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.
About Valen Global Strategy Consulting
Are you looking to make better decisions about your global growth strategy? The Valen Group can help be the outside strategic advisor to help you and your team compete and grow in the global marketplace. We have provided fact-based recommendations for over 16 years to top global company executives. Learn about how we approach the practice of strategy and work with you in a highly trusted, transparent and effective way.
So, what is strategy?
An activity View of Sustainable Competitive Advantage…
Much of what we at Valen teach our strategy consultants comes from economic modeling because economics is the decision as to where to allocate scarce resources. This is a critical part of strategy, we follow much of the main activities Michael Porter teaches, which is to determine what choices or trade-offs will be made. Furthermore, that those choices made are aligned toward a unique set of activities that create a sustainable, competitive advantage. You know you have a good strategy because it provides the organization an above-average margin versus competitors. We cannot compare margins across industries generally, but within an industry or more precisely within a defined competitive set.
Strategy consulting is a critical resource for top leadership and their executives to:
Offer best practices in strategy management and insight into the practice of strategy
Provide an outside, unbiased perspective
Uncover blind spots or other strategic considerations to identify core strategic issues
Reframe problems to be more actionable to solve for teams
Break ties and improve decision-making discipline; provide sound logic to build conclusions
Global Strategy Services include:
Global Organizational Benchmarking Study
Global Coordination of Innovation Strategy and Approach Tools
Global Growth Strategy Development
How we work with you as a global strategy consulting firm?
At the Valen Group we find that many of our initial conversations with clients are to really sort out what type of strategy problem it is and the approach to collect the facts to resolve it. We will:
Take time in initial discussion to ask questions and understand the situation to frame the problem
Draft a brief outlining our approach to discuss scope of work prior to a formal proposal, an engagement letter the outlines the objective, major deliverables and provide some sense of effort, team, activities
Provide generalists who know the practice of strategy to lead the efforts or oversee work but this also may include functional experts for specific knowledge and insight into problem solving
Follow proven problem-solving methods and logic which means they work to deduce the solutions from the facts and ensure the fact support a conclusion and recommendations
Some examples demonstrating our Strategy Consulting experience:
Worked with a major food & beverage company that was very country/region siloed in their work who wanted to develop a more holistic global strategy. We identified a particular growth platform that we believed could be leveraged and conducted a global strategy process that included focuses on similarities and global coordination of ideas. One critical step was the preparation and global mindset session within our Collaborative Workshop Environment to agree and build out global growth platforms. The outcome of understanding as to changes needed in organizational structure, decision-making and coordination across the organization was the most significant and lasting takeaway. Over the next five years, the senior executives restructured the organizational model to improve coordination and leverage global centers of excellence and regularly meeting rhythm to share information and align growth strategy roadmaps.
Top global consumer products company was being beat to market by local upstarts and more nimble regional players. We conducted global benchmarking study on how other organizations organized for global coordination of innovation. We work with them to develop an organizational model improvement that reduced time to market from 12-18 months to 6-12 months by the core development and local adaptation of global growth platforms. In addition, they implemented a global accelerator team to help with specific product launches where speed was critical to success to change the dynamics in how this organization competes globally.
