Audio ARTICLE
OF THE MONTH
Stranova Interviews Carol Sanford
Carol Sanford's MP3 interview on an Innovative Approach to Strategic Planning.
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Case Studies
Client: Colgate-Palmolive, Boksburg, South Africa
Situation: A little over a year before the elections that formed the New South Africa, Colgate took on a change process in the South Eastern African businesses. What seemed like a market and productivity improvement at the outset became a life-changing and nation-building effort that profoundly changed the lives of all those involved. Colgate was astounded at first, when the workforce picked up our consciousness building efforts and took them into the townships to educate people on how to be involved in governing. Then Colgate made it more intentional and was even more astounded at the results on both sides. Colgate became the only large corporate exception to the widespread strikes that brought most companies doing business in South Africa to their knees. They had a vigorous renewal that was both financial rewarding and meaningful to everyone in the African operations.
The process: Executives and Operating people were educated about how the quality of their thinking, individually and collectively, effected their actions. They also discovered the fact that allowing and or, conversely, excluding things from their thinking also directly impacted their actions. It became clear that this matter of inclusion and exclusion dramatically limited or enhanced creativity and precision in thinking about a business. They sat together in two-day workshops, working on the business, but not using the brainstorming and techniques they had routinely employed. They worked on developing different intelligences and learned to bring those to bear on the business. They discovered how to see the essence of a market and how to align an organization to pursue its unique core. They learned more systemic mental frameworks for thinking to develop these and other arenas.
Individually, and collectively, they learned to observe themselves and how their own behavior and mental energy affected the quality of their thinking and their internal and external interactions among themselves and with customers. They learned to be much more rigorous in challenging ideas and to use the market as the common denominator for reconciling differences rather than compromising among the different opinions on the table within committees or groups.
And then they took all that into the townships and used it to teach and execute self-governance. The intelligences were applied to finding the essence of a situation and distilling what was right and good for the largest number of people - the nation and it’s resources - for the longest future they could conceive. They faced the question of subservience in workforce placement and apartied. They worked on how to change these in the new era. And they brought their new found understanding back into the business and developed black leadership that cared about the whole of the population, their ability to work and prosper, and the ability of the company to succeed and provide more jobs to the newly emerging literate black workforce. There was no dividing line between the people, the townships and the company. They were all designed to succeed.
Bottom Line:
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Many companies suffered a 2 months strike. During the same period, at Colgate, although the people were heavily unionized, the company did not miss a single day because of a strike.
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As a result the market share of Palmolive soap went up from 25 to 50% and Colgate went from a remote second to market leader.
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Sales grew exponentially by over 400% in the year immediately preceding the elections and continued at a 200% year over year for the next three years.
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New markets were opened that better matched the buying power and needs of the population in townships and distribution models that got to a block level distribution system invented by the machine operators who lived in the townships. They matched the system to the environment or context.
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In spite of the difficulty and danger of travel for the operating teams there was almost no tardiness or turnover, which had been epidemic the year before (not only in Colgate but in all workplaces.) No one wanted to miss a day of education and creation.
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