A multi-billion-dollar division of a fast-moving, high-tech European goods conglomerate was at a strategic crossroads. A few years earlier, the company had decided to move away from low-end commodities and toward more integrated high-end product offerings. To date, however, the division had been unable to align the organizational capabilities with this direction. As a result, it performed poorly and senior management's intent was neither understood nor credible internally or in the stock market. Consequently, the operations were scrutinized at many levels of the organization, with little or no focus on long-term strategic issues. The division asked SDG to help address the problems because our previous work with the CEO resulted in robust and often counterintuitive findings that had created substantial new value.

Shifting senior executive focus away from operational details freed their attention to address strategy issues. It also gave the operational managers more time to develop and implement plans for improvement because they spent less time explaining the past. As a result of the engagement, the company implemented a Value-Based Leadership program that covered four phases:

• Assessing the risk and value of each value center of the organization
• Reducing barriers to value creation and agreeing on focus for the future
• Shifting corporate direction from products to customer solutions
• Implementing this direction and building capability to sustain momentum.