Fit For Business

A practical approach to business transformation Fit for Growth* is a unique approach to business transformation that explicitly connects growth strategy with cost management and organization restructuring. Drawing on 70-plus years of strategy consulting experience and in-depth research, the experts at PwC’s Strategy& lay out a winning framework that helps CEOs and senior executives transform their organizations for sustainable, profitable growth. This approach gives structure to strategy while promoting lasting change. Examples from Strategy&’s hundreds of clients illustrate successful transformation on the ground, and illuminate how senior and middle managers are able to take ownership and even thrive during difficult periods of transition. Throughout the Fit for Growth process, the focus is on maintaining consistent high-value performance while enabling fundamental change. Strategy& has helped major clients around the globe achieve significant and sustained results with its research-backed approach to restructuring and cost reduction. This book provides practical guidance for leveraging that expertise to make the choices that allow companies to: Achieve growth while reducing costs Manage transformation and transition productively Create lasting competitive advantage Deliver reliable, high-value performance Sustainable success is founded on efficiency and high performance. Companies are always looking to do more with less, but their efforts often work against them in the long run. Total business transformation requires total buy-in, and it entails a series of decisions that must not be made lightly. The Fit for Growth approach provides a clear strategy and practical framework for growth-oriented change, with expert guidance on getting it right. *Fit for Growth is a registered service mark of PwC Strategy& Inc. in the United States

No one, from the CEO down to the lowest level worker, intentionally sets out to create waste or fail at their assigned work tasks. It s human nature to strive for and attain success in things we set out to do. Unfortunately many of us unwittingly pursue the path of least resistance even when we re pursuing our goals. Shortcuts multiply over time as we attempt to circumvent less desirable work tasks, and in doing so, we contribute to errors, defects, waste and risk that not only draws on your bottom-line, but jeopardizes productivity, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and ultimately the future of your organization Getting Business Fit takes a cut-to-the-chase approach in identifying, quantifying and setting out to eliminate the non-value work and waste in your organization. The fact that we are amidst a great recession, there is no better time than now to eliminate the waste in your organization and pursue business fitness. All you need is your sincerity to act, organizational commitment from your leadership team, the empowerment of your workforce, and Gary s five simple steps to getting business fit."

Treat your business like your body and get in shape today! As with health and fitness you must have a clear image of what business health is before you can ever hope to achieve it. How Fit is Your Business delivers simple and concise ways to take inventory of your business, develop plans for improvement, and implement the changes needed to succeed. Included inside are the resources you will need to: - Measure your business with a ten-point business check-up - Interpret these results and establish benchmarks - Determine specific areas where your business needs improvement - Develop methodical, step-by-step processes for change - Break down the misconceptions that could lead you astray - Remove the mystery from the process of improvement - Learn the basic tools to build a better, healthier business - Measure progress and monitor success - Set the stage for success in all of your business endeavors

Are your products and services fit for purpose?How would you know? Do you know why your customers choose you, your products, and your services? If not, how can you find out? In this new book from the best-selling author of Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, David J. Anderson, together with Alexei Zheglov, teach you how to answer these questions and more. . . . How do you know whether a change is an improvement?When is an improvement a step too far?When might you be overserving your market? Using highly accessible examples from transportation, broadcasting, entertainment, food and beverage, online retailing, telecommunications, software applications, pharmaceuticals, sports and recreation, automotive manufacturing, and retailing, Anderson and Zheglov teach you how to choose the right metrics to drive the behavior you need to catalyze improvements that directly affect customer satisfaction. Using their unique brand of storytelling, they show how to segment your market based on customer purpose, how to establish fitness criteria metrics as your key performance indicators (KPIs), how to use your frontline staff to sense your market, and alternatively, using Fit-for-Purpose Surveys and the Fitness Box Score. Using the highly pragmatic, actionable guidance of the Fit-for-Purpose Framework, you will learn how to select market segments that align to your strategy, how to design products and services that align to customer expectations, and how to take actions to amplify successful markets and switch off unsuccessful ones. This book will help you find new customers in new market segments, better satisfy your existing customers, and keep them all coming back for more. Fit for Purpose is for executives, strategic planners, product managers, product planners, portfolio managers, service designers, service delivery managers, and anyone who wants to understand better how to manage for long-term survival and profitability in the complex and volatile markets of the 21st Century.

Is your organisation in good shape for today’s digital world? Has it effectively changed the way it works to keep up with the new connected consumer? Or is it still stuck on the digital business basics, losing relevance and falling behind in the race for customers? Get Fit for Digital Business will help you to assess where you are now, where you need to go and how you can get there. Leaning on two decades of business transformation experience, Rob Laurens describes the difference between just doing digital and being digital. He provides a practical six-step process that any leader can use to accelerate change, seize the opportunities and counter the threats that digital technology brings. This is people-first business transformation for the real world; the way to build core strength, speed and agility throughout your organisation. Free from digital jargon and corporate gobbledegook, it’s a complete framework for leaders who don’t have time for an MBA in digital business – but who do want to get their teams in great shape to survive and thrive in a digital world. Get Fit for Digital Business will help you to create an enterprise that is not just more productive and profitable, but also happier and healthier – leaving you and your team feeling and performing better in every department.

This text is an important addition to the ongoing discourse on strategic management, particularly, strategic human resource management. It is a result of research carried out in the agricultural sector, in general, and on multinational tea firms, in particular. The author’s hands-on and conceptual insights gained through nineteen years of experience across African countries make the text a useful tool for company boards of directors and strategic level managers charged with the formulation and implementation of business and human resource strategies. In addition, it provides justification to HR managers of the need to shift focus from primarily being concerned with routine transactional HR activities to dealing with transformational ones, which are contingent on the circumstances of the organization. Scholars, management consultants and management students will also find the contents of this book to be of great interest and benefit. It is now sufficiently recognised that management has to be concerned with deliverables, rather than abstractions. Therefore, many firms formulate and implement one form of business strategy or the other. However, strategies cannot be conceived, let alone realised, without human resource input. The question that HR continues to grapple with, therefore, is how it can demonstrate the contribution of each employee to the bottom line and business sustainability. How this question is to be answered has not always been explained and is even more crucial for the agricultural firms which are characterized by great instability in terms of weather patterns, commodity prices, currency exchange rates and wage levels. HR planning, in these circumstances, cannot be a simple exercise, but getting it right is more important than for organizations in more predictable environments. This book moves away from the romanticization of the role of HRM in such organizations, and instead provides empirical evidence of the types of business and human resource strategies employed, strategic integration between these strategies and the strategic human resource management processes and practices used. Finally, it considers the concomitant synergies achieved by strategic fit between business and human resource strategies and their role in achieving sustainable competitive advantage.

With advancing information technology, businesses must adapt to more efficient structures that utilize the latest in robotics and machine learning capabilities in order to create optimal human-robot cooperation. However, there are vital rising concerns regarding the possible consequences of deploying artificial intelligence, sophisticated robotic technologies, automated vehicles, self-managing supply modes, and blockchain economies on business performance and culture, including how to sustain a supportive business culture and to what extent a strategic fit between human-robot collaboration in a business ecosystem can be created. The Handbook of Research on Strategic Fit and Design in Business Ecosystems is a collection of innovative research that builds a futuristic view of evolving business ecosystems and a deeper understanding of business transformation processes in the new digital business era. Featuring research on topics such as cultural hybridization, Industry 4.0, and cybersecurity, this book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, executives, managers, corporate strategists, economists, IT specialists, IT consultants, engineers, students, researchers, and academicians seeking to improve their understanding of future competitive business practices with the adoption of robotic and information technologies.

This is the first text to offer a comprehensive socio-cultural and historical analysis of the current fitness culture. Fitness today is not simply about health clubs and exercise classes, or measures of body mass index and cardiovascular endurance. Fit for Consumption conceptualizes fitness as a field within which individuals and institutions may negotiate - if not altogether reconcile - the competing and often conflicting social demands made on the individual body that characterize our current era. Intended for researchers and senior undergraduate and postgraduate students of sport, leisure, cultural studies and the body, this book utilizes the US fitness field as a case study through which to explore the place of the body in contemporary consumer culture. Combining observations in health clubs, interviews with fitness producers and consumers, and a discourse analysis of a wide variety of fitness texts, this book provides an empirically grounded examination of one of the pressing theoretical questions of our time: how individuals learn to fit into consumer culture and the service economy and how our bodies and selves become ‘fit for consumption.'