High Performance Business

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"A high-performance business in one that excels in balancing current needs and future opportunities while consistently outperforming peers in growth, profitability and future value and returns to shareholders. Join the discussion on how to achieve high performance here. "

Blogpodium top stories 2012

As we approach the end of 2012, it’s a good time to look back and review all of the great content that’s been published the past 12 months. It’s been a busy time in the world of Innovation, Analytics and Digital, considering everything from different ideas about the key ingredients for successful innovation to shifts in the way consumers engage with social networks and mobile devices.

Below are a few of the best articles we’ve seen published this year.


Top 10 Challenges for Investment Banks 2012
Investment banks are increasingly operating in a volatile, resource constrained and highly regulated environment. Rigorous focus on strategic and operational priorities provides the key to high performance. Complying with new and impending regulations presents major challenges for investment banks.

To help investment banks plan and execute with success as macro trends reshape the industry, Accenture has developed a list of the top 10 challenges to address in 2012.

Different key ingredients for successful Innovation

The responses to a poll Accenture ran on LinkedIn revealed that people have very different ideas about the key ingredients for successful innovation. A full half of the respondents believe that understanding customer challenges is the key, while another third believe it is essential to embed innovation in an organisation.

The truth is that all of these play a role in successful innovation. But is there one element that is so crucial that without it successful innovation would be impossible?

The importance of Data Governance
Does your company consider its data to be a strategic asset? More important, do you not only consider it to be an asset, but are you also treating it as any other asset?

In my 20 years of experience in Data and Information Management, I worked for companies, who claimed to understand the importance and potential value of their data, but struggled to live up to this understanding. And, up to today, many companies I visit are still not taking full benefit of the wealth of information that is stored in their systems.

Are you moving fast enough in Digital?
As the world is changing rapidly, organizations need to stay in the game by investing in digital capabilities. But many organizations find it difficult to predict the expected ROI, resulting in little investments and lack of innovation.

Digital is radically changing the traditional ways organizations interact with customers. Customers are willing to interact with organizations via social media, and expecting them to be out there too! Therefore the question is no longer how fast things are moving, but: are you moving fast enough?

High Performing Business in changing economic times
In this volatile, uncertain and increasingly complex world, many businesses and governments have an urgent need to reassess current strategies and vital capabilities to achieve high performance.

Companies that want to stay in business need to make concrete plans for the future, with little room for errors. After all, companies will need to keep launching successful business concepts or products to outperform their rivals in these challenging times.

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CFO Day 2012 – High Performance Finance Round table

With over 400 CFOs attending and top speakers including Dutch Minister of Finance, Jan Kees de Jager and Vice-President Of Google Enterprise EMEA Sébastien Marotte; CFO Day, recently this event for financial leaders in the Netherlands had its 11th anniversary. With this year’s theme titled “On Course in a new World”, this edition of the annual event emphasized the changing volatile world in which enterprises are currently operating in. Changes discussed during the day included New technology (i.e. Mobile, social and Cloud Computing) and Sustainability as a license to operate.

On behalf of Gold partner Accenture, Andrew Meade and I had the opportunity to present and discuss the Dutch background and results of Accenture’s High Performance Finance study, which explored the current state of Finance in the Netherlands and how it is adapting to the significant environmental changes. With Finance on the rise, the finance organization assumed greater responsibility for helping the enterprise deal with the growing risks to the business as the recession unfolded.

Read more…

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High Performing Business Studies in changing economic times

In 2008, just before the crisis, Accenture launched its first High Performance Business (HPB) study, which revealed that companies listed on Amsterdam’s AEX index were underperforming their international peers, largely due to less growth. Shortly afterwards, the fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis on the US house market led to a freeze in the credit supply in the financial sector. This triggered an economic crisis that hit (international) trade, which in turn resulted in a social crisis driven by increased unemployment rates.

The second HPB study, published during the crisis in 2009, revealed that AEX-listed companies were still underperforming and less well positioned for growth. However, this time their underperformance was also due to the fact that they lacked the operational agility to adjust quickly to the changed market conditions.

The following year saw a slow recovery, largely fueled by government investment in infrastructure projects, stimulus packages, the restocking of global supply chains and strong growth in many emerging markets. However, these measures only addressed part of the core issues, and the remaining weaknesses in segments of the banking sector and lagging production volumes in mature markets remain a major drag on the global economy to this day. Read more…

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Delivering choice and control through differentiation: 82% like it!

The thing about passion is that it is catchy…the energy it gives rubs off onto others.  A colleague of mine had a recent ‘service experience’ and wanted to share it with me and I would like to share it with all of you.  I would like to introduce you to Lucinde Klop (@Lucinde_K ) – another passionate customer service consultant from Accenture – and this is her service experience.

Selecting a new health insurance plan has been on my ‘to do list’ for a couple of weeks. I was not looking forward to this task, as I was expecting my only choice was between marginal differences in monthly payments and reimbursements.  However, when I finally got to it, I was highly surprised! Not only could I choose from monthly payment options, but I could also choose between various levels of service defined per insurance package.

Read more…

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World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2012

What great transformations will the world see in the next decade?

Tomorrow marks the kick-off of the 42nd edition of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting which will take place January 25-29 in Davos, Switzerland under the theme The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models.

Over 2,600 top officials from leading private-sector companies, governments, nonprofit organizations and academic institutions will gather to discuss the increasingly complex, interdependent and fast-paced era we live in whereby leaders return to their core purpose of defining what the future should look like, aligning stakeholders around that vision and inspiring their institutions to realize that vision. Ahead of the event Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme outlines 3 trends that are driving this global transformation.

Like last year, Accenture Chairman Bill Green was once again invited to share his vision and opinions and will moderate a panel session entitled A Smart Growth Solution that examines how technological advances drive economic growth and employment.

Read more…

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Marketing and Analytics as a service; how Accenture helped a large insurance company

In the wake of the recent recession, consumer behavior has changed substantially. Expectations of customers globally are accelerating: they expect the highest product quality, more value for money and better tailored service. Like stated by my colleague Jort Possel in his previous blog post: “Consumers are connecting in more than one way and on multiple devices, consuming more content, and doing it all on the go”.

With the explosive growth of online, mobile and social media channels, customers choose their interaction channel of preference and demand a seamless multi-channel experience. To sustain high performance and growth through uncertain times, companies will need to work harder and smarter to find and capitalize on growth opportunities and to provide a great customer experience.

Read more…

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2011 ends with a bang: my ‘mini-wow’ experience

As the end of 2011 approachs it time to take a moment to look back at all it has brought and all it has become.  What a disappointment.  Now I am not trying to be the grinch that stole away the happy holiday feeling but lets’ face it folks, no one really surprised us this year?!

I opened the 2011 year with a positive post about customer service and a challenge question as to whether this would be the year that companies would make the difference or if they would continue to kick-back and let customers scream at the door.  As a law abiding Netherlands consumer let me just say I have lost my voice a few times this year.  But has all been lost?  Can our little Dutch customer service economy be saved?  I still really believe so and am awaiting to meet the individuals with the ‘doorzettingsvermogen’ to change the game. Oh where oh where can they be….?

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Climbing a Curve: A Big Enough Market Insight

In my last post, I talked about how true high-performance companies manage to jump the S-curve, not just once but repeatedly. It is just as important, however, to understand how companies get onto and climb the S-curve in the first place. This requires something we call the Big Enough Market Insight, or BEMI. At Accenture, we believe this is at the heart of all successful businesses. A BEMI is an insight into the future of a market with enough growth potential to generate substantial revenues – and profit – for years to come. An insight so powerful that it puts your company way ahead of the competition, at least for a time.

To be a real high performer, it’s not enough to simply win. You have to win big; so big, in fact, that the market knows immediately that you’re playing in a different league to your competitors. One example is pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. Read more…

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The Business of Jumping S-Curves

Welcome to the first in a series of posts in which I’ll look at what makes companies genuine high-performance businesses, and discuss why so many fail to make the grade. Are enduringly successful companies simply in the right place at the right time? Can it really just be a matter of luck or is there more to it than that? Accenture has explored this topic in detail over the years, and we’ve identified a number of traits that we believe distinguish the winners from the also-rans of the business world.

So how do a select group of companies outperform their peers over a sustained period? And how do they manage to consistently grow both revenues and profitability, even during economic downturns and market disruptions? Is it down to the business ‘excellence’ that was the focus of so much business literature in the latter part of the 20th century, or is it the ‘greatness’ that everybody was talking about in the early part of the last decade? In 2003, Accenture embarked on a major research project to find out what really sets these companies apart. Over the past eight years, we have looked at over 800 companies across dozens of industries and going back decades. What we found is that truly great companies get to the top and stay there by accomplishing the one thing that evades the majority of companies: they jump the S-Curve of business performance.

Read more…

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Mark Foster’s notes from Davos

This post I want to share with you was written by Mark Foster, group chief executive, Management Consulting, Accenture. This post was first published on the Forbes  Blog in the segment ‘Davos Notebook‘ and details Mark Foster’s opinions about the second day of the WEF 2011 in Davos.

The highlight of the morning was a plenary session led by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France on the role of the G20 in global governance.  He explained that a direct implication of our interdependent and complex planet is that no nation in the G20 or outside it can “go it alone.” In setting out the agenda of the French presidency of the G20 he covered many topics including making a plea for more collaboration and convergence between the players. He paid tribute to the contribution of the G20 to creating the conditions for 5% growth in global GDP in 2010 but recognised that it was easier to get agreement under the pressure of a crisis – and will be tougher to do in a more benign context.  The G20 is only legitimate if it continues to be a decision-making body rather than a ‘talking’ shop.  He identified real continuing challenges and issues that remain, including inflation and global tensions from commodity price volatility and currency imbalances. The G20 and G8 must discuss this and act. The President called out the weakness of the UN as a body to deal with the issues due to its lack of permanent representation on the security council of Africa, India and Latin America.  He described a vision of a new global architecture for collaboration in an interdependent world.  In the Q and A which followed, President Sarkozy was deeply emphatic about the long-term future of the Euro at the heart of a durable Europe despite recent uncertainty. He was also pretty ardent on the need for substantive regulation of the financial sector. Read more…

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