Strategic Consulting

1. STRATEGY, CULTURE, AND
ALIGNMENT

2. Agenda
• Introduction to Congruence Model
• Application to Client
• Summary

3. Syllabus
• Course Pack
• Flawless Consulting by Block
• Quizzes

4. Consulting and Best Practices
• There are no perfect solutions
• To be optimally effective, the
recommendations must
• Align with the organization’s other
elements
• Advance the overall strategy of the
organization

5. Tushman & Nadler’s (1980) Congruence
Model

6. Work: What is done, and how is it
processed
• Does the work require specific knowledge or skill?
• What are the intrinsic rewards involved in completing
the work?
• Is it mechanistic or creative?
• How does the work flow?
• What sort of approach is needed to do this work
best? Quick? Thorough? Caring? Analytical?
Precise? Enthusiastic? ...
• Where are the interdependencies?

7. People
• Who interacts to get the work done? Bosses,
employees, peers, external stakeholders.
• What skills do the people possess? Knowledge,
experience, education, competencies.
• Is there a demographic profile? Age, gender,
ethnicity.
• What are these people's preferences and
expectations for compensation, reward, career
progression, recognition, and organizational
commitment?

8. Organizational Structure: Formal
Structure, Systems and Processes
• How is the company organized? Mechanistic or
organic.
• Are there distinct business units or other
separations? Regional, functional, by product, by
market.
• How distinct and/or rigid are the lines of authority?
• How standardized is the work? Rules, policies,
procedures.
• How is work measured and incentivized and
rewarded?

9. Culture
• What do people really do to get work
done?
• How does information flow around the
organization?
• What are the beliefs and values of
individuals in the organization?
• Is there a political network in play?

10. Organizational Culture
Set of shared, taken-for-granted
implicit assumptions that a group
holds and that determines how it
perceives, thinks about and reacts to
its various environments

11. Layers of Corporate Culture

12. Layers of Organizational Culture
• Observable artifacts
• Consist of the physical manifestation of an
organization’s culture
• Acronyms, manner of dress, awards, myths and
stories, published lists of values, observable
rituals and ceremonies, special parking spaces,
and decorations

14. Layers: Values
Concepts or beliefs that pertain to desirable end
states, transcend situations, guide selection of
behavior and are ordered by relative importance
• Espoused values
• represent the explicitly stated values and norms that are
preferred by an organization

15. Example: Williams-Sonoma’s
Espoused Values

16. Enron’s
1998
Annual
Report

17. Layers of Organizational Culture
• Enacted values
• Represent the values and norms that actually are
exhibited or converted into employee behavior
• Based on
observable behavior

19. Google Culture

20. Wolf of Wall Street Culture
(Stratton Oakmont Investments)

21. Layers of Organizational Culture
• Basic assumptions
• Constitute organizational values that have become
so taken for granted over time that they become
assumptions that guide organizational behavior
• The “constitution,” explicit or tacit, that governs the
group

22. Based on the work of Quinn & Cameron

23. Competing Values Framework

24. The Business Engine
• Critical tasks (Work)
• Concrete actions (manufacturing a product,
developing a service, increasing market share,
hiring employees)
• Work flows necessary to carry out those actions.
• Formal organization
• Recognized units and functions hierarchical
levels, reporting relationships, career paths,
compensation systems, and so on.

25. The Human Engine
• People
• Various types of people needed
• How they are recruited, hired,
assigned, trained, and appraised
• Informal Structure (Culture)
• “How things are done here”—how
people behave and dress, how hard
and long they work, what gives
them status or takes it away, what
behaviors are respected and
imitated, what is talked about or
kept quiet, and so on.

27. Extra layers of complexity
• Consultants must navigate their own firm’s
culture, as well as that of their client
• In addition to these internal cultures,
consultants must be much more aware of the
big picture elements
• Strategy of the organization
• The environment in which the client operates

28. Your client
• Think about this model as you do your project
• How would your recommendations affect the
congruence of the organization?
• Think about your client as a system in which
every part affects every other part
• What are the implications of “Best Practices”

29. Summary
• This is where the “Strategy” in strategic
consulting comes from
• Successful organizations (and firms) are not
hodgepodges of Best Practices– What they
do makes sense as a whole
• Alignment is a balancing act
• Change is constant