Who
Rod has lead an active engineering, management and management consulting career over
nearly 25 years. Salient facts include:
- Roderick Keyes Laird is based in Melbourne and was born in 1956.
- Has lived and worked in Melbourne, Sydney and Düsseldorf
- Rod's first working decade was in engineering management, as Director
of Australia's largest Biomedical Engineering Institute. This built on his
earlier research on recognition technology for the Australian Bionic Ear
cochlear implant
- The most recent 16 years have found him engaged in management
consulting, first with McKinsey & Co and subsequently with Accenture.
Rod's passion is working as part of an executive team to architect and transform businesses to
deliver significant bottom-line impact. All the better if there is a "with a
twist of technology" in the challenge. You can access Rod's
curriculum vitae if
you'd like to find out more about him. What
Business Impact Architecture represents the
selective distillation of sometimes hard-won insight and experience over the
last decades. It has evolved with advances in formal management approaches,
changing management capabilities and new technologies. Most of all it is
driven by what has worked in real businesses; concepts that real managers
have adopted and applied to deliver tangible performance impact. The
following illustrates the spectrum of contexts in which its concepts have
delivered practical outcomes
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Business turnaround |
- An industrial products business went from
delivering hundreds of millions of dollars EBIT to negative cash flows.
Focusing the business on customer rather than manufacturing economics
drove a complete re-architecture. The Business Impact
Architecture Framework or
Impact Bridge provided the
provided the template to do so. As a result rationalisation of assets and
costs - and a complete restructuring of product portfolios and channels -
was required. A comprehensive transformation agenda combined cost
reduction, capital productivity improvement and margin and share uplifts
to return the business to healthy profitability.
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Post-Merger Integration |
- A global hi-tech company had acquired a smaller competitor, but had
neglected to integrate it effectively. Country management took on the task
of "back filling". They adopted the Impact Bridge to help
it formulate the combined business's strategic proposition - and line up a
new integrated business behind it. Soon after, the management team was
faced with the task of integrating another acquisition - this time much
larger. The incumbent management team confidently applied their business
architecture skills to deliver a "global best outcome". Their leadership
and transformation mastery overwhelmingly impressed incoming management -
previously regarded externally as the "best professionals" of their
industry. Some years later, and even larger merger occurred - and the new,
integrated management team yet again demonstrated their Impact Bridge mastery to
deliver another superbly integrated, rapidly growing business. Yet another
"global best outcome".
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Strategic re-positioning |
- A high tech business had experienced many years of
impressive growth on the back of a strong, focused product offer and a
outstanding reputation and relationship with its customers. Its challenge
was to sustain this growth, based on a spectrum of exciting innovations.
The Impact Bridge helped the management team harness their
ideas. It crystallised their strategic proposition in a world of
multiple, rather than single, products, channels and customer segments.
It helped them draw out the implications for fundamental change in their
organisation, operation and management approach. And it allowed
them to lay out their growth roadmap, confident that their actions and
resources all aligned to maximise impact and put them on track to double
their value within 5 years
- A national Telco recognised the need to become more
market focused. The shift from a function and network-centric operator to
included a customer-centric perspective demanded realignment much more
than its organisation. Its systems, operations and eventually its product
portfolio and network reflected this fundamental shift. The
Business Impact Architecture concepts highlighted
where and how alignment could proceed pragmatically, step by step.
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New venture |
- Taking a
Business Architecture approach drove the rapid
conceptualisation and realisation of a complex business services joint
venture employing in excess of 500 personnel and ultimately delivering
multiple tens of millions of dollars in net profit.
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The Impact Bridge toolkit has demonstrated its usefulness in activities ranging from
testing the plausibility of preliminary business concepts, through performance
optimisation of the whole or parts of business to complete business
re-conceptualisation and repositioning. Its power stems from its pragmatic
extension of management team capabilities, placing in their hands the tools to
effectively align action with intent to maximise impact across any business.