Growth Strategies for the World’s Biggest Brands

Evolving Enterprises: Stories of Growth Transformation

Today I am delighted to be joined by my friend and colleague Jim Scholes. Jim is well known as an academic and a highly successful consultant, who has worked for some of the best-known companies in the world. Based on his academic work with Peter Checkland, Jim has spent much of his career helping some of the biggest names in the world achieve growth strategies. Jim talks about how he set up his consultancy company and the way he structured a fee system to incentivise the consultant and the client to achieve growth for the client.

Jim talks about some of the key challenges in consultancy – neither the client nor the consultant know in advance what the answer will be. Jim talks about the importance of helping clients at different levels of a company to go on a “learning journey”, one of the most critical factors in delivering consulting assignments well. Jim talks about his work with Nokia in the early 1990s, helping them to move beyond their financial problems and establishing a strategy for their enormous global growth; reaching, by the late 1990s, a position as the globally dominant mobile phone supplier. Jim talks about working with the CEO of Nokia, Jorma Ollila and how this, initially tricky working relationship, became a partnership for growth. Jim also talks about a European division of a US business that he worked with, another huge global corporation. The European business was initially seen as the ‘problem child’ and were instructed to change. After Jim’s work, the board accepted that the European business was the one that had a stronger business model. Directly resulting from the consulting assignment a different approach was taken to the whole global business, including the US, and the client created a new $2bn worldwide business – an immensely successful example of growth and transformation using systems approaches.