1. Top-level Strategy Management; Managing strategy at the top is about putting in place a management platform that enables connecting the organization’s long-term vision with specific strategic goals.
We help Boards, CEO and their top teams create the overarching framework and the management platform within which the organization can effectively set its strategic direction, deploy its key strategic initiatives and maximize operational impact. IAC achieves this by:

• Establishing long-term vision – Defining and tuning a clear and compelling vision is crucial for unifying and focusing the organization’s efforts.
• Linking strategy and governance – Effective Board involvement in the organization’s strategic process enhances the nature and extent of the organization’s strategic thinking.
• Running the strategic management process – Strategic management is not what it used to be. It is changing from traditional goal setting to steering strategic ideas and processes.
• Linking strategy and market valuation – Building shareholder value requires effectively linking strategic moves and capital structure management.

2. Setting Strategic Direction
Setting strategic directions requires being more creative than your competitors in envisioning the future business landscape, assessing what innovative approaches are necessary, and choosing the role the organization will play in shaping industry changes. This involves:

• Sharpening the competitive focus– The concept of sustained competitive advantage is often elusive and still, the heart of business strategy consists of accurately determining which corporate battles to engage in and consistently developing the capabilities required to win.
• Defining regionalization models and Africa business priorities – Expanding out of a unique home market is tricky. It necessitates outperforming local players with distinct local advantages as well as regional giants who leverage regional competitive assets and economies of scale.
• Directing non-organic growth – Companies often reach a ‘glass ceiling’ to their organic growth. The challenge is to direct non-organic growth initiatives to adjacent businesses in order to maximize the probability of success in non-organic growth.
• Developing national public policy – Government policy-makers must optimize the impact of regulation on markets, develop public assets and ensure effective delivery of services while considering a variety of stakeholder concerns.
• Crafting non-profit strategy – Third-sector organizations face a constant challenge: maximize the impact of limited resources in advancing their vision and goals, while competing for public attention and philanthropic and public funds.

3. Deploying Strategic Intents
Having established the strategic direction, a high-performing organization deploys its strategic intents with high velocity and executes with all the energy required.
This means successively launching a new business and operating models as well as developing new assets and competencies that position the company ahead of its competitors.
To do so in a systematic and relentless manner, we join forces with our clients in an original execution-driven management framework.

• Establishing and running an effective execution campaign – Strategy is “an art all of the execution” but the execution is often more complex than planning. An energetic, synchronized, and well-monitored campaign of rapid capability building and launching of new initiatives (often referred to as a PMO) maximizes the returns of a well-conceived strategy.
• Creating innovative business models – Effective design of new business models is key to seizing upon discontinuities in the environment earlier, faster, and more effectively than competitors.
• Aligning people with strategy – Precise design of structure, processes, and incentives provides the necessary foundation for the successful execution of strategy.
• Upgrading critical capabilities – Well-designed and developed capabilities are at the heart of sustainable competitive advantage in the evolving core of the company’s business.

4. Maximizing Operational Impact
Organizations that are lean in their competitive race are those that excel in their operations in ways that are fully tuned with their strategic intents. This allows them to maximize the operational impact of their strategy and to achieve sustained high performance. IAC helps you to achieve impact by:

• Making the delivery-system efficient – Managing the company value chain in a way that efficiently delivers on strategy often requires major transformation across all the stages of the value creation process.
• Improving customer experience – A comprehensive and integrative customer experience concept embedded across the entire value chain constitutes part of the organization’s competitive positioning and is at the heart of any business model the organization deploys.
• Rationalizing and focusing the product/service portfolio – To achieve portfolios that are balanced and aligned with strategy, organizations must ensure that the offering maximizes competitive benefits to customers at the best use of internal resources.
• Designing the performance metrics system – Performance metrics are important for linking long-term strategy with short-term actions. A strong performance metrics system communicates strategy, aligns work processes, and enables guidance of behavior while remaining simple to comprehend and operate.
• Driving profit-improvement and turnaround – A successful profit-improvement plan both “stops the bleeding” and puts the company on a path toward longer-term sustainability. Ensuring a successful turnaround requires simplifying operating processes, separating out activities that don’t add significant value, and achieving greater efficiency in execution.