Interim Executive | Non-Executive Director
Successful businesses are built one at a time. Successful groups are something different.
Individual businesses typically grow by deepening customer relationships, expanding capability or entering new markets.
Groups have an additional opportunity: creating value at the intersections between their businesses. However, because the opportunity sits across businesses, few are set up to pursue it systematically.
Every situation has its own commercial context, organisational dynamics and starting point; there is no single blueprint. What is often needed is an incremental commercial overlay that brings together market-facing relationships, complementary capabilities and overlapping propositions, enabling the Group to pursue opportunities beyond the reach of any individual business.
Delivery calls for a different type of capability: leadership that creates alignment across organisational boundaries, builds relationships and internal networks, aligns priorities, and establishes the commercial disciplines that become embedded in the way the Group operates.
Acquisition and buy-and-build programmes often bring the opportunity into sharpest focus but it is by no means confined to those situations. Many long-established multi-business organisations have simply never focused systematically on the additional value available at the intersections between their businesses.
When it works, collaboration stops being an initiative and becomes part of the way the Group operates: a capability that creates lasting commercial advantage.
