Introducing The Navio Group. Building the future.
“The only constant is change,” wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus over 2000 years ago. It’s a maxim which holds true today and is even more resonant given our access to untold information, news, insights and tools to make sense of it all. In the retail and consumer world, however, outside pressures are pushing businesses to fortify. This strengthens them in the short-term but then creates a culture adverse to change. So, when the inevitable shift in consumer demand occurs, these companies scramble to launch initiatives to “reinvent” themselves without the proper frameworks, mindsets or structure. These business transformations fail roughly 75% of the time and fall flat from within the company for a various, but highly predictable, set of reasons.
This is the problem we seek to solve at The Navio Group. How do retail and consumer goods firms succeed in adopting change in their business? How is that adoption measured? And, most importantly, how do companies know if they’re on the right track before it’s too late?
Among the sea of stories showcasing failure, three indicators are seen: (1) a lack of compelling vision for change, (2) an inability to rally around the transformation and (3) a failure to successfully execute. Any combination of these core problems stunts a transformation effort before it begins and indicates it should be scrapped, redrawn or relaunched.
To help companies create a clear long-term path for themselves, and bring organizations along, we have developed a three-pronged approach to tackle the complex problem of transformation.
- Analyze & generate insights – we often stop to ask executives: when was the last time you spoke with one of your customers in one of your stores? This question never fails to elicit a pregnant pause followed by often either “a long time ago” or, surprisingly, “never.” We believe analysis and insight gathering is critical to transformation efforts because it’s the foundation for the vision from which strategy operates.
- Build & drive – many organizations give their most critical initiatives to their top executives, expecting them to succeed. However, this means they must prepare materials, communicate up and down the organization, engage cross-functional stakeholders, and manage follow-ups on a timeline…all of this is supposed to happen on top of their daily onslaught of meetings, email, and, not to mention, just managing their everyday business. Organizations tend to forget: management capacity is a finite resource.
- Measure – Peter Drucker, a pioneer in business management, often said “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” and we firmly believe in this idea. For a transformation, we think this is more than just a weekly survey or pulse check. It’s reflected in the engagement of the organization and measuring “engagement” is critical to understanding if a company’s vision will be realized.
We believe transformation support is critical to helping retail and consumer goods companies today bridge the large gap between customer expectations and brand delivery. We take this challenge seriously, so we seek to do all this in a manner that’s different from other general service firms in the market:
- We are passionate about the retail and consumer market and bring a diversity of functional experience to deliver a well-rounded point of view.
- Our team has a balance of experience and new age thinking because the rapid pace of change means that the tactics of the past don’t guarantee success in the future. We believe being digitally native is critical to helping retail and consumer companies chart a new course.
- We believe in the mix of both art and science to the human element and data. Transformations at their core are about changing companies made up of people and it’s important that the numbers are balanced out with the human element and engagement, which is harder to measure.
We look forward to tackling this problem and working with leaders and teams emboldened by the challenge of building organizations that can meet their customers’ current and future needs. We hope you’ll join us in building the future.
