Our Philosophy
The Valen Group has consulted with major global 1000 innovation and brand focused companies and has significant global strategy consulting experience.
How we deliver our global consulting team
We work uniquely with a local and global mix of consultants. We have global experience and expertise for global strategy centrally and we utilize local market experts to supplement our teams and help us connect to each culture or area of focus in an engagement. This global/local mix is ideal so we can have a deep understanding of issues and opportunities but sum up and combine these areas into global priorities to ensure that we are not just listing a compilation of local issues or opportunities, but rather looking at the synergy across geographies and business units.
Important Factors in Global Business Strategy
Cultural Empathy. Companies that are global leaders are constantly faced with cultural challenges. It is important that we spend time training and creating awareness of culture differences and similarities. When we consult with organizations on global strategy, we look for traits of a cultural mindset. It is true that the more exposure to culture the more understanding occurs; however, the reality is that a cultural mindset is quite simply being open to the ideas of your society may not be the ideas of another society. That sensitivity and awareness to be open to new ideas is critical to find opportunities in global business. This type of open discussion must be central to your global strategy; even which site you select to hold a global meeting matters, beyond language, strategic planning meeting flow and other strategy discussions.
Additive not subtractive. When searching for global growth opportunities, especially when there is a global innovation to coordinate and determine how to prioritize global strategy or innovation development, it is important to reverse traditional thinking which we see many times as subtractive or working toward the lowest common denominator. Those team that change the mindset to “summing up” the similarities will find quite a lot of commonality and power in leveraging core technology and growth platform developments across regions.
Grouping. Grouping like regions of the world by income/poverty for instance can in many product categories or industries identify more similarities and leverage a new product developed across multiple parts of the world. For instance, parts of Russian and eastern Europe have many of the similar product price point needs of low income areas in the Americas. While language and customization such as scent or flavor may change, the core product features are the same.
Globalization vs. Localization Strategy. There are many cute saying about this, but when we facilitate discussions around best practices they are not really the best strategy for your organization. In fact, in our Global Coordination of Innovation study conduct with some of largest global consumer branded companies, we found that globalization and localization is a strategic choice. What is most important is to craft a global organizational strategy and stick with it, invest in that and compete based upon those capabilities and expertise.
