a negative order intake (clients returning their already purchased products), resulting in a need for Volvo Logistics management to set a savings target of 400 million SEK for 2009, almost 30% of the total turnover, to be able to come back to “black figures”. Solution & Execution Volvo…

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Dynamic Leadership to deal with complexity and change

In people’s personal lives individuals inherently take on a broad range of responsibilities, including caring for their children, managing their households, maintaining their finances, and providing daily sustenance. They are accustomed to being responsible and accountable for these tasks, addressing problems as they arise. When they need help or advice, they go get it. It is an interesting paradox that at work, for most people, in most companies, they are to some extent treated like irresponsible children. Their freedom and authority to act on what they see is needed is severely limited. They are supposed to ask for permission or…

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Unleashing a surprising potential in the workforce

The most powerful boundaries are those in our heads. https://youtu.be/l3fAIePastg As an expat in India, Eurion Kemish managed the regional salesforce for Seco Tools for a limited period of 2 years. It proved to be a fundamental change both for himself and the local workforce. On the occasion of the local roll-out of Seco’s Integral Management change effort, he was able to unleash a sleeping potential of engagement, ownership and creativity to the surprise of everybody involved, himself included.  

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Crisis Management by Involving Everyone

What does it bring to involve every employee in managing through a crisis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjG7deRhVvA&t=15s See the interview HERE This is an interview by Bernhard Sterchi done with Anna Lundqvist’s about her closing a factory and transferring all know-how and production to Vietnam.   How was she able to involve every employee in the journey? How was the transfer not only done on-time but also exceeding expectations on cost and quality? And how on earth did she motivate the old factory improve all KPI’s until the final day? How did she manage the frustration, fear and anger?

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Infrastructures for Complex Workflows

To turn a single team into a High Performing Team is a challenge, but to make a whole company of 100, 500 or 5.000 team members act as One Team is a challenge at a whole different level. When you combine our all-too-human tendencies to get stuck in our own perspectives with the necessity of collaborating with people with very different specialist training, culture, language and day-to-day priorities, things tend to go wrong. This challenge is something none of us are trained for in our schools, families or even in team sports. This lack of preparation for the complexities of…

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Infrastructure for Self-Organisation

Modern society is made possible by a long string of infrastructures. They provide us with easy access to electricity, water, information, entertainment, transportation, child care, money, etc. Inside this framework, modern life operates in all its complexity. We act as free agents to make a living, survive, be successful and hopefully enjoy a good and healthy life. Inside these integrated infrastructures we each go about our own business, we all take our own decisions every day and in some ‘miraculous way’ the intricate web of society seems to work and produce a basically good life for most of us. And…

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Infrastructure for Frontline Teams

Teamwork can be a joyful and extremely powerful experience. It can bring the best out of people and enable them to produce great results together, way beyond what they could achieve individually. But more often than not, meetings and teamwork turn into a painful waste of time. If you already have a healthy workable infrastructure for Strategic Navigation in place, everyone in the company will be on board, eager to help and ready to put their shoulders to the wheel. Next thing you need is an infrastructure that enables and sustains a creative and effective effort from each team.  …

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Infrastructures for Strategic Navigation

When you think about infrastructures in companies, what first comes to mind is physical stuff, like buildings, machines and phone lines. But a healthy, functional infrastructure also includes things like communication lines, work structures and power structures. The quality and design of this second category of infrastructures will make or break the strategy. For starters, these infrastructures must provide everyone in the company with a shared view of where you are headed together, it must provide easy access to any information they may need to help make the strategy happen, as well as the freedom and authority to take whatever…

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Speed, Trust and Infrastructure

Increasing complexity and speed of change force companies to find new ways to compete. To survive and thrive in such volatile business environments, companies around the world strive to become more agile, resilient and responsive. This can only happen if each player in the organisation, regardless of position or specific area of responsibility, has the autonomy and freedom to swiftly take intelligent local decisions and initiatives. This requires a culture based on collaboration and mutual trust and a widely shared view of strategic challenges, as well as short term business priorities. So, is this a pipe dream or a realistic…

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Managing blind spots

What you don't know is easy enough to manage, just ask the experts or request help from competent people. But what do you do with your blind spots – the problems that you are not even aware of? It has been our observation, over the years, that many Top Managers operate unaware of their own blind spots. The same can be said of Middle Managers and Co-workers. Let's have a look at what some serious scientific surveys have to say about this. The Iceberg of Ignorance Sidney Yoshida’s 1989 study, ‘The Iceberg of Ignorance’, called our attention to what he…

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Why don’t they listen to what I say?

Companies have to deal with many different kinds of strategic challenges. Some are managed by clever analyses and decision making from the management team. Others by launching development projects, managed by some of the best resources in the company. But what do you do when the understanding of a problem disappears into complexity? How do you handle a problem that resists mapping and understanding, establishes itself permanently and defiantly resists all attempts to find solutions? What do you do when it seems like no one is listening to what you say? Many of today’s challenges in society are conspicuously complex.…

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What happened to trust?

Trust in a company increases the speed with which issues are resolved. Actually, the level of trust in a company is one of the cornerstones of competitiveness. Where did we come from and where are we now when it comes to trust?   Growing up in the north of Sweden, we kids went out early in the morning and only came back when it was time for dinner. When thirsty we drank from the garden hose and nobody worried about where we were. Never locked the door or bike. The policeman was a guy who stopped by on his rounds…

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Moving a factory – cutting pre-calculated costs by 50 %

The truth tellers around the coffee machines in the corporate world have, for a long time, been saying, ‘No manager will ever be sacked because he moved a factory to a low-cost country’. There are a clearly a lot of temptations involved in packing your bags. Should one respond to the call of the East? Around 2010 there was a shift in the wind, and the number of factories moving back to the mother country started to outnumber the ones moving out (BCG report april 2012). The whole issue of offshoring and reshoring is clearly an interesting and complicated question. For a…

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Management’s worst headache

When asked about their biggest challenge and first priority, MD’s of 400 big global companies answered – strategy implementation. Realizing the strategy is ranked as top priority on a list of 80 important issues, also containing other extremely important challenges like, for example, innovation, geopolitical stability and profitable growth. A scientific study, published in Harvard Business Review, shows that most management teams are dissatisfied with the speed and power of their own strategy implementation. The study confirms what we in Integ Partner have known for a long time – most companies are in need of a strategy engine! This extensive…

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