But if you’ve spent any real time in BI—especially inside large organisations—you start to realise something deeper. The technical side, while necessary, is far from sufficient. You can run perfect analyses, build elegant models, and design compelling solutions… and still see very little change happen in reality.

Why?

Because BI is not just about solving problems. It’s about getting problems solved.

That distinction sounds subtle, but it’s everything. It’s the difference between producing insight and producing impact. And making that leap requires a much broader skillset than most people expect when they first enter the field.

In my experience, the best BI leaders are not just technically strong. They are multi-disciplinary operators. They combine analytical rigour with human understanding, structured thinking with creativity, and personal discipline with organisational awareness. They are, in a sense, “generalist specialists”—people who go deep in technical areas, but also develop meaningful competence across a wide range of adjacent domains.

If you break it down, there are at least ten disciplines that matter. Technical skills are just one of them. The other nine are what allow you to translate capability into results.

Let’s walk through them.

The first discipline is, of course, technical skills.

This is the foundation. It’s what you were hired to do, and it’s the minimum bar you need to clear before anything else starts to matter. Without it, nothing else really compensates.

What good looks like here is not necessarily brilliance—it’s reliability. You know the core BI and continuous improvement techniques. You understand the language. You can run analyses independently, structure problems correctly, and produce outputs that are clean, logical, and useful. You don’t need hand-holding for standard tasks. You’re someone the organisation can depend on.

There are countless ways to build this: textbooks, formal courses, internal training programs, coaching from more experienced practitioners. The key is deliberate practice. You need volume and repetition. Over time, the patterns become second nature.

But once you reach a certain threshold, something interesting happens. Marginal improvements in technical skill start to matter less than improvements elsewhere.

That brings us to the second discipline: broader analytical techniques.

One of the biggest unlocks in BI is realising that your core toolkit is just a subset of a much larger universe of thinking approaches. If you only operate within traditional BI frameworks, you’ll often miss more creative or more powerful solutions.

Great BI practitioners borrow aggressively from other fields.

From strategy consulting, they take structured thinking and hypothesis-driven problem solving. From private equity, they adopt a deep focus on value and a comfort with uncertainty—often expressed through tools like sensitivity tables or what investors might call a “fan of outcomes.” Instead of presenting a single-point estimate, they show a range of plausible scenarios, helping decision-makers understand risk and upside in a much more nuanced way.

From behavioural psychology, they learn how people actually make decisions—not how we assume they should. From negotiation theory, they pick up techniques for navigating trade-offs and aligning interests. From data science and machine learning, they expand their ability to extract signal from large datasets. From the emerging world of AI, they learn how to prompt, iterate, and augment their own thinking.

And then there are more subtle skills: simplifying complex ideas without losing their essence, building narratives that make sense to non-technical audiences, using visual communication to guide attention, and framing problems in ways that unlock new angles.

How do you build this? By going beyond your immediate field. Read widely—books, articles, case studies. Watch how people in adjacent disciplines think. Take online courses. Experiment. The goal is not to become an expert in everything, but to build a diverse “mental toolkit” that you can draw from when needed.

The third discipline is influencing skills.

This is where many technically strong BI professionals struggle. They produce good work, but they don’t see it translate into action.

The reality is that most organisations are not rational machines. They are human systems, full of competing incentives, emotions, habits, and politics. Even when your analysis is correct, people may resist it. They may feel threatened, unconvinced, or simply overwhelmed.

So you need to influence.

What good looks like here is subtle. It’s not about being loud or forceful. It’s about understanding your stakeholders deeply—what they care about, what they fear, what motivates them—and then framing your message in a way that resonates.

Sometimes you push. Sometimes you step back. Sometimes you reframe the problem. Sometimes you build coalitions quietly before making a move. You learn to use the right language for the right audience, translating technical insights into business implications.

And critically, you develop empathy. You don’t just ask, “Is this the right answer?” You also ask, “How will this land?”

The way to build this is through exposure and reflection. Observe how experienced leaders influence others. Pay attention in meetings—what arguments work, which ones don’t, and why. Seek feedback. Practice small interventions. Over time, you build intuition.

The fourth discipline is team leadership.

At some point, your personal capacity becomes the bottleneck. You simply cannot do everything yourself. To create real impact, you need to build and lead a team.

And this is where the game changes.

Leading a team is not just about allocating tasks. It’s about creating an environment where high performers can thrive. That means recruiting well, setting clear expectations, providing context, giving feedback, and creating a culture of ownership and learning.

What good looks like is a team that operates with a high degree of independence. People know what needs to be done and why. They take initiative. They challenge each other constructively. There’s energy in the room. You’re not constantly firefighting.

In fact, a good sign is that you’re occasionally surprised—both by the quality of people who join your team, and by what they achieve.

Building this takes time. You need to be deliberate about hiring, even when under pressure. You need to invest in onboarding and coaching. Regular one-on-ones matter. So does creating space for learning—both internal and external. And perhaps most importantly, you need to lead by example. Your standards become the team’s standards.

The fifth discipline is communication skills.

This is one of the most underestimated areas in BI.

Many people assume they’re “decent communicators” because they can speak or write without obvious issues. But effective communication—especially in a business context—is a much more refined skill.

At its core, it’s about making your ideas land.

What good looks like is communication that feels effortless to the audience. Your presentations are clear, structured, and visually clean. Your story flows logically. The key message is obvious, without being forced. You know how to use emphasis, pacing, and even humour to keep people engaged.

In meetings, you create space for others to contribute, while still driving towards an outcome. You make people feel heard, but you don’t let discussions drift endlessly.

This is highly learnable. Study good examples—well-crafted presentations, strong speakers. Break down what makes them effective. Practice deliberately. Seek feedback on your slides, your emails, your verbal updates. Over time, refine your style.

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The sixth discipline is change management skills.

If influencing is about getting people on board, change management is about getting things done.

Many BI initiatives fail not because the ideas are wrong, but because execution breaks down. Momentum is lost. Priorities shift. Resistance builds quietly.

Good change management is about managing the process end-to-end.

You know when to check in, and when to leave people space. You don’t overload the organisation with meetings, but you maintain enough cadence to keep things moving. You track progress without becoming bureaucratic. When something isn’t working, you adjust quickly rather than pushing blindly.

There’s also a rhythm to it. Early on, you build alignment. Then you move into execution. Along the way, you celebrate wins, address issues, and keep reinforcing the narrative of why this matters.

You build this skill by owning initiatives from start to finish. There’s no substitute for experience here. Each project teaches you something new about how change actually happens.

The seventh discipline is personal productivity.

This one is often overlooked, but it’s critical.

In many BI roles, especially leadership ones, you are the central node. Your energy, focus, and consistency have a disproportionate impact on outcomes. If you’re scattered, tired, or disengaged, it shows—and it cascades.

What good looks like is not constant intensity, but sustainable performance. You’re able to maintain focus when needed, recover when needed, and understand your own patterns.

You start to notice what drives your energy. Sleep, nutrition, exercise, caffeine, work environment—they all matter. You also become more aware of your mental state. When motivation dips, you don’t just push blindly; you diagnose the cause and adjust.

There’s a growing body of practical advice in this space. People like Andrew Huberman or Peter Attia break down the science in accessible ways. But the key is experimentation. Take ideas, test them, and build routines that work for you.

The eighth discipline is financial acumen.

At the end of the day, most BI initiatives are judged in financial terms. Cost savings, revenue uplift, return on investment—these are the metrics that matter to decision-makers.

If you can’t engage at this level, you limit your influence.

What good looks like is fluency. You understand key concepts like NPV, IRR, cash flow versus accounting profit. You can build financial models from scratch, even with imperfect data. You can sanity-check numbers and triangulate estimates.

More importantly, you can translate operational changes into financial impact in a way that resonates with finance stakeholders.

Building this requires targeted effort. Corporate finance textbooks are a good starting point. Online courses can help. But nothing replaces practice—building models, reviewing business cases, working closely with finance teams. It’s a toolkit that is highly worth investing your energy in developing.

The ninth discipline is relationship management.

Beyond your immediate team, your effectiveness depends heavily on your relationships across the organisation.

BI work is inherently cross-functional. You need cooperation from people in operations, finance, HR, IT, and beyond. If those relationships are weak, progress slows down.

What good looks like is a broad network of strong, trust-based relationships. People know you, respect you, and are willing to help. You can find common ground with different personalities. You follow through on commitments. You’re seen as dependable.

Interestingly, this is less about formal networking and more about genuine human interaction. Take the time to understand people. Be curious about their work and their challenges. Offer help when you can. Small actions compound over time.

You build this through consistency. Showing up, following through, being reliable—it all adds up.

The tenth and final discipline is personal career management.

This is the meta-layer.

Even if you develop all the skills above, your impact will still depend on context. Some organisations are more receptive to change than others. Some roles give you more leverage. Some environments will accelerate your growth; others will stall it.

So you need to be intentional about your career.

What good looks like is clarity and proactivity. You have a sense of where you want to go in the next one to two years, and a rough direction beyond that. You’re not drifting. You’re making deliberate choices about roles, projects, and environments.

You also have a backup plan. If something isn’t working, you don’t stay stuck indefinitely. You reassess and adjust.

Building this requires reflection. Periodically step back and ask: Am I learning? Am I having impact? Am I in the right environment? Talk to mentors. Explore options. Stay informed about the market.

If you step back and look at these ten disciplines together, a pattern emerges.

Technical skills get you in the game. But the other nine determine how far you go.

They are what allow you to convert analysis into action, ideas into outcomes, and potential into real impact.

And importantly, they reinforce each other. Strong communication improves your influencing. Good relationships make change management easier. Financial acumen strengthens your credibility. Personal productivity underpins everything.

Becoming well-rounded doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a gradual process of identifying gaps, experimenting, learning, and refining. At any given point, you might be strong in some areas and weaker in others. That’s normal.

The key is awareness and intentionality.

If you treat BI purely as a technical profession, you cap your potential early. But if you approach it as a multi-disciplinary craft—one that blends analysis, psychology, leadership, and execution—you unlock a much higher ceiling.

And that’s where the real value lies.

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Every major consulting firm, software vendor, and LinkedIn thought leader will tell you the same thing: AI is transforming procurement. And they’re not wrong. But there is a version of this story being told right now that is, at best, incomplete — and at worst, quietly misleading.

The narrative goes something like this: deploy an AI-powered spend analytics platform, connect it to your ERP, and watch the savings opportunities surface themselves. Run your sourcing events through an AI-enabled e-auction tool. Let machine learning flag contract non-compliance in real time. Sit back, collect the savings.

If you have spent serious time in heavy industry procurement — mining, energy, manufacturing, construction — you will already know why that story rings hollow. Not because the tools don’t work. They do, increasingly well. But because the hardest part of procurement cost reduction was never the analysis. It was always the judgment.

“AI gives you the X-ray. You still need the surgeon.”

WHY PROCUREMENT IS STILL ONE OF THE BIGGEST LEVERS

In heavy industry, external spend typically represents 50–70% of total revenue. That is not a rounding error — it is the largest single cost pool in the business. And yet, in most organisations, it remains one of the least systematically managed.

The reasons are familiar to anyone who has worked in this space. Procurement is fragmented across business units, geographies, and asset classes. Spend data is messy, inconsistent, and spread across multiple ERP systems. Category management capability is uneven. And the most complex, highest-value categories — the ones that actually move EBITDA — are often managed on the basis of relationships and institutional knowledge rather than structured market intelligence.

The result is that most heavy industry companies are capturing somewhere between 40–60% of the theoretical value available in their procurement base. The gap is not a mystery. It is just hard to close. Which is exactly why AI, deployed well, matters.

WHERE AI GENUINELY ADDS VALUE

Let’s be specific. Across the procurement lifecycle, there are five areas where AI tools have moved from novelty to genuine, repeatable capability.

Spend diagnostics and leak detection. The most immediate and defensible use case. AI-powered spend analytics can classify, cleanse, and categorise transactional data at a scale and speed no team of analysts can match. More importantly, it surfaces patterns that humans routinely miss: maverick spend hiding inside approved vendor codes, pricing inconsistencies across sites for the same SKU, tail spend that has quietly consolidated into a handful of unmanaged vendors. In a large mining or energy business, this kind of diagnostic typically surfaces 8–12% of addressable spend that was previously invisible. The question is always: invisible to whom? Often the spend was known at site level. It just never made it into a form that could drive decisions at the category level.

Supplier market intelligence. AI tools are increasingly capable of aggregating and synthesising external market data — commodity indices, supplier financial health indicators, capacity utilisation signals, news and regulatory changes — and presenting it in a form that supports sourcing decisions. For commodity-linked categories (steel, copper, fuel, bulk chemicals), this kind of intelligence is genuinely valuable. It can flag when a supplier is under financial stress before it becomes a supply chain problem, or identify windows of market softness that create negotiating leverage.

Sourcing strategy and e-auctions. AI-enhanced sourcing platforms can now do more than run a reverse auction. They can suggest supplier slates based on historical performance and market participation, model different lot configurations to maximise competitive tension, and provide real-time analytics during an auction event. For well-structured, competitive categories, this represents a meaningful capability upgrade over traditional approaches.

Contract compliance and leakage recovery. One of the most underappreciated use cases. A significant portion of negotiated savings — estimates vary, but 20–40% is commonly cited in the literature — leaks out in the implementation phase through pricing errors, off-contract buying, and failure to capture volume rebates. AI-powered contract management tools can monitor transactional data against contracted terms at scale, flagging deviations in near real time. In a business with thousands of active contracts, this is simply not possible to do manually with any consistency.

Tail spend governance. The long tail of procurement — the thousands of small transactions that collectively represent around 20% of spend but 80% of purchase orders — has historically been too expensive to manage actively. AI changes that equation. Automated approval workflows, AI-assisted vendor consolidation recommendations, and anomaly detection on small transactions make tail spend management tractable in a way it never was before.

WHERE THE SURGEON STILL MATTERS

Here is where the honest conversation starts. Every one of the capabilities above is real. And every one of them can be deployed in a way that produces precisely zero lasting value without the right human judgment sitting alongside it.

Take spend diagnostics. AI will tell you that you have 47 active vendors supplying industrial gases across your assets, with a total spend of £12 million and significant price variation by site. That is useful. What the AI cannot tell you is that three of those vendors are the only ones with the technical certification to supply to your most hazardous process units, that the largest vendor is also a critical partner on a capital project you cannot afford to disrupt, and that the price variation is partly explained by genuinely different logistics costs rather than poor negotiation. A category manager who does not know those things will run a consolidation exercise that creates operational risk, damages a strategic relationship, and delivers savings on paper that reverse within 18 months.

Or consider supplier market intelligence. The platform surfaces a signal that steel prices are declining and recommends accelerating a contract renewal. What it does not know is that the current supplier has been investing in plant upgrades specifically to support your next major maintenance shutdown, and that disrupting the relationship now — even to capture a 5% price improvement — creates a much larger risk on the other side. Market intelligence without market relationships is just noise with a dashboard.

The same logic applies to sourcing. AI can optimise a lot structure. It cannot read the room in a negotiation, understand why a supplier is — or is not — hungry for your business, or know that the incumbent’s seemingly uncompetitive bid reflects a deliberate decision to walk away from your category rather than a negotiating position to be tested.

This is not a limitation of AI that will be solved by the next model generation. It is a structural feature of procurement in complex industries. The value lives in the intersection of data and context, of analytics and market knowledge, of insight and judgment.

A PRACTICAL FRAMEWORK

For practitioners looking to deploy AI effectively alongside experienced category management, three principles hold up well in practice.

Lead with the diagnostic, but interrogate the output. Use AI spend analytics as a starting point, not an answer. Treat the outputs as hypotheses to be tested against category knowledge, not recommendations to be actioned. The discipline of working through the delta between what the data says and what experienced people know is often where the most valuable insight lives. The best category reviews we have seen start with an AI-generated spend profile and end somewhere completely different from where the data initially pointed.

Invest in the interface between tool and team. The biggest failure mode in AI procurement deployments is the handoff. Analytics teams run the platform, produce outputs, and pass them over a wall to category managers who do not trust the data and do not know how to engage with it. Close that gap deliberately. The most effective implementations have category managers who understand the tools and data scientists who understand the categories — or, ideally, people who can do both. This is a talent and culture problem as much as a technology one.

Reserve your best talent for your most complex categories. AI adds the most value in the middle of the spend distribution — structured, competitive, data-rich categories where analytics can genuinely replace manual effort. At the top of the spend distribution — the large, complex, often sole-sourced categories that drive the most value — human expertise is irreplaceable. Do not let AI deployments create the illusion that these categories are being managed when they are not. The risk is real: organisations that invest heavily in AI tooling sometimes use it as justification to reduce experienced headcount in exactly the categories that need them most.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH ABOUT MOST DEPLOYMENTS

Here is the contrarian view, offered with the benefit of having sat in a lot of procurement transformation war rooms: most AI deployments in procurement are solving the wrong problem.

The categories that respond best to AI-led optimisation are, by definition, the ones that were already reasonably competitive, reasonably structured, and reasonably transparent. The tools find savings in places where savings were findable. What they do not do — and cannot do — is unlock the value in the categories that are genuinely hard: the single-source suppliers with real leverage, the long-term service contracts where value is embedded in scope rather than price, the contractor relationships in capital projects where the real cost driver is how work is packaged and managed rather than the day rate.

These categories require experienced, credible people with deep market knowledge and the organisational standing to make difficult calls. No platform changes that. And the risk of a well-marketed AI deployment is that it creates the appearance of a world-class procurement function while the categories that actually matter continue to be managed the way they always were — on gut feel, long relationships, and hope.

The companies generating the most value from AI in procurement are not the ones that bought the most sophisticated tools. They are the ones that used AI to free up experienced category managers from the analytical grind — and then deployed those people against the categories that actually move the needle.

THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IS IN THE COMBINATION

AI is a genuine step-change in procurement capability. The tools are real, the use cases are defensible, and the economics are compelling. Organisations that are not actively exploring AI-enabled procurement today are already falling behind.

But the companies that will pull ahead on procurement cost performance over the next five years will not be the ones with the best platform. They will be the ones that figured out how to combine the analytical power of AI with the market knowledge, judgment, and credibility of experienced procurement professionals — and who were honest enough with themselves to resist the temptation to substitute one for the other.

The X-ray is extraordinarily useful. But you still need a surgeon who knows what they’re looking at — and what to do about it.

In most organisations, the phrase “category strategy” triggers a familiar mental image. A one-page document. A standard template. A handful of boxes to fill in before the next sourcing event. Spend profile, supplier landscape, risk rating, savings target, procurement approach. Tick, flick, submit, archive.

Everyone involved knows the ritual. The procurement team produces the document because the governance process requires it. The business signs it off because it looks sensible enough. And nothing fundamentally changes as a result. The same suppliers are invited. The same scope is tendered. The same assumptions are carried forward. The same outcomes emerge, usually with modest price movement and a sense that “we’ve done procurement properly”.

This is not a failure of intent. Most category strategies start with good intentions. The problem is that the artefact has replaced the thinking. The document exists, but the hard questions were never seriously confronted. And without confronting those questions, a category strategy is just an administrative step, not a strategic one.

A good category strategy is not defined by how neatly it fits on a page. It is defined by whether it changes decisions. It should materially alter what you buy, how you buy it, who you buy it from, and how much value the organisation captures over time. If it does not do that, it is not a strategy. It is paperwork.

What problem is a category strategy meant to solve?

To understand what a good category strategy actually looks like, it helps to step back and ask what problem it is meant to solve in the first place.

At its core, procurement exists to convert organisational demand into outcomes at the best possible combination of cost, risk, performance, and flexibility. A category strategy is the mechanism that shapes how that conversion happens for a specific area of spend. Done well, it creates clarity where there is habit. Done poorly, it formalises existing behaviour and locks it in.

This distinction matters. When a strategy simply codifies the status quo, it gives a false sense of control. The organisation feels disciplined, but it is not necessarily being deliberate. The future ends up looking suspiciously like the past, just renegotiated.

The difference between those two outcomes lies entirely in the quality of thinking that sits behind the strategy.

Moving from “what we buy” to “what outcome we need”

The first question a meaningful category strategy must answer is deceptively simple: what are we actually buying?

In many organisations, this question is answered far too quickly. We buy cleaning services. We buy IT support. We buy professional services. We buy maintenance. We buy logistics. These labels feel precise, but they are usually superficial. They describe the contract, not the outcome.

When you push harder, you often discover that the organisation is not really buying a service at all. It is buying uptime. Or compliance. Or availability. Or responsiveness. Or peace of mind. Or speed. Or optionality. Or the ability to scale without adding headcount. Or the ability to transfer risk.

This distinction is more than semantic. Once you start framing the category around outcomes rather than labels, new possibilities emerge. If the outcome is uptime, is a traditional maintenance contract the only way to achieve it? If the outcome is access to capability, is an external provider always the right answer? If the outcome is compliance, is the current service model actually the lowest-risk approach, or simply the most familiar?

This reframing is uncomfortable because it destabilises long-held assumptions. People are attached to the idea that “this is how we buy this category”. A good category strategy deliberately challenges that idea. It treats the current model not as a default, but as one option among many.

Challenging the default buying model

Once the outcome is clear, the next question becomes unavoidable: is there a better way to achieve it?

Better does not automatically mean cheaper. It can mean more resilient, more scalable, easier to manage, or less exposed to supplier risk. In some cases, the answer is to move work in-house that has historically been outsourced. In others, the answer is the opposite. Internal teams that grew organically may no longer be the most effective way to deliver the outcome at scale.

Sometimes the right move is to consolidate multiple fragmented services under a single supplier to gain simplicity and economies of scale. In other cases, the right move is to deliberately split a monolithic contract into smaller components to introduce competition and reduce dependency.

There is no universal best practice here. Anyone offering one is selling comfort, not insight. The right answer depends on context: the organisation’s capabilities, its risk appetite, the maturity of the supply market, the volatility of demand, and the strategic importance of the outcome being delivered.

This is where category strategies most often fail. Rather than exploring these alternatives seriously, teams default to the current structure and focus on negotiating harder within it. The strategy becomes an optimisation exercise rather than a design exercise. Marginal gains are pursued, while structural opportunities are ignored.

Rethinking who the “best” supplier really is

Once alternative ways of buying the outcome are on the table, the question of suppliers becomes much more interesting. Who is actually best placed to deliver what we need?

This is not the same as asking who the incumbent is, who has the strongest brand, or who is most familiar to stakeholders. It is about fit. Fit to the outcome. Fit to the organisation’s scale and complexity. Fit to its appetite for innovation and change.

In some categories, the best supplier may not even be a traditional supplier. It might be a strategic partner. It might be a consortium. It might be an internal capability that is strengthened and reconfigured. It might be a deliberately designed mix of providers, each responsible for a clearly defined part of the outcome.

Arriving at this answer requires stepping outside the usual procurement comfort zone. It means engaging the market earlier and more openly. It means talking to suppliers not just about price, but about how they would solve the problem if they were starting from a blank sheet. It means being willing to hear answers that do not fit neatly into existing templates.

From relative prices to real value

This naturally leads to one of the most sensitive questions in any category strategy: what is the right price to pay?

Too often, price is treated as a relative concept. Lower than last time. Lower than budget. Lower than the benchmark. These comparisons are easy to make and easy to defend, but they do not tell you whether the organisation is capturing real value.

A good category strategy treats price as an absolute question. What should this outcome cost, given the way we choose to deliver it? What are the underlying cost drivers? What is the supplier’s economic reality? Where is value genuinely being created, and where is it simply being transferred?

Answering this properly is hard work. It requires building bottom-up views of cost and value, testing assumptions, and being honest about trade-offs. It often exposes uncomfortable truths, such as the fact that a low headline price may be accompanied by hidden risk, poor performance, or rigidity that destroys value elsewhere in the organisation.

This is one of the reasons many category strategies avoid going deep on value quantification. It is much easier to label options as high or low cost, high or low risk, strategic or non-strategic. But these labels obscure more than they reveal. A meaningful strategy should be able to articulate the value of different options in real financial terms, even if those numbers are imperfect. Directionally right and transparent beats precise and misleading every time.

Designing the commercial and contractual settings

Price, of course, is only one part of the equation. A category strategy that focuses solely on rates and discounts is incomplete.

Terms and conditions define how risk is allocated, how performance is measured, how change is managed, and how disputes are resolved. They determine whether a contract is rigid or flexible, adversarial or collaborative. Getting these settings right can unlock enormous value over time, particularly in categories where demand is uncertain or evolving.

A good category strategy is explicit about which commercial levers really matter and why. It does not treat contracts as legal boilerplate. It recognises that commercial structure is itself a strategic choice, and it designs it deliberately to support the desired outcomes.

The work behind the thinking

Reaching this level of clarity does not happen through desk-based analysis alone. It requires several reinforcing streams of work.

Internal analysis provides the foundation. Historical spend data, demand patterns, contract performance, and stakeholder behaviour all reveal how the category actually operates today, as opposed to how it is described in policy documents. This analysis often surfaces inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and hidden drivers of cost and risk.

External analysis adds perspective. Understanding the supply market, its structure, its economics, and its direction helps distinguish between constraints that are real and those that are self-imposed. Markets evolve, often faster than procurement assumptions do.

Market engagement connects theory to reality. Conversations with suppliers reveal how they think, where they see opportunity, and how different sourcing models would change their behaviour. When done early, this engagement shapes the strategy rather than simply validating it.

Expert input rounds out the picture. This may come from advisors, peers in other organisations, or internal experts who have navigated similar challenges elsewhere. Learning from others’ experience reduces blind spots and accelerates insight.

Why the best category strategies take time

All of this takes time. And that is not a flaw in the process. It is the point.

A good category strategy is not built in the final weeks before a contract expires. It is developed early, when there is space to think, explore, test, and challenge assumptions. It prioritises depth over speed and robustness over optics.

Once established, the strategy should not be treated as static. Markets shift. Organisational priorities change. What was optimal two years ago may no longer be optimal today. The real power of a category strategy lies in its ability to evolve. By revisiting assumptions and updating insights, the organisation ensures that when the next procurement event arrives, decisions are made from a position of intent rather than urgency.

In that sense, a category strategy is not really a document at all. It is a capability. It reflects how seriously an organisation is willing to think about how it spends money and why.

When procurement teams embrace this mindset, the impact is profound. Conversations move from price to value. From suppliers to solutions. From process to purpose. The strategy stops being something done to satisfy governance and starts becoming something that shapes the organisation’s future.

That is what a good category strategy looks like. Not neat. Not fast. But genuinely strategic.

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It’s the mark of someone who doesn’t need constant direction, who moves forward even when the path isn’t clear, and who can transform vague inputs into meaningful progress.

High agency is one of those traits that separates the “cube” from the “ball.” A cube, once flicked, comes to a halt unless pushed again. A ball, once nudged, keeps rolling forward on its own momentum. In business, you want to be the ball.

Everyone understands the idea of high agency. The hard part is implementing it - especially in environments where ambiguity is the norm, stakeholders are busy, and the instructions you get are more like a sketch than a blueprint.

In this article, I’ll break down how to develop high agency step by step, so you can move from simply following instructions to being the person your leaders trust to drive outcomes independently.

Why High Agency Matters

In business improvement and strategy (and consulting more broadly), you rarely get a fully-formed, well-defined task. More often you get a loosely phrased objective:

• “Can you take a look at our customer churn problem?”

• “We need a page on competitor pricing - what’s the story?”

• “See if we can work with that supplier in Indonesia.”

If you treat these inputs literally, you risk circling back with “I wasn’t sure what you wanted” - which frustrates leaders and slows everyone down.

By contrast, someone with high agency can take those rough inputs, frame them into a clear problem, test an approach, and quickly return with an 80/20 answer - before iterating toward a gold-plated version if truly needed.

The 8-Step Playbook for Building High Agency

Here’s a systematic way to approach any ambiguous task.

Step 1: Understand the Task to the Extent Possible

Often, the person giving you the assignment hasn’t thought it through fully. That’s not laziness - it’s just reality at senior levels, where ideas come fast and time is scarce.

Your job:

• Write down what you think the task is asking for.

• Identify what’s missing or unclear.

• Make reasonable assumptions so it makes sense to you.

If you can double-check, great. But don’t expect your manager to give you a perfectly structured answer. High performers are comfortable figuring things out from partial inputs.

Example: If asked to “look at customer churn,” decide whether the task is to analyze reasons for churn, benchmark against peers, or propose solutions. Choose one angle to start, and clarify if needed later.

Step 2: Make a Perfect-World Plan

Sketch what you’d do if you had unlimited data, time, and access.

• What’s the ideal analysis?

• What would the perfect data set look like?

• What would the final deliverable include?

This anchors you in the “gold standard” of how the problem could be solved.

Example: For customer churn, the perfect plan might involve a regression on customer-level data, detailed churn surveys, and competitor mystery shopping.

Step 3: Simplify to the 80/20 MVP

Now, cut ruthlessly. What’s the 20% of effort that gets you 60-80% of the answer?

• Use assumptions instead of perfect data.

• Google sources instead of launching surveys.

• Build a simple Excel model instead of a Python pipeline.

The goal isn’t perfection. It’s speed + directional accuracy.

Example: Instead of a regression, start with a quick cohort analysis using the data you have. Instead of surveying 1,000 customers, interview 5 sales reps for insights.

Step 4: Stress-Test Your MVP

Once you have a first cut, ask: Where could this be wrong?

• Vary assumptions to see which ones swing the outcome.

• Sharpen the critical few assumptions.

• Ignore the rest for now.

This makes your MVP robust enough to be credible without wasting effort on immaterial details.

Example: If your churn analysis depends heavily on one assumption about competitor pricing, pressure-test that assumption by checking a few price points online.

Step 5: Share the MVP and Get Feedback

Show your leader the MVP output and ask:

• “Is this the direction you had in mind?”

• “Here’s what I assumed - do these look reasonable?”

• “This is 80/20 - do you want me to take it further?”

This accomplishes two things:

1. It validates whether you’re on the right track.

2. It allows your manager to calibrate how much more accuracy is needed.

Often, the MVP is enough to guide decisions.

Step 6: Do the Next 20%

If further work is needed, don’t jump straight to perfection. Ask: What’s the next 20% effort that gives me the next meaningful leap in accuracy or insight?

Maybe it’s gathering real supplier quotes instead of Googling. Maybe it’s cleaning a messy dataset instead of relying on averages.

Deliver again, then recalibrate.

Step 7: Iterate

Repeat the cycle: MVP → feedback → refine.

Each loop adds value without committing you to unnecessary polish. This prevents the classic consultant trap of spending 50 hours on something the client only needed at a directional level.

Step 8: Gold-Plate Only if Needed

If the situation truly demands it - e.g., a board presentation or an investor due diligence - then go for the gold-plated version.

But by this point, you’ll be certain it’s worth the effort, and you’ll have a robust base to build from.

Practical Examples

Example 1: Partner Outreach

Task: “See if we can work with Supplier X in Indonesia.”

• MVP: Google Supplier X, check if they export, see if they have existing Western partners.

• Next step: Email a contact, test responsiveness.

• Gold-plated: Fly to Jakarta, negotiate terms face-to-face.

High agency means you don’t stall because you don’t have a full playbook. You start small, test, and escalate only if promising.

Example 2: Organizing a Workshop

Task: “Put together a client workshop on efficiency.”

• MVP: Draft a 3-page outline of topics and a sample agenda.

• Stress-test: Ask if the client cares more about cost or customer experience.

• Next step: Add detailed exercises and breakout session plans.

• Gold-plated: Book venue, professional facilitators, full deck.

Instead of asking “What exactly do you want?”, you push forward with a prototype.

Example 3: Physical Process Improvement

Task: “Improve our warehouse picking process.”

• MVP: Walk the floor, observe workers, note inefficiencies.

• Stress-test: Compare with benchmarks (items per hour).

• Next step: Pilot a new layout in one aisle.

• Gold-plated: Roll out redesign across the warehouse with full training and metrics.

Again, you don’t wait for perfect data. You act.

Final Thoughts: Becoming the Ball

High agency is one of the most valuable traits you can develop in a corporate environment. It’s the difference between being a cube that needs constant flicking and a ball that rolls forward on its own.

The steps are simple in theory - but powerful in practice:

1. Frame the task.

2. Plan ideally.

3. Simplify to MVP.

4. Stress-test.

5. Get feedback.

6. Do the next 20%.

7. Iterate.

8. Gold-plate if needed.

Master this process, and you’ll stand out as the person who creates momentum where others stall. Leaders will trust you with more responsibility, colleagues will look to you for direction, and your career trajectory will accelerate.

High agency isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about creating answers when the path is unclear.

Be the ball.

Where exactly are we trying to go — and how do the pieces of our program add up to get us there?

That is why we believe every strategic advisor should carry one tool in their back pocket: the from/to waterfall. It’s a single-page diagram that captures your baseline performance, the portfolio of initiatives you’re proposing, the estimated impact of each, and the end-state target.

This one-pager is not just a visualisation. It’s a forcing mechanism: it makes you pick a metric, estimate value, and subject your logic to scrutiny. And when used well, it becomes both the North Star and the treasure map for the change journey.

Why a waterfall?

The brilliance of the waterfall is its simplicity. Start with a baseline — say, $500 million in annual revenue. Then stack up the estimated impact of each initiative: new product lines, pricing improvements, operational efficiencies, customer churn reductions, cost takeouts. Each “bar” on the waterfall moves you from today’s state (“from”) to the future state (“to”).

Unlike a table of numbers, the waterfall forces a narrative: Here’s where we are today. Here’s what we need to achieve. Here are the moves we think will get us there. Do they add up?

Executives rarely rally behind 80-page slide decks. But a single page that shows “baseline → initiatives → outcome” is hard to ignore.

Below is a step-by step guide for how to create this critical one-pager.

Step 1: Pick the right metric

The first trap to avoid is metric sprawl. A change program can touch dozens of KPIs: cost per unit, NPS, employee attrition, gross margin, inventory turns. But for your waterfall to have impact, you must anchor on one metric that matters most for the program.

• For a new growth strategy, the anchor metric might be revenue or market share.

• For an operational excellence program, it’s often EBITDA margin or cost savings.

• For a customer experience transformation, you might choose retention rate or lifetime value.

The chosen metric should pass two tests: (1) senior leaders actually care about it, and (2) it can translate the disparate projects into a common currency.

We once saw a global bank run a $200m customer experience program measured by “number of digital features launched.” Unsurprisingly, the program quickly lost credibility. When they reframed it around cost-to-serve per customer and digital adoption rate, it became clear which projects actually mattered.

Step 2: Estimate the baseline

Next, define the starting point. This doesn’t need to be perfect — “roughly right” is enough.

For example, say you’re working with a consumer goods company launching a new growth strategy. The current baseline: $1.2 billion in annual revenue. Everyone may argue whether it’s $1.18 or $1.23 billion, but for the purpose of the waterfall, that detail is irrelevant. The waterfall is about directional sense-making, not accounting precision.

What matters is that the baseline is accepted as “close enough to reality” so you can start building the story.

Step 3: Brainstorm all the ideas

Here’s where creativity enters. In a workshop with leaders and stakeholders, list every initiative that could drive the change program. No filtering yet — just generate options.

In a cost program, this might include vendor renegotiation, warehouse automation, headcount optimization, SKU rationalization, and energy efficiency.

In a growth program, it might include new product launches, digital marketing campaigns, channel expansion, and pricing changes.

Quantity precedes quality here. You want enough raw material to later assess relative value.

Step 4: Estimate the value of each idea

Now comes the strategic advisor’s most delicate move: putting a number on each initiative.

Again, the goal is not precision but plausibility. For example:

• “SKU rationalization” → $25 million annual savings, based on prior benchmarks.

• “New premium product line” → $60 million revenue, based on 5% penetration of existing customers.

• “Improve customer retention by 3 percentage points” → $40 million revenue preserved.

The key is to tie every estimate back to the chosen metric. You can use industry benchmarks, internal pilot results, or back-of-the-envelope math. What matters is that you avoid “number-free strategy.”

Step 5: Build the waterfall

This is the fun part. Starting with the baseline, stack each initiative’s impact up or down.

• Revenue strategy? Baseline $1.2b → new products +$60m → retention +$40m → channel expansion +$100m → final “to” state $1.4b.

• Operational excellence? Baseline cost $2.0b → vendor renegotiation –$80m → automation –$50m → headcount optimization –$40m → new baseline $1.83b.

The visual reveals instantly whether the program is ambitious enough, credible, or padded with fluff.

Step 6: See if the end-state looks attractive

When you step back, does the “to” state look compelling enough for leadership to back?

If a five-year transformation only shifts revenue from $1.2b to $1.25b, it’s not a transformation — it’s noise. If a cost program saves 2% but demands three years of disruption, the waterfall will expose the mismatch.

This is where many programs die, and rightly so. Better to find out on one page than after years of effort.

Step 7: Sense-check and refine

Now interrogate each bar of the waterfall. Are the big-ticket items realistic? Have you double-counted benefits? Did you overlook secondary impacts?

For example: a “pricing increase” might yield $50m in theory, but what if customer churn offsets half of that? Conversely, an automation project may deliver more than expected once scaled.

This is the stage for humility — iterate, debate, and tighten the estimates.

Step 8: Socialize with stakeholders

Before you run to the CEO, pressure test the one-pager with functional leaders. Show the supply chain head the cost program. Walk through the revenue strategy with sales and marketing.

This both improves accuracy and builds buy-in. When leaders see their fingerprints on the page, they are more likely to champion the program later.

Step 9: Present to decision-makers

Now you’re ready for the top table. Resist the urge to bring 50 slides. Put the one-pager waterfall up front. Explain the baseline, walk through each bar, land on the outcome.

Senior executives don’t want a tour of your spreadsheet logic. They want to know: Do the initiatives add up to the goal? Where are the big bets? What’s the level of risk?

The waterfall answers those questions in seconds.

Step 10: Use it as your treasure map

Once the program is approved, the waterfall shifts from proposal to navigation tool. Each bar represents a workstream, each workstream has an owner, and the whole picture shows what success looks like.

As the program unfolds, you can track whether initiatives deliver the expected impact. Adjustments can be mapped back to the waterfall: if one project underdelivers, which others can pick up the slack?

It’s not just a launch tool; it’s an execution compass.

Examples from different industries

To make this concrete, let’s look at three different types of change programs.

1. New Strategy (Growth)

A mid-size software company wanted to double revenue in five years. Baseline: $500m. Initiatives: launch two new product modules (+$150m), expand into Europe (+$120m), upsell premium tier (+$80m), reduce churn 5% (+$50m). The waterfall showed a “to” state of ~$900m — not quite doubling, but close. Leadership decides to greenlight and add M&A as a further lever.

2. Operational Excellence

A chemicals manufacturer faced declining margins. Baseline EBITDA margin: 12%. Initiatives: raw material sourcing optimization (+2pp), energy efficiency (+1pp), plant automation (+1.5pp), SG&A reduction (+1pp). Waterfall “to” state: 17.5%. The one-pager convinces leadership to invest heavily in automation because it clearly drives the biggest uplift.

3. Customer Experience Transformation

A bank wanted to improve NPS and retention. Baseline customer attrition: 20% annually. Initiatives: new mobile app experience (+3pp retention), improved call center response (+2pp), proactive outreach for at-risk customers (+2pp). The waterfall showed attrition dropping to 13%. The CFO translates that into $100m annual revenue preserved — suddenly customer experience becomes a financial story.

Why advisors love it (and clients do too)

The from/to waterfall works because it:

• Forces clarity on goals and metrics.

• Translates big, abstract programs into a single number.

• Surfaces whether the ambition matches the aspiration.

• Provides a shared language for executives from different functions.

• Fits on one page — and therefore gets remembered.

Every advisor should have one in their toolkit. It doesn’t replace detailed analysis, but it comes before it. Without a credible one-pager, all the spreadsheets in the world won’t win hearts or budgets.

Closing thought

Change programs fail for many reasons: lack of buy-in, weak execution, shifting priorities. But the most fundamental failure is launching without a clear, shared, quantified vision of what success looks like.

The from/to waterfall is not glamorous. It’s not the sexiest chart in your deck. But it’s the single most powerful way to answer the question: Where are we going, and how are we getting there?

As an advisor or a change manager, if you can produce that one-pager early in the journey, you’ll find that everything else — stakeholder alignment, funding, accountability, even morale — becomes much easier.

At McKinsey, one of the first things you learn is this: insight only matters if people can see it, understand it, and remember it. That’s where the right chart becomes a weapon.

Over time, we found that 7 chart types are disproportionately useful in day-to-day business improvement, strategy, and management contexts. If you can master these — both how to build them and when to use them — you’ll be miles ahead of most of your peers.

Here they are:

1. Horizontal bar chart

2. Vertical bar chart

3. Waterfall chart

4. Cost curve

5. Heat map

6. Process chart

7. Text buckets chart

Let’s go through each one.

1. Horizontal Bar Chart

A horizontal bar chart is one of the cleanest ways to show how a metric has shifted over time. Because we naturally read from left to right, it feels intuitive for the viewer to follow a progression: sales rising across quarters, EBITDA falling during a downturn, or headcount climbing over a decade. The metric itself can be anything — financial, operational, or even softer measures like employee engagement. What matters is that the eye can quickly trace change in the bars across the timeline without effort.

See an example of what it looks like below:

Another strength of the format is that you can layer more nuance into the picture by using color-coding within each bar. For example, an EBITDA bar might be segmented into subcomponents like different divisions, or a sales bar might show how much growth came from price versus volume. These sub-segments give richness to the story without cluttering the chart with additional lines or labels. The trick is to keep it simple: too many subdivisions and you lose the power of the overall shape.

Another common mistake is overloading the chart with too many periods. If you try to show every single month for 10 years, the viewer will get lost in detail and miss the forest for the trees. Instead, aggregate intelligently — roll months into quarters, years into five-year averages, or decades into eras. This forces clarity and makes the bigger story obvious. Conversely, avoid using horizontal bar charts to compare static categories, such as different business units in a given year. In that case, a vertical bar chart is a cleaner and more natural choice. Imagine a visual where EBITDA is plotted over a 10-year horizon with each bar broken into the main drivers — in three seconds the reader knows both how performance moved and what was behind it.

2. Vertical bar chart

A vertical bar chart comes into its own when you need to compare static categories at a single point in time rather than a trend over time. It’s the natural choice for showing how one period breaks down across business units, product lines, customer segments, or geographies. For example, if you want to illustrate how revenue in 2024 was distributed across five divisions, a vertical bar chart makes that comparison immediately clear — each bar is a category, each height a share of the whole.

Have a look at the visual example below:

The strength of this format lies in its visual clarity. Our eyes are good at comparing heights when the categories are arranged side by side, and the layout reinforces the sense of distinct buckets of performance. It’s particularly effective when you want to highlight one category against others, either by color or annotation, because the difference is visible at a glance.

Where this chart can go wrong is when it’s overloaded with too many bars or when the scale is manipulated. Ten or fewer categories is usually ideal; beyond that the bars become indistinguishable and the insight gets lost. The scale should always start at zero, otherwise you risk misleading the reader by exaggerating small differences. Used well, a vertical bar chart is the best way to show the shape of a business at a given moment in time — who’s contributing most, who’s lagging, and where the story really is.

3. Waterfall chart

The saying goes that a waterfall chart is the consultant’s (or the strategist’s, or the BI professional’s) best friend when it comes to explaining how you get from one number to another. Instead of presenting totals that feel disconnected, the waterfall shows the journey step by step — starting with a baseline, then layering in the key additions and subtractions until you arrive at the final result. It’s also often used in finance: an EBITDA bridge, a revenue walk from last year to this year, or a budget variance analysis. But the principle applies widely — any situation where you need to show the drivers of change is a candidate for a waterfall.

Here’s what it usually looks like in practice:

What makes the format powerful is its clarity. Each bar either pushes the value up or pulls it down, and by the time you reach the last bar, you know exactly why the number moved the way it did. Colors reinforce the message: green or blue for positive, red for negative, with the starting and ending totals clearly anchored. The reader doesn’t need to scan through a dense table or reconcile numbers mentally — the chart does the math visually. This makes it far more persuasive in executive discussions, where attention spans are short and the “so what” needs to be obvious.

That said, a waterfall chart only works if it is disciplined. Too many micro-contributors and the story fragments — aggregate the trivial items into one “Other” bar if needed. Always show the starting and ending totals; without them the logic collapses. And (in most cases) resist the temptation to use it for static breakdowns (like showing share of spend across suppliers) — that’s not its purpose. The waterfall is a storytelling device, designed to walk your audience through a narrative of change. Used well, it transforms what might otherwise feel like accounting detail into a clear, memorable story of performance drivers.

4. Cost curve

A cost curve chart is another staple in strategy and operations work, particularly when you need to show how one unit, plant, supplier, or competitor stacks up against others on cost efficiency. The logic is simple: you line up all the players along the x-axis, with the width of each bar corresponding to some measure of capacity (like annual production), usually ranked from lowest to highest cost per unit, and then plot the cost itself on the y-axis. The result is a curve that reveals the spread across the industry — who sits in the low-cost position, who’s in the middle of the pack, and who is at risk because they are sitting far out on the high-cost tail.

It might be easier to understand it visually, like in the example here:

The power of the cost curve lies in what it reveals with a glance. A mining company can see whether its operations are in the lowest quartile globally, or whether they are dangerously exposed above the industry average. A procurement manager can line up suppliers to identify who is truly competitive. Strategy teams can highlight the breakeven point in a commodity market and show which players will survive if prices fall. Color-coding adds even more meaning: shading your company one way, competitors another, or highlighting the “safe zone” below industry breakeven.

But this chart demands discipline. If you clutter it with too many variables — prices, margins, volumes — the clarity disappears. Keep it simple: units on the x-axis, cost per unit on the y-axis, and cumulative volume if that helps the story. Always ensure the ranking is correct; the entire credibility of the chart rests on that order. And be careful when sharing externally — sensitive cost data should be anonymised or indexed rather than published directly. Done well, a cost curve transforms abstract benchmarking into a sharp, visual story about competitive position and strategic risk.

5. Heat map

A heat map is one of the most effective tools for making sense of complex, multidimensional data. Rather than forcing your audience to digest multiple charts or long tables, you can encode the signal in color intensity across a grid. This makes patterns, outliers, and “hotspots” jump out at first glance. In a business context, it is invaluable when you need to compare companies, plants, or regions across several metrics at once.

Let’s use this chart as an example:

In this example, we want to show four companies, each evaluated on three dimensions — cost competitiveness, production scale across plants, and reputation for product quality. A heat map allows you to set up the companies along one axis and the criteria along the other. Each cell is shaded according to performance: darker blue for better cost competitiveness, higher production, and stronger product reputation. Within seconds, the viewer can see which company is a low-cost producer with scale, which one is niche but high quality, and which ones are stuck in the middle. It transforms what would otherwise be a messy table into a structured visual story.

The discipline is in execution. Keep the colour scale simple and intuitive — light to dark on a single hue, or a clear gradient, but never a full-blown rainbow. Label the extremes of the scale so there’s no guesswork about what “dark” means. Don’t overload the map with dozens of metrics or categories, otherwise it becomes a blur of color. The goal is pattern recognition, not data dumping. In our case, the map should help an executive understand at a glance why Company X dominates on cost and scale but loses ground on product reputation, while Company Y thrives in quality despite smaller production. That kind of story lands far better in a meeting than three separate charts ever would.

6. Process chart

A process chart is the right choice when you need to guide your audience through a sequence of steps. It’s not about data, but about flow — making it crystal clear how something gets done from start to finish. In our example of finding cost opportunities, the five steps are straightforward: clean up your data, identify high-potential areas, prioritise, select projects to activate, and begin testing and delivering value. Putting these in a simple, left-to-right flow with arrows immediately communicates the logic: this is not a random list of actions, but a repeatable method with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The beauty of a process chart is that it lends itself to just enough design flair. A plain row of rectangles works, but it won’t hold attention. Adding subtle touches — rounded boxes, clean arrows, a muted color palette that differentiates each step — elevates the chart from a list into a story. The emphasis should always be on elegance rather than decoration: a consistent style, clear typography, and perhaps a touch of shading or icons if they reinforce meaning. The goal is to make it visually inviting, not to overwhelm with gimmicks.

The discipline is the same as with other charts: keep it simple, and keep it focused on the audience. Five steps is perfect — digestible at a glance, but still detailed enough to show there’s substance behind the method. More than seven and the logic gets diluted; fewer than three and it feels trivial. In our case, the process chart works because it makes the approach to cost improvement tangible: the executive doesn’t just hear “we’ll find savings,” they see the roadmap of how it will happen. Elegant, simple, and structured — that’s the mark of a good process chart.

7. Text bucket chart

A text bucket chart is one of the simplest but most versatile tools in a corporate toolkit. It takes what could otherwise be a messy, free-flowing discussion and imposes structure by grouping ideas into clear categories. In the example below, the buckets are the divisions (A through D), and within each bucket the strengths and weaknesses are captured side by side. This format works because it helps executives process qualitative insights with the same ease they would numerical data — in one glance, they can see which divisions are cost-competitive, which trade on reputation, and which are struggling with adaptation or cash generation.

What makes the text bucket chart particularly effective is its ability to balance detail with clarity. You don’t want a long essay under each label — the discipline is to distil the essence into two or three well-crafted lines. That way, the page functions almost like a heat map for words: the reader can scan quickly, but still grasp the relative positioning of each division. In this example, Division A is painted as a high-volume cost player with weak product leadership, while Division D is portrayed as future-oriented but cash-constrained. These short, punchy formulations communicate more than an entire page of prose ever could.

There’s also a design element here. A well-made text bucket chart is visually clean: aligned boxes or rows, consistent typography, maybe a touch of shading to separate categories, but nothing excessive. You can add subtle emphasis — for instance, bolding the division names, or highlighting critical weaknesses in a different color — but the core principle is restraint. This is not about decorative design, it’s about giving structure to thought. Done well, a text bucket chart like this can transform a qualitative discussion into a sharp, memorable visual that anchors the rest of the conversation.

Here’s a strong conclusion you could use to close out the article:

So what

The truth is, you don’t need dozens of chart types to communicate effectively in business. In fact, the more exotic the visual, the greater the risk your audience spends energy deciphering the picture rather than absorbing the message. What you need is mastery of a small set of versatile, high-leverage charts — the ones that reliably turn analysis into insight, and insight into action.

The seven chart types we’ve covered — horizontal and vertical bar charts, waterfalls, cost curves, heat maps, process charts, and text buckets — are the workhorses of business storytelling. Each has a natural purpose: showing change over time, comparing static categories, walking through the drivers of a result, benchmarking cost positions, spotting patterns, clarifying workflows, or synthesising qualitative insights. Used with discipline, they can handle almost every communication challenge you’ll face as a professional.

The real art lies not in the mechanics of drawing these charts, but in the intent behind them. A good chart is a decision-enabler: it tells your audience what’s happening, why it matters, and where to act. If you can get comfortable with these seven formats — and use them thoughtfully rather than mechanically — you’ll quickly stand out as the person who can cut through complexity and make the story clear. And in corporate life, that clarity is what gets remembered, acted upon, and rewarded.

If we asked you to name the most underrated skill in business, you might say “time management,” “public speaking,” or “strategic thinking.” All fair answers. But in our experience - both advising executives as consultants and watching professionals rise or stall in their careers - the true silent superpower is listening.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: most people think they’re far better at it than they actually are.

We’ve seen senior leaders lose buy-in from their teams because they kept talking over them in meetings. We’ve watched talented managers miss critical cues from clients because they were too busy preparing their next point. And we’ve seen promising careers plateau, not because of a lack of technical brilliance, but because colleagues felt they were never truly heard.

Listening well is not just about politeness or social niceties - it’s a hard skill that directly drives outcomes: better ideas, stronger alignment, smoother execution, and ultimately, credibility. If you don’t invest in it, you’ll find doors quietly closing. But if you do, you gain access to something rare: the ability to make people feel understood, motivated, and willing to follow your lead.

So how do you do it? Let’s break it into three layers: mindset, strategy, and tactics.

Part 1: Mindset

Most people treat listening as if it were little more than the pause button on a conversation - something you do politely until it’s your turn to speak again. That’s a mistake. Listening is not passive; it’s one of the most active tools you have for building trust, uncovering motivations, and shaping outcomes. When you listen with intention, you’re not just absorbing words - you’re picking up patterns, emotions, and signals that most people miss.

To unlock this skill, three mental shifts matter more than anything else.

1. Don’t treat feedback as criticism.

When someone gives you feedback - or even just a forceful opinion - they’re giving you a window into their world. Too often, our first instinct is defensiveness: “They don’t get it” or “That’s unfair.” But what feels like criticism is really data. Data about what matters to them, where they feel pain, or what they perceive as risk.

In consulting, we learned this lesson quickly. Clients would voice frustrations that sounded messy, even irrational at times. But more often than not, those raw emotions pointed to deeper organisational issues: a broken process, a misaligned incentive, a lack of clarity. If you dismiss feedback because it’s uncomfortable, you risk missing the insight hidden inside it. But if you treat every reaction - accurate, exaggerated, or emotional - as raw material, you suddenly have something to work with.

2. Listen for motivations, not just words.

The real art of listening is not hearing what someone says but uncovering why they say it.

Imagine a colleague tells you, “I don’t think this project will work.” Take it at face value, and you might chalk them up as resistant or negative. But if you listen with curiosity, you might uncover very different stories. Perhaps they’re worried about resourcing. Perhaps they fear the reputational risk of failure. Or perhaps they’re quietly wondering how this project will affect their own role or career trajectory.

When you listen past the literal words and tune into the underlying motivation, you can respond to the real issue. Address the resource constraints, the reputational worry, or the career concern, and suddenly that same colleague is more likely to become an ally rather than an obstacle.

3. Adopt the learner’s mindset.

The hardest shift is often the simplest: approaching conversations with genuine curiosity. Many professionals plateau because, deep down, they believe they’ve already seen it all before. Every meeting becomes a stage for confirming what they already know rather than discovering something new.

The best listeners take the opposite posture. They enter discussions with a learner’s mindset: “What can I pick up here that might change my view?” This doesn’t mean agreeing with everything you hear - it means staying open to the possibility that you don’t yet have the full picture. Ironically, when people sense you are open to being changed, they often become more open to being changed themselves.

At its core, listening well is about humility. The humility to believe that feedback is useful, even if imperfect. The humility to recognize that motivations matter as much as words. And the humility to admit that you don’t yet know everything.

Part 2: Strategy

Good listening doesn’t happen by accident. It requires structuring the conversation in a way that draws out meaningful input. Three approaches can help:

1. Come with something for people to react to

One of the fastest ways to kill a discussion is to throw out vague, open-ended questions: “What do you think?” or “Any ideas?” At best, you’ll get a hesitant response or something so high-level that it doesn’t move the conversation forward. At worst, you’ll be met with silence.

The alternative - and far more effective approach - is to bring something concrete to the table. It doesn’t need to be perfect. In fact, it shouldn’t be. A draft framework, a handful of bullet points, or even a quick “strawman” proposal is often enough. The moment people have something tangible to react to, the quality of their feedback skyrockets.

This was one of the consulting world’s best-kept secrets. Rarely did we present “the final answer” in the early stages. More often, we came with what we jokingly called the “80% version.” A sketch of the idea, a framework with rough numbers, or a model that still had plenty of assumptions. Why? Because incomplete work invites debate. People don’t feel like outsiders critiquing a polished solution - they feel like collaborators shaping it.

Psychologically, this matters. The act of reacting creates ownership. Stakeholders who push back, refine, or add to your draft are far more likely to feel invested in the eventual outcome. What started as your idea quickly becomes their idea too. That shift - from compliance to ownership - often determines whether an initiative takes root or dies in the implementation stage.

In other words, don’t wait until your thinking is “ready.” Bring the draft. Put something on the table. Invite the reactions. You’ll often find that the imperfect, early version sparks the best discussion - and leads to a far stronger final result.

2. Use (guided) open-ended discussions

There are moments when you want more than just validation of an idea—you want creativity, perspective, and unexpected insights. That’s where open-ended discussions shine. The risk, of course, is that an unstructured conversation can quickly spiral into side tangents and vague talk that doesn’t lead anywhere.

The fix is simple: give people freedom within a framework. Instead of dictating the solution, set a few guideposts that channel energy into the right areas. For example, you might open a team meeting by saying: “Let’s focus today on three themes: customer satisfaction, cost control, and team morale.” This signals that input is welcome, but not limitless. The conversation can roam - but always within boundaries that matter to the business.

This approach unlocks more creativity than a rigid plan while avoiding the frustration of endless meandering. It also makes people feel that their voices are shaping the direction, not just filling airtime.

3. ‘Pro’ move: Offer people a choice

Not everyone listens - or contributes - in the same way. Some people need something tangible to react to: a draft, a framework, a slide. Others freeze when presented with a polished version and feel their input is unwelcome unless the discussion is left more open.

The most effective listeners recognise this and adapt. The professional move is to offer both. You might say: “I can show you a draft framework, or we can keep it open-ended - what would you prefer?” In just one sentence, you shift the dynamic: the other person now has agency in how the discussion unfolds.

This simple tactic lowers defensiveness, because people don’t feel pushed into a single mode of engagement. It also boosts ownership: when individuals choose the format that works for them, they are far more likely to contribute meaningfully.

It’s a small adjustment, but it’s often the difference between someone shutting down versus leaning in. And in a corporate setting - where influence is built as much on how you invite input as on the quality of your own ideas - that difference compounds over time.

Part 3: Tactics

If the mindset sets the stage, and strategy gives you the plan, then tactics are the small, almost invisible moves that transform listening from a good intention into a practical advantage. These are the behaviours that separate someone who merely nods in meetings from someone who earns genuine trust and influence.

Release your agenda (at least temporarily)

One of the most common mistakes is coming into a conversation with such a fixed position that you can’t hear anything else. Of course, you’ll always have your perspective - but true listening requires the ability to set it aside, even briefly, to make space for what the other person is saying. Think of it as suspending judgment, not abandoning it. You can always return to your agenda later, but if you push it too hard in the moment, you’ll miss critical signals.

Stay alert for cues beyond words

A big part of listening is tuning into what people are not explicitly saying. Tone of voice, pacing, hesitations, and even what someone avoids mentioning can tell you as much as their actual words. For example, a colleague might say they’re “fine” with a proposal, but their body language or flat delivery could signal deeper concerns. Attentive listeners notice these dissonances and probe gently to uncover what’s really going on.

Signal engagement through notes and reflection

There’s a reason top performers take good notes during discussions - it shows focus, creates a record, and often helps distill messy inputs into structured outputs later. Even simple gestures like writing down a phrase, or repeating back what you’ve heard (“So, if I’m understanding correctly, you’re worried about the timeline?”) demonstrate that you’re not just waiting to talk - you’re absorbing. This reassures others that their views matter.

Resist the urge to push back immediately

When someone says something you disagree with, the instinct is often to correct or defend straight away. But pushing back in the moment often shuts the conversation down. Instead, take time to process. Sleep on it if possible. This doesn’t mean avoiding conflict - it means giving yourself room to think about the best way to reframe or challenge an idea. Often, you’ll find a more constructive angle after some reflection.

Reframe from the other person’s perspective

One of the most powerful listening tactics is restating what you’ve heard in the other person’s own frame of reference. If they’re worried about costs, don’t argue from benefits - first acknowledge and articulate their concern in their terms. Once they feel understood, they’re far more open to alternative viewpoints. This technique not only prevents defensiveness but also builds alignment faster.

Frame pushback carefully when it’s needed

Eventually, you will need to disagree or offer a counterpoint. When you do, separate the idea from the person. For instance: “I see why this approach appeals—it’s faster. My concern is whether we can deliver at quality under those conditions.” Notice how the objection is tied to circumstances, not competence. Done well, this makes people more likely to engage with the substance rather than feel attacked.

In short: show up engaged, resist the temptation to dominate, and treat the other person’s perspective as a resource to be clarified and built upon - not something to be swatted down.

Closing

In consulting, we used to say that the best consultants didn’t necessarily have the flashiest answers - they had the deepest ability to listen, synthesise, and then reframe the problem in a way that unlocked progress.

The same is true in corporate life. The leaders who rise are rarely the loudest in the room. They are the ones who make others feel heard, who uncover hidden motivations, who structure conversations that produce clarity, and who turn feedback into better outcomes.

Listening may not look glamorous on your résumé. But in practice, it’s the multiplier that makes every other skill - analysis, strategy, communication - actually work. Neglect it, and you’ll miss critical opportunities. Master it, and you’ll find that influence, trust, and impact come far more easily.

It’s common in companies of all sizes and across industries. Sometimes it’s because quantifying feels too hard. Sometimes it’s because the link between the action and the result is indirect. Sometimes it’s because people aren’t used to doing it — they’ve built careers on “delivering good work” without always needing to prove the measurable benefit.

But here’s the reality: in business improvement, quantifying potential impact is one of the most valuable habits you can develop. It changes how you choose projects, how you think about them, and how others perceive your work.

Why people skip quantification

There are a few recurring reasons why teams avoid putting a number on the potential benefit:

1. “It’s too hard to measure.”
The data might be incomplete, messy, or locked away in systems you can’t access. Sometimes there’s no direct precedent for the change you’re proposing.

2. “It’s not how we usually work.”
In many operational environments, improvement projects are chosen based on intuition, urgency, or availability of resources — not on hard business cases. The culture simply hasn’t required people to make the link to measurable results.

3. “The benefits are indirect.”
Some projects don’t create value in a straight line. They reduce risk, improve flexibility, or strengthen relationships. These benefits are real — but harder to model, so they get left as “intangibles.”

4. “It’s uncomfortable to commit to a number.”
Once you say, “This will deliver $2M in annual savings,” people will hold you to it. For many, the fear of being wrong outweighs the potential upside of making an estimate.

Easy vs. hard to quantify projects

Some projects almost make the calculation for you:

• Direct-input cost reductions — negotiating a lower price for a raw material you purchase in large quantities.

• Waste elimination — reducing scrap rates in a production process.

• Energy efficiency upgrades — lowering electricity consumption by replacing high-energy equipment.

The link between action and benefit is short and clear. The variables are few. The data is usually in the ERP system. You can often calculate the benefit with confidence in an afternoon.

Other projects require more detective work:

• Stocking more spare parts — This ties up more capital immediately, but does it reduce downtime enough to justify the cost? And if downtime does drop, how much extra output actually gets sold?

• Upgrading non-bottleneck areas of a plant — More capacity in a process that wasn’t the constraint may make no difference if the true bottleneck remains elsewhere. Unless the bottleneck shifts during certain times of year, the extra capacity could sit idle.

• Switching to a lower-spec input — You save money per unit purchased, but if it wears out faster or leads to more defects, the total cost of ownership could actually increase.

The harder the link, the more valuable it is to try and quantify. In these cases, the act of chasing the number forces you to map dependencies, identify assumptions, and see the system as a whole — all of which lead to better decision-making.

Beyond “easy” and “hard” — a broader typology

You can think of projects as falling into four archetypes:

1. Direct and Certain – Clear, well-understood link to value. Easy to model. (e.g., renegotiating a fixed-price contract)

2. Direct but Uncertain – Clear link to value, but magnitude depends on volatile inputs. (e.g., energy efficiency where savings depend on weather patterns)

3. Indirect but Certain – Indirect link to value, but evidence supports the outcome. (e.g., safety measures proven to reduce incident rates)

4. Indirect and Uncertain – Both the link and the magnitude are hard to model. (e.g., cultural change programs, innovation capability building)

This mental model helps you decide how much effort to put into the quantification and how much weight to give the result.

Six reasons why it’s worth the effort

Outside the Direct and Certain examples provided earlier, it is fair to say that quantifying the benefits of your projects requires some hard work. So why do it? Below are some of the most compelling reasons, based on our lived experience from the last 15 years in this space.

1. Prioritisation
Quantification makes it obvious which projects deserve your attention — and which don’t. With limited time and budget, this is non-negotiable.

2. Sharper thinking
To put a number on something, you must articulate how it connects to a value driver: cost, revenue, or risk. This often reveals flaws or blind spots in the project logic.

3. Speaking the language of decision-makers
Executives don’t buy into projects because they “sound good.” They buy in when the value is clear and easy to compare against other opportunities on the table.

4. Tracking and accountability
Without a baseline estimate, you can’t know if the project delivered what was promised. And if you do track, you can demonstrate your team’s impact in concrete terms.

5. Investment yardstick
An initiative might deliver $500k in benefits — but if it costs $2M to implement, it’s a poor investment. Quantification exposes these mismatches early.

6. Career perception
Being able to place your project in the broader universe of company priorities signals strategic thinking. People notice.

How to start, even when it’s hard

You don’t need perfect data or absolute certainty. Start with:

1. Defining the value driver — Is this about reducing cost, increasing revenue, lowering risk, or freeing capacity?

2. Mapping the chain of cause and effect — Step through how your action leads to the result, and identify where assumptions live.

3. Using ranges — If you’re unsure, give a low/likely/high estimate and explain what would drive each scenario.

4. Flagging dependencies — Call out what else must happen for the benefit to materialise (e.g., sales must find buyers for extra output).

5. Documenting assumptions — This builds credibility and helps refine the estimate later.

Over time, these steps become second nature — and your projects will be better chosen, better executed, and better recognised.

Final thought

Even an imperfect estimate is better than none. The process of quantifying impact forces clarity, aligns stakeholders, and positions you as someone who sees beyond the immediate task to the bigger picture.

In business improvement, that’s not just a skill — it’s a competitive advantage.

Two people on my team approached the lead-up to that workshop in very different ways. One focused narrowly on their assigned section. Their slides were polished, they knew their talking points, and they turned up on time. In theory, they’d “done everything right.” But on the day, discussions went in circles because some stakeholders arrived with key concerns unaddressed, a decision-maker came in cold on critical context, and actions at the end lacked clear owners. Each gap was someone else’s job to fill, so they let it slide.

The other person took a wider view. They knew the real outcome wasn’t “presenting well”; it was getting the group aligned and committed to action. They spent time ahead of the workshop mapping out likely friction points, spoke to hesitant stakeholders in advance to reduce surprises, checked that decision-makers were ready to weigh in, and even drafted potential action lists to make it easy for leaders to commit next steps. When debates threatened to derail the agenda, they subtly helped bring the conversation back to decisions that mattered. By the end of the session, the group left not only informed but aligned and moving forward.

That day drove home a truth that separates high performers from everyone else: success isn’t delivering your part of the process - it’s making sure the right result happens, even if you don’t control every lever yourself.

Why “Owning the Outcome” Is Harder Than It Sounds

Most organisations are built around processes and responsibilities. Each person has a role, a checklist, a handover point. The system gives comfort: If I do my part well, things will work out.

But the reality in complex, high-stakes environments is different. Outcomes fail all the time - not because people don’t work hard, but because gaps open between the handovers, priorities clash, assumptions go untested, or a critical decision doesn’t land in time. When that happens, the process doesn’t matter. The result is still a failure, and everyone feels the pain.

Owning the outcome is about stepping beyond your task list and taking personal responsibility for success - even where you rely on others. It’s not about micromanaging colleagues or trying to do every job yourself. It’s about thinking and acting like someone who cares deeply about the finish line, and doing what it takes to make sure the organisation actually gets there.

So how do you do it? Read on for a step-by-step guide based on our own lived experience and years of practice.

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Step 1: Define the Real Finish Line

High performers get clear on what success really means. In the workshop example, the outcome wasn’t just “run a session” or “present findings.” The real goal was that executives left the room aligned, with concrete actions owned by the right people. Without that clarity, you risk focusing on tasks instead of impact.

Ask yourself:

• What is the true end-state we’re after?

• Who will notice if we succeed - or fail?

• What’s the consequence of falling short?

Once you know that, every other choice becomes easier.

Step 2: Excel at What You Control

Before you can influence others, you need a foundation of credibility. That means doing your own work flawlessly - delivering high quality, on time, without drama. In the workshop, the second team member could spend energy helping stakeholders prepare because they weren’t scrambling on their own deliverables.

High performers remove themselves as a source of risk. They’re the ones others never have to chase, freeing up capacity to watch the bigger picture.

Step 3: Anticipate Where Things Will Break

Owning the outcome means seeing beyond your patch. Stakeholders have competing priorities. Decision-makers get pulled into other fires. Handoffs go missing.

In our workshop, the first warning sign was that two senior managers hadn’t read pre-work material. The low-performer assumed “their manager will brief them.” The high performer checked in, realised the gap, and made sure they had the essentials beforehand.

This mindset is about scanning for failure points early - before they become unfixable. Where could momentum stall? Who might think deadlines are flexible? Which step relies on someone who has no skin in the game? Map it out and plan accordingly.

Step 4: Influence Without Authority

Much of owning the outcome is about moving others in the right direction, even when you don’t have formal power to make them act. The best people do this naturally:

• They make it easy for others to contribute - drafting emails, preparing templates, lightening their load.

• They check in regularly, gently nudging without pestering.

• They create shared urgency by framing why the outcome matters for everyone involved.

• And when needed, they escalate early - tactfully but firmly - to get attention on looming risks before it’s too late.

In the workshop, the high performer wasn’t the most senior person in the room. But by the time the session started, they’d already built bridges, reduced friction, and set up leaders to make decisions smoothly. That’s influence in action.

Step 5: Communicate Early, Adapt Fast

Even with the best preparation, things go sideways. A key executive shows up late. A decision turns contentious. A dependency falls over.

High performers don’t freeze or hide when this happens. They communicate risks early, explain implications clearly, and offer constructive options. If a pivot is needed, they help create consensus before decisions are made, so there’s no drama later. They know when shortcuts are worth taking - and when sticking to the full process avoids bigger headaches downstream.

This flexibility is often the difference between a workshop that descends into chaos and one that still produces tangible outcomes.

The Mindset Shift That Sets You Apart

Owning the outcome is less a skill and more a way of thinking. It’s accepting that you are partly responsible for success or failure, even when you don’t control all the pieces. It feels uncomfortable because it stretches the boundaries of your “official” role. But this is how leaders think.

Leaders care about results, not checklists. They remember the people who make things happen, not just those who “do their bit.” Once you embrace this mindset, you start spotting gaps earlier, influencing more effectively, and becoming the person others trust with critical, high-visibility initiatives.

Final Thought

The difference between “doing your job” and truly delivering is subtle but profound. Anyone can complete tasks. The people who rise fastest - the ones entrusted with the toughest, most important work - are those who own the outcome, end-to-end.

Whether it’s a workshop, a project, or a major decision, they ask a simple question every day: “What still needs to happen to make this a success?” And then they take responsibility for it - even when the process says it’s someone else’s job.

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Every corporate workplace has high performers. They’re the ones who seem to get handed the best projects, have more influence, and move up faster. And while it might be tempting to chalk it up to politics or favoritism, that’s rarely the full story.

From over a decade in very demanding corporate environments (think top-tier management consulting, strategy or private equity) — we’ve had a front-row seat to top performers in action. We’ve hired, developed, promoted, and coached many of them. And we’ve seen what truly drives performance across functions and roles.

Here are 10 principles that separate good from great — and what it takes to truly become a top-tier performer in any corporate setting.

1. Master Your Craft — and Then Keep Improving

Let’s get one thing out of the way: being good at your job is the minimum requirement.

High performers know their function inside-out. They don’t need hand-holding. They take the time to go deep. They build tools, frameworks, templates. They eliminate repeat mistakes. And they get faster, cleaner, and sharper over time.

But here’s the thing — technical competence is the floor, not the ceiling.

If you want to play in the top league, it’s not enough to just deliver solid work. You need to go beyond: bring judgment, anticipate issues, and help others improve too.

Ask yourself: Are you investing time every week to get better? Faster? More accurate? More insightful?

2. Own the Outcome, Not Just the Task

Top performers bring a mindset of extreme ownership.

They don’t say: “I did my part.”
They say: “This didn’t land. Let me figure out how to make it right.”

They don’t bring excuses. They bring solutions. They see the task through the eyes of the final recipient — the stakeholder, the customer, the team.

Even when the brief is vague or the goals shift, they adapt. They fill in the blanks. They make it work. They think like a business owner — not an employee.

You don’t get noticed for what you were assigned. You get noticed for what you made happen.

3. Be In Control — But Not Robotic

You know that person in the office who always looks flustered, even when they’re working hard? They rarely get promoted.

Top performers project control — of their time, their energy, and their attention. They show up prepared, not reactive. They manage their calendar like a pro. They say no when needed. They move with intention.

But — and this is crucial — they don’t come off like robots. They show their human side. They make jokes. They have empathy. They connect with others. But when it’s game time — they’re locked in.

You don’t need to work 16 hours a day. But you do need to look like you’re in charge of your day.

4. Be the Person Who Always Delivers

Reliability isn’t sexy — but it’s foundational.

When you say you’ll send the file tonight, send it tonight. Even if it means staying up late. Or skipping dinner. Or working the weekend.

Why? Because consistency builds trust. And trust builds influence.

That doesn’t mean burning out. High performers are smart about recovery. They take time off when the moment’s right. They protect their energy. But when the team is counting on them — they show up, full throttle.

Make people feel: “If it’s on your plate, it’s handled.”

5. Communicate With Intent: Over or Under — Strategically

One of the fastest ways to lose credibility is miscommunication.

Top performers develop good judgment on when to over-communicate, and when to under-communicate.

If something’s mission-critical, they’ll confirm it — twice. Even if it feels redundant. Even if others “already know.” They’d rather repeat than regret.

But they also know when not to clutter inboxes. They get to the point. They simplify. They give just enough detail to move forward — and save everyone’s time.

Know your audience. Know your moment. Calibrate your message.

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Let’s raise the bar — together.

6. Say Yes to Hard Things

You don’t build a reputation by doing what’s easy. You build it by taking on ambitious, challenging, sometimes scaryprojects — and giving them a real shot.

Even if you’re not sure you’re ready. Even if the task feels unfair or unclear. Top performers don’t complain — they commit. They might doubt in private, but they deliver in public.

And more often than not, they surprise themselves. They grow. They learn. They become the person who can handle “that level.”

It’s okay to fail. It’s not okay to be the person who never tries.

7. Show Your Assumptions — and Invite Critique

Mistakes aren’t usually about lack of intelligence — they’re about hidden assumptions.

Top performers are explicit about what assumptions underpin their analysis, recommendation, or plan. They lay them out in the open. They say: “Here’s what I’m assuming — tell me if I’ve got that wrong.”

They actively seek feedback — from peers, bosses, and clients. They’re gluttons for critique. Because they know it makes the work better. And it makes them better.

If you're scared of being challenged, you're not growing. Show your thinking. Let others pressure-test it.

8. Be Politically Smart — Without Being Political

Corporate life has politics. But politics ≠ backstabbing. Top performers understand the human layer of every organization.

They read the room. They sense who’s aligned and who’s not. They adapt their approach depending on the person. They find supporters and nurture them. They work with skeptics — without defensiveness.

They don’t take things personally. They relate to people, not roles. They’re the same person in the boardroom and in the lunchroom.

And they show respect — to everyone. From the CEO to the office cleaner.

Emotional intelligence isn’t soft. It’s a performance multiplier.

9. Communicate Like a Pro — Visually and Verbally

If you can’t explain it simply, you haven’t mastered it.

Top performers are exceptional communicators. They can:

• Simplify complex topics

• Use clear structure

• Speak with confidence

• Write with precision

• Design slides that land

They know when to use jargon — and when to drop it. They flex their tone to the audience. They use stories, metaphors, humor. They look and sound credible.

Your ideas matter — but only if people can understand them.

10. Be a Net Giver in Relationships

This might be the most underrated trait of all: generosity.

Top performers don’t just ask for help. They give it. Freely. Without scorekeeping.

They make intros. They share templates. They mentor juniors. They support peers. They thank people. They give credit. And they do it before they’re senior.

Over time, they build real social capital. Not because they’re networking — but because they care.

Don’t be the person who only shows up when they need something. Be the person people are glad to hear from.

Final Thought: It’s a Game — But a Noble One

Being a high performer isn’t about being perfect. It’s not about being the smartest in the room, or the fastest up the ladder.

It’s about showing up — with intent, with resilience, and with integrity. It’s about delivering more than expected. It’s about lifting others as you rise. And it’s about playing the long game — because reputations are built slowly and broken quickly.

Whether you’re early in your career, mid-level, or reinventing yourself — these 10 principles are timeless.

Start where you are. Pick one or two to double down on this week. Then build. Consistency compounds.

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Short. Sharp. No fluff. Just insights that help you win in business and in your career.

However, in practice, real cost transformation is surprisingly rare.

That’s because while cost is often discussed, it’s rarely attacked. True, first-principles cost improvement - where a business reevaluates not just how much it pays, but why it’s buying what it buys - requires something most organisations are reluctant to give: focus, discomfort, and a willingness to challenge the status quo.

But when done right, this work can quietly add hundreds of millions to a company's bottom line - and billions to its valuation.

Let’s walk through why.

Cost Drives Enterprise Value—Far More Than Most Leaders Think

Imagine a company with $1.5 billion in revenue and a healthy EBITDA margin of 20%. That’s $300 million in earnings. At a standard multiple of 12x, its market value sits at around $3.6 billion.

Now picture a successful cost initiative that reduces the company’s operating expenses by just 10%. Given an implied cost base of $1.2 billion, that’s $120 million in savings - most of which flows straight through to EBITDA.

EBITDA grows from $300 million to $420 million. Apply the same 12x multiple, and suddenly the business is worth $5.04 billion.

That’s a 40% increase in market cap (an additional $1.44 billion!) - driven not by a bold new product, not by revenue growth, but by quiet, disciplined, line-by-line cost work.

The Lower the Margin, the Bigger the Explosion

What makes cost transformation even more compelling is that its impact is amplified in low-margin environments. Take two businesses, each with $1.5 billion in revenue:

• The first operates at a 10% margin - $150 million EBITDA.

• The second at 5% - just $75 million in earnings.

If each cuts their cost base by 10%, the first adds $135 million to EBITDA (raising it to $285M), while the second adds $142.5 million (raising it to $217.5M). The first sees an EBITDA boost of 90% (almost 2x). The second? Nearly 3x the original size.

For businesses operating with tight margins - retailers, logistics operators, manufacturers - this is game-changing. One well-run cost program can double your profit. And the market will reward you accordingly.

So Why Doesn’t It Happen More Often?

Because it’s uncomfortable. Real cost transformation isn’t about shaving 2% off the stationery budget. It’s about challenging long-held assumptions:

• Are we specifying materials or services beyond what we need?

• Have we locked ourselves into supplier relationships that haven’t been renegotiated in years?

• Are our vendors profiting more from our inattention than their performance?

This work requires cross-functional collaboration. Finance, procurement, operations, engineering, legal. It means surfacing unflattering truths. It forces business units to answer difficult questions about historical decisions.

It’s not glamorous. But there is impact—real, quantifiable, high-multiple impact.

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What Cost Transformation Actually Involves

At its core, a good cost transformation program follows a simple logic:

You begin by getting visibility - mapping your cost base in detail. You can’t change what you don’t understand. You’d be surprised how often companies lose sight of what they are actually buying.

Then you look for patterns: categories with heavy spend but low scrutiny, specifications that exceed business need, suppliers who’ve grown complacent behind multi-year agreements.

You form hypotheses. Maybe you're overpaying for logistics. Maybe your software contracts are loaded with unused licenses. Maybe your service agencies are charging legacy rates.

Then you test those hypotheses. Benchmark against peers. Rethink specifications. Conduct clean-sheet pricing exercises. Run supplier RFPs. Renegotiate. Re-source.

You operationalise the savings. Construct business cases and convince business leaders to make the changes. Build tracking mechanisms. Hold owners accountable. Make sure the savings flow through to the P&L - and stay there.

This work is part detective, part negotiator, part reformer, part motivator. It’s unglamorous, but it’s foundational.

When to Consider External Help

In many cases, internal teams are more than capable of delivering meaningful cost improvements. They know the suppliers, understand the technical requirements, and have the trust of the business. If given the time and mandate, they can often make significant progress.

But that’s a big “if.” In most organisations, day-to-day responsibilities already fill the calendar. Carving out space for a focused, commercially aggressive cost program - especially one that cuts across functions - can be a real challenge.

That’s where external support can be useful. Not essential, but worth considering.

External teams can bring a few things that accelerate progress: experience from other industries, structured playbooks for sourcing or re-specification, and the ability to focus entirely on the cost program without being pulled into operational firefighting.

They also bring a fresh set of eyes - less tied to legacy decisions, less influenced by internal politics. And because they’re not permanent, they’re often better suited to the “surge” nature of transformation work: come in, help get it done, and roll off.

It’s not about handing over the reins. It’s about being pragmatic - using the right combination of internal knowledge and, where needed, external capacity to get results.

In Closing: The Work That Moves the Needle

In today’s environment, investors are sceptical of narrative-driven growth stories. What they want is discipline. Predictability. Real earnings.

And that’s what cost transformation delivers.

The irony is that the work that drives the greatest enterprise value is often the least celebrated. There’s no TED Talk about it. No ad campaign. Just the quiet confidence that you’re running a tighter, smarter, more valuable business.

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Sometimes even the best firms in the world get the basics wrong.

Take this slide from Goldman Sachs. It was part of a quarterly earnings pack — intended to show how their Asset & Wealth Management division performed in Q4 2023.

But if you’re a senior executive skimming this deck, or a junior associate trying to figure out what matters, you’re met with a wall of content that feels more like a data dump than a business story.

Here’s the original slide:

What’s Wrong with This Slide?

At first glance, it looks respectable — professional fonts, institutional blue tones, neat layout. But appearances can be deceptive. Let’s look more closely at what’s actually happening here.

1. There’s no real headline — just a label.

The title “Asset & Wealth Management – Assets Under Supervision” tells you the topic, not the point. It’s like someone handed you a folder with a sticker but no summary. A good title should answer the question: Why am I looking at this? What happened?

Instead, we’re left to dig through the slide ourselves to figure that out.

2. It’s unclear what matters — everything is given equal weight.

The slide throws everything at the reader all at once: two full data tables, four donut charts, and a paragraph of text all laid out side by side. No single element stands out as the main focus. Is the important story about Q4 results? Or year-on-year change? Or client mix? It’s hard to tell.

This is what happens when a slide is assembled rather than designed. There's no hierarchy — no guiding hand helping the reader process and prioritize the content.

3. The charts are more decorative than explanatory.

Take the four donut charts on the right. They show the current mix by asset class, client channel, region, and vehicle type — but they don’t show any change over time. That might be fine if the rest of the slide told the story of change, but it doesn’t.

The result? You get color and shape, but not insight. These visuals take up valuable real estate without helping the viewer understand what's changed or what drove performance.

4. Important numbers are buried in small-font bullets.

Look at the text section titled “AUS Highlights.” It’s where the real performance drivers are mentioned: net inflows, market appreciation, dispositions. But all of this is hidden in the same small font as everything else, competing for attention with the charts and tables.

And even if you do read it, there’s no clear link between those bullet points and the data. You’re left to mentally triangulate what they mean using the tables on the left — a cognitive burden that could have been avoided.

5. There’s no story flow — just parts.

Ultimately, the biggest issue is structural: the slide is a collage, not a narrative. It doesn’t walk the reader through a clear arc. There’s no beginning, middle, or end — no “so what.” That might be forgivable in a technical appendix, but not on a slide that appears this early in the deck.

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Now Compare It to the Remake

This version of the slide (which we created) tells the same story — but in a way that’s dramatically easier to follow. Let’s walk through the changes and why they work.

How the Remade Slide Fixes the Problems

It starts with a clear, insight-led headline.

“AUS grew 10% in 4Q23 vs prior period, driven by growth in all asset classes.” This is what the original slide failed to do — tell the reader what happened and why it matters, right at the top. The message is now instantly clear: there was growth, it was broad-based, and it happened in Q4.

It features one main chart that does the storytelling.

Instead of overwhelming the viewer with tables and donuts, the remake uses a single vertical bar chart to show AUS by asset class over three quarters. You can immediately see:

• The total growth (from $2.55T to $2.81T),

• Which asset classes contributed,

• And how the mix shifted slightly over time.

This is where the story lives — and now it’s easy to see it.

It uses supporting visuals carefully and clearly.

To the right of the main chart, three smaller stacked bars show the 4Q23 breakdown by client channel, region, and vehicle. These aren’t shouting for attention — they’re toned down in grayscale — but they provide helpful context for those who want to dive deeper.

The previous donut charts are gone. And we don’t miss them.

Key performance highlights are pulled out and emphasized.

The key drivers — $141B in market appreciation, $265B total increase in AUS — are no longer buried in a sea of text. They’re highlighted in a small commentary box on the right, using bold text and spacing to guide the eye.

A busy exec can skim these in 5 seconds and walk away with the takeaways.

The data table is there — but in its proper place.

Instead of dominating the slide, the roll-forward data is tucked away at the bottom in a light grey box. It’s there for completeness, but it doesn’t distract from the narrative. This is how reference data should be treated: as backup, not the main act.

So What Can You Learn From This?

If you regularly present performance updates, financial results, or operational dashboards, this example is worth studying. The redesign shows what can happen when you treat a slide as a communication tool — not just a reporting vessel.

It’s not about adding polish. It’s about sharpening the story.

3 Lessons to Take Into Your Next Slide

1. Lead with the message, not the metric. Your headline should tell the story, not describe the chart.

2. Less is more — but only if it’s better. Strip back noise, elevate what matters, and let one chart do the storytelling.

3. Design for humans, not just analysts. Use layout, spacing, and structure to help your audience think less and retain more.

If this was helpful…

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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This article gives you the checklist I used as a management consultant and private equity investment professional, and sharpened in a variety of corporate settings. It’s not about “design” in the artistic sense — it’s about communicating clearly, logically, and persuasively.

Whether you’re a beginner or just looking to upgrade your slides, these 30 principles will raise your floor — and your ceiling.

Section 1: Structure & Logic

1. One message per slide

A slide should have a single core idea — one point you're trying to land. If you try to make two or more points on the same slide, you dilute your message and confuse your audience. Clarity beats density.

2. Use action-oriented slide titles

Titles are not labels; they are headlines. “Revenue” is a label. “Revenue grew 12% YoY, led by Asia” is a headline — it tells the story. Your audience should understand the core message just by skimming titles.

3. Communicate top-down (start with the answer)

Executives don’t want a build-up — they want the bottom line first. Begin each slide (and the presentation overall) with the answer, then walk through the logic that supports it.

4. Ensure your slides form a storyline

Think of your deck as a movie. Each slide is a scene, and the scenes should follow a coherent arc. Does the presentation make sense from beginning to end? Does each slide set up the next?

5. Use MECE logic (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive)

When presenting lists or frameworks, avoid overlap (mutually exclusive) and make sure you haven’t left anything out (collectively exhaustive). This helps your logic be both clean and complete.

6. Ask “so what?” on every slide

Every slide must earn its place. Ask yourself: What does this mean? Why should anyone care? What’s the implication or recommendation? If you can’t answer that, rethink the slide.

Section 2: Visual Discipline & Layout

7. Use standardised templates

Don't improvise your layout. Use a small set of pre-approved templates. This ensures alignment, consistent font usage, and faster slide production. Consistency creates trust, reduces friction, and signals professionalism.

8. Stick to a disciplined font system

Use one font family (e.g., Arial, Calibri, or your company’s house font). Set fixed sizes: e.g., 26-28pt for titles, 16-20pt for body, 8-10pt for footnotes. Avoid resizing text randomly — it looks sloppy and amateur.

9. Use standardised shapes and formatting

When adding boxes, arrows, and labels, use the same color, line thickness, and corner radius throughout. Freestyling creates visual noise and makes it harder for your audience to read the slide.

10. Use white space intentionally

White space isn’t “wasted space” — it helps structure the slide, guide the readers’ eye and avoids overwhelming them with clutter. Group related elements together with white space between them. If everything is crammed together, nothing stands out.

11. Limit bullet points

While bullets can be helpful, they’re overused and often come across as lazy thinking. They also flatten structure and make your thinking look linear, even when it's not. If you use bullets, keep them short, parallel, and grouped logically. Better yet, use a diagram or framework.

12. Use colour with restraint

Too many colours = visual chaos. Stick to two or three consistent colours (often from your brand palette). Use bold colour to highlight what's important — not just to make slides “pop.”

13. Avoid shadows, gradients, and clipart

These belong in 2005. Modern slides should be flat, clean, and minimal. Let your content, not your effects, do the talking.

14. Balance visual weight

A slide should feel balanced. If one side is heavy with visuals or text, rebalance to avoid a lopsided feel. Think of visual “gravity” and distribute elements to achieve a balanced feel.

15. Align elements perfectly

Use PowerPoint’s alignment tools religiously. Alignment creates order. Misaligned text boxes and shapes are one of the most common (and easiest to avoid) signs of sloppy execution.

16. Use icons only when they add meaning

Icons can help reinforce ideas (e.g., a dollar sign for cost). But don’t add them for decoration. Every icon should clarify or emphasize something — otherwise, leave it out.

17. Standardise all spacing and placement

Title bar at the same height. Footer in the same spot. Margins consistent. These small details create a sense of professionalism — and their absence undermines it. Remember that consistency builds trust.

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Section 3: Charts & Data Visualisation

18. Choose the right chart for your data

Use charts intentionally:

• Bar for comparing quantities

• Line for trends over time

• Waterfall for showing build-up or breakdown

• Pie (rarely) for simple part-to-whole relationships

Choosing the wrong chart type can confuse your message.

19. Use clear, descriptive chart titles

Chart titles should state what’s shown, over what period, and in what units (e.g., “Monthly Revenue by Region, Jan–May 2025, $m”). Aim to orient the reader, not to tell the story.

20. Highlight the key data visually

Use a bold color, callout box, or annotation to draw the reader’s eye to the insight. Don’t force your audience to study the whole chart to find the punchline.

21. Only break chart axes when necessary

Breaking the y-axis can distort perception — it should only be used when absolutely necessary and must be clearly indicated. Otherwise, you're misleading your audience.

22. Include a legend if more than one data series

Don’t assume the reader will figure out which line is which. Use a legend or — better yet — label lines directly on the chart where possible.

23. Avoid “German slides” (too much data)

German slides are dense, data-heavy, and often unreadable. If your slide needs a magnifying glass to read it, you’ve gone too far. Simplify or break into multiple slides.

24. Cite your sources in footnotes

Always include the source (and date) of your data. It builds credibility and protects you. It also answers the inevitable question: “Where did these numbers come from?”

25. Use footnotes for clarifications and assumptions

Footnotes are where you handle nuance: definitions, caveats, or special cases. Don’t clutter your main content — move complexity to the footnote if it’s not central to the story.

Section 4: Polish & Professionalism

26. Keep the deck short and focused

More slides ≠ more insight. In fact, long decks dilute your message. Ruthlessly trim fluff. The best decks are short, sharp, and high signal.

27. Use bold and italics sparingly

Bold is for emphasis. Italics are for nuance. Use them carefully. Over-formatting creates visual clutter and weakens the impact of the emphasis.

28. Avoid jargon unless absolutely necessary

If the audience doesn’t expect specialist language, don’t use it. Clarity wins. Translate technical complexity into business terms.

29. Test readability at 70% zoom

Zoom out to 70%. If you can’t read the slide, neither can your audience in a meeting or on a projector. Resize text or simplify the layout accordingly.

30. Do a final pass with “client eyes”

Before sending, read the deck as if you’ve never seen it. Is the story clear? Do the titles make sense? Are there typos? Would you bet your reputation on this?

Bonus Tip: Build Your Slide Toolkit

Create your own personal library of slides, frameworks, and visuals that meet this standard. It speeds up your workflow, raises your baseline quality, and ensures consistency across decks.

Final Thought

Great slides are not about artistry — they’re about clarity, structure, and trust. This checklist won’t just make your decks prettier — it will make your thinking sharper and your communication more persuasive.

The best presenters don’t just “decorate” their content — they shape it with intention. Every line, every chart, every visual decision is made to serve the message. When you build slides this way, you earn your audience’s confidence before you even speak.

And remember: slide-making is a craft. You’ll get faster, cleaner, and more effective with deliberate practice. So don’t just bookmark this checklist — turn it into muscle memory. That’s how you move from making slides… to making impact.

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It’s clean.
It’s factual.
It’s... completely forgettable.

Let’s not sugar-coat it: bullet points are the fast food of business communication. They fill space, they deliver the basics, but they rarely leave an impression. When you’re presenting a process, a framework, or a recommendation that took weeks of thought and effort to develop, is that really how you want to showcase it?

We are going to show you a better way — one that not only clarifies your thinking but also earns you credibility with senior stakeholders. It takes the same five steps listed above, but presents them in a way that feels designed, intentional, and memorable.

Let’s walk through how to do it — and why it matters.

The Problem With Bullet Points

Bullet points are easy to write and easy to read. That’s why we default to them. But they also flatten your message. They suggest that every item is equally important, disconnected from the others, and independent of any underlying logic or structure.

When we present a process — especially one with sequential steps — we’re often trying to do three things at once:

1. Communicate the sequence (what happens first, second, etc.)

2. Reinforce the relationships between steps

3. Create a visual memory anchor for the audience

Bullet points do none of those well. They’re linear, yes — but they’re also abstract. They make your work feel like it came out of a textbook, not from deep thinking or collaboration.

What Better Looks Like

Here’s the slide we’re going to build instead:

This is what you can call an “elevated process visual.” It’s still just five steps. But the design and layout transform how the content is perceived.

Let’s break down why this works — and how to create something similar for your own work.

Step 1: Use layout to reinforce structure

The first thing you notice is the visual flow. The steps are arranged left to right in a staggered pattern. This isn’t just for aesthetics — it suggests motion and progress, which is critical when communicating a multi-step approach.

Even more importantly, it signals that someone thought about how to lay this out. It doesn’t look like default PowerPoint formatting. It looks designed. That creates trust. It says: “We cared enough to make this clear.”

💡 Pro tip: Always ask yourself: What is the visual logic of this slide? If the answer is “top to bottom list,” you’re probably defaulting to bullets.

Step 2: Create consistency in shape and labelling

Notice that each step is presented inside a soft-rounded rectangle with a consistent size, font, and label style (“Step 1,” “Step 2,” etc.).

That consistency gives your viewer something to latch onto — a rhythm. It makes it easy to follow the flow and compare elements. It also makes the slide feel more polished and intentional.

💡 Avoid: Mixing icons, varying text sizes, or using decorative shapes just for flair. Visual consistency is your best friend when conveying structure.

Step 3: Use the background to suggest depth (without clutter)

You’ll notice the background features abstract square shapes in various sizes and opacities. These don’t carry specific meaning — they serve a different purpose: depth.

This kind of background breaks the monotony of a blank canvas without overwhelming the core message. It gives the slide a layer of visual sophistication that makes it feel designed rather than assembled.

Think of it as setting a stage: your content is the actor, but the background is the lighting and set. Done well, it elevates everything.

💡 Tip: Use subtle patterns or shapes to build depth. Don’t overdo it — the background should never compete with the main content.

Step 4: Add supporting text — but only where needed

Each step is paired with a small amount of supporting text underneath. Not full sentences. Not long paragraphs. Just enough to clarify or expand.

This is deliberate. Viewers read slides differently than they read documents. They scan. They latch onto what’s bold or centered. Supporting text should be there if and when the reader needs it.

What this does:

• Keeps the slide visually clean

• Allows deeper understanding for those who want it

• Shows that you’ve thought about both the “what” and the “why”

💡 Guideline: If you need more than 2 lines to explain a step, your audience probably needs a second slide — or you need to simplify.

Step 5: Anchor your headline in action

The headline says: “Here are the 5 steps we should take.” It’s simple, direct, and action-oriented.

Compare that to more generic headers like “Process overview” or “Recommended approach.” Those say nothing.

Good headlines do work. They don’t just title the slide — they frame the slide. And in this case, they make it immediately clear what the viewer is about to see and why it matters.

💡 Best practice: Use your slide title to answer the question: What should the audience take away from this?

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Why This Works With Senior Stakeholders

There’s a reason why professionals obsess over slide quality — because it signals the quality of your thinking.

A slide like this does a few things that bullet points can’t:

• Shows synthesis – You’ve taken information and shaped it into something clear and visual

• Demonstrates effort – You didn’t copy-paste bullet points; you constructed an argument

• Builds memory – The visual layout helps people remember the steps and the logic

• Creates shareability – A strong visual slide gets circulated. It stands on its own.

In high-stakes environments, slides are currency. The better yours are, the more weight your voice carries.

So, When Should You Use This?

You don’t need to do this for every list or every idea. But when you're explaining a key framework, process, or methodology — especially one you want to drive alignment around — this kind of visual is worth the effort.

Use it when:

• You’re presenting a plan or roadmap

• You want to show how different steps or workstreams relate

• You’re introducing a “signature” approach (e.g., transformation model, diagnostic method, 100-day plan)

• You want to stand out from competitors or internal teams using generic slides

Final Thought: Think Like a Designer, Not Just a Thinker

You already know how to break down complex ideas. That’s table stakes. What separates top-tier professionals is the ability to present those ideas in a way that sticks.

This isn’t about style over substance. It’s about using design to reinforce substance.

The next time you need to present a 5-step process, skip the bullets. Take 30 more minutes. Build a visual that tells a story. Your audience will thank you — and more importantly, they’ll remember what you said.

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Note: We've had firsthand experience with most of these BI-like disciplines over the years. Admittedly, we are more experienced with some than with others, but we should have enough of a general sense to be able to articulate (at least some) of the distinctive differences.

Six Sigma

This is widely considered to be (one of the) foundations of all things related to Business Improvement. Introduced in mid-1980s at Motorolla (of all places) this discipline quickly became widespread in corporate America in 1990s and beyond. One of the most famous adopters of Six Sigma is potentially Jack Welch from GE, who built his whole management strategy around the concept.

Fundamentally, Six Sigma is an engineering-inspired discipline, which aims to reduce the number of defects produced per million opportunities. Six sigma relates to six standard deviations from the mean and corresponds to around 3.4 defects per million, which makes it an acceptable performance standard in manufacturing environments (according to Six Sigma philosophy).

Six Sigma also has an elaborate qualification system for its practitioners. It sounds similar to martial arts, where people gradually increase their qualification from beginner ('white belt'), to experienced practitioner ('yellow belt' and 'green belt'), to master ('black belt' and 'master black belt'). Progression along the qualification system corresponds to the level of theoretical knowledge and practical skills that are demonstrated by the practitioner.

Typical tools used by Six Sigma practitioners focus on standardisation of operational procedures and measurement of statistical results. The discipline also has something called DMAIC, which stands for Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control. That last one ('Control') is particularly important, because it can often be the case that what you thought was going to be an improvement in theory often doesn't translate into measurable quality uplift after changes are implemented (as there can be other hidden drivers that kick in once you remove the most obvious issue).

Reason why Six Sigma was so revolutionary for its time is because of its insistence on a data-driven approach, as opposed to personal opinions or gut feel of a company's subject matter experts. Human brain has a lot of biases which might not be visible to the naked eye. Six Sigma eliminated impact of those biases by relying on cold hard facts (and numbers) in making and evaluating process improvement decisions.

Lean Manufacturing

Lean methodology is another popular (and quite foundational) concept that you encounter if you do your work in Business Improvement and related fields. It was originally developed in Japan by Toyota, but only introduced in the West in the 1990s through an MIT publication focussed on the future of automotive production.

At its core, Lean Manufacturing relies on the concept of 'waste' that exists in any manufacturing (or service) process. Lean traditionally defines 7 sources of waste: overproduction, excessive motion (e.g., people walking too much across the floor while doing their work), idle time (waiting for another process to finish), defects (which later require rework), excessive inventory (which freezes capital and can damage production discipline), over-processing (e.g., putting in features that are not needed by the customer), excessive transportation (waste of time within a process).

Lean also has a number of really cool techniques that make it into a powerful toolkit for any BI practitioner. These are all well-known to many today, but require real skill in order to apply them effectively. These include: 5S (organising an effective, efficient and safe workign environment for workers), Kanban (a system for managing a process in a just-in-time fashion, avoiding unnecessary inventory between steps), Poka-Yoke (engineering-like controls that reduce the risk of human error), Gemba (walking the floor in a purposeful way to spot inefficiencies and improvement opportunities), and others.

We've used various Lean tools in our practice over the years, and they are often very powerful despite their apparent simplicity. For example, you can always analyse any repetitive task you're doing for 7 sources of waste and be 100% sure you would find an opportunity for improvement. For example, producing monthly management reports where you often spend excessive amounts of time looking for (and verifying) input information, which happens month-in, month-out. Or how annual budgets are put together in most organisations - a process that is often ripe with inefficiency, rework and frustration.

Operational Excellence

This one is a bit harder to pin down insofar as exact definitions go. In our best understanding, OpEx is often used as a collective term for all manner of efforts and techniques that can help improve how a given process is performed. There might be more to it, but this is how we've seen the term used in our practice.

Similar to Six Sigma and Lean, OpEx is often an engineering-like discipline within most organisations. There can be whole departments and individual roles called 'Operational Excellence', and their task is to deploy all tools and techniques known to man in a quest to achieve more optimal operational processes.

In our experience, OpEx is less often used for non-tangible processes, such as within a finance function (for example). It can be applied there, no doubt, but it just more often seems to refer to core manufacturing or production processes in most organisations.

Turnaround

Turnarounds as a separate BI-like discipline seem to have originated in North America and relate to instances where companies need to be salvaged from impending bankruptcy or insolvency in a relatively quick manner. This is often something that is done by private equity firms where one of their investment philosophies is based on distressed asset investing and turnaround.

The idea here is relatively simple: you take over an otherwise promising company that is poorly managed for pennies on the future dollar. Reason for the discount in purchase price is the financial difficulty the company is in (e.g., inability to pay its debts). You often inject short-term liquidity to stabilise the ship and then begin the process of turning the company around and onto higher-performing footing.

Typical techniques (that we've seen) when it comes to turnarounds include detailed marginal profit analysis by segment, which helps you identify which segments contribute positive cash returns to the business, and which don't. Those that don't often get spun out and sold (to a buyer that is able to operate that segment in a better way), or discontinued and shut down. The trick is often in being ruthless and avoiding emotion when making difficult decisions to trim the business only to its profitable parts.

There are other techniques, of course, particularly those that focus on lowering the cost of existing products or services, or increasing the price, where it wouldn't lead to a disproportionate loss of demand. Results are often achieved through dispassionate negotiation and pitting competing vendors against one another to achieve better prices. There is often a lot of legal footwork involved as well, in analysing which (onerous) contracts can be broken, so that the company can survive until after the turnaround.

One other prominent technique involved in turnarounds involves renegotiation of loans and other forms of debt. Debt is often the reason for the turnaround in the first place, as inability to meet repayment obligations is often what triggers subsequent turnaround-like activities. Because (by definition) the company is no longer able to pay all its debtors, the rationale is that most debtors would be better off agreeing to a modified repayment schedule that meets most of their requirements, than risk getting a substantially reduced repayment amount (if any) if the company goes under.

All in all, turnarounds is quite a stressful business for everyone involved. However, there are firms and individual practitioners who make a living out of it, and become quite skilled when it comes to applying the various tools in the bag to salvage defaulting companies.

Transformation

Transformation is a modern-day favourite, a buzzword that a lot of people are using to describe their BI-style efforts. Our guess is that it just sounds quite radical, but also positive, and that makes people feel really good about what they are doing.

At its core, similar to Operational Excellence, Transformation doesn't really have a clearly defined scope, philosophy, or set of tools (at least in our practical experience). Rather, it is often a combination of multiple other philosophies and toolkits that are called upon as part of Transformation in order to improve a particular aspect of the business (e.g., reduce cost, create a new high-performing business unit, increase average prices).

McKinsey defines Business Transformation as 'designed to boost overall performance through increased revenue, lower operating costs, and better customer satisfaction and workforce productivity'. You can see how it's quite a broad definition and covers (virtually) all aspects of the business that drive profitability.

Nowadays, there are also new sub-types of Transformations being introduced across the market, including Digital Transformation (focussing on digitising the various legacy processes and systems that exist within a business) or ESG Transformation (aiming to reduce emissions and improve corporate social responsibility outcomes of how a company operates). These are all focussed on additional facets of running a well-performing business, in addition to the classic profit and loss drivers.

What's next

It is clear that there will always be a need for Business Improvement when it comes to running companies. There simply aren't business that are ideal and with no further room for improvement (yet), and so there would always be someone with ideas on what else can be improved in a given organisation.

People are likely to come up with further (trendy) names to call their particular style of BI, so as to differentiate it from all others that exist on the market. Companies will also be continually interested in the newest and freshest perspectives and approaches that might help them improve how they run their business. Saying 'we are doing the same things as before' is often not a good message to send to your investors and other stakeholders.

Perhaps there will be some form of AI-enabled Business Improvement that comes next, with neural networks analysing business processes, implementing digital changes and alerting humans of other improvements that can't be done directly by computers.

Whatever it is, our bet is that there will always be demand for highly-skilled BI practitioners and experts in most scenarios of how the future unfolds. Therefore, it seems like a good idea to master as many of the philosophies and skills that we described above, to turn yourself into a more well-rounded BI professional.

Now, the problem with VDTs is that people often don’t really know how to construct a ‘good’ value driver tree. That is because there are numerous ways how you can get your VDT wrong and less useful than it could otherwise be. And not so many ways for how to get it just insightful, actionable and (importantly) concise enough to be powerful, and avoid turning into an overly academic exercise with limited practical applicability.

Let’s consider an example

For the sake of simplicity, assume you’re running a BI program for a restaurant chain, which already has 50 active units across the country, and is looking to grow the network further over the next 3-5 years (domestically and internationally). Where do you start? And how do you make the VDT practical to guide the design of your BI program?

Firstly, you need to think about the governing metric your BI program will chase. Broadly speaking, there are a few different ones you could potentially pick from:

• Cost: How do we lower unit costs in order to increase profitability of each unit that we already operate?

• EBITDA: How do we balance revenue and expenses (simultaneously) in order to maximise operating profits from our existing network of units? Key word here is ‘balance,’ as you often need to increase costs to drive up revenue (and EBITDA) in return.

• Enterprise value: How do we couple profitability (i.e. EBITDA) with what investors might value the company at (i.e. enterprise value), so as to maximise how much the company is worth overall?

• Equity value: Let’s also throw in the difference between debt-holders’ and equity-holders’ claims on the value of the company, and zero in on how to maximise (specifically) the equity value of the company (for our shareholders).

As you can see, each of these metics is a legitimate (potential) governing metric in its own right. Depending on the breadth of your mandate as Head of BI, you might end up picking a particular metric over all others. Or, if you’re especially driven and your working environment lends itself to this, you might also go ‘upstairs’ and present a vision for which governing metric you think your BI program should target (regardless of your current mandate).

Let’s assume you pick a broader governing metric

In our example above, it would be equity value. In many ways, that’s probably the best way to approach your BI program in the absence of political constraints on your mandate, because it makes sure you’re not going to ‘lose forest for the trees,’ or over-optimise certain parts of the business to the detriment of its broader performance. Like, for example, cutting down too heavily on costs, which then starts to affect revenue, EBITDA, and ultimately, the value of the business overall (but might do so with a delay).

What your (potential) VDT could look like is something like this:

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Here’s what you can notice when looking at this sample value driver tree:

• Comprehensiveness: The tree aims to have branches (and individual drivers) that cover the most important items, which influence your governing metric. This includes deconstructing the drivers for revenue, costs, valuation multiple, and level of external debt.

• Conciseness: This tree could easily be blown out to look 10 times its current size (and complexity), as there is a lot of (minute) detail that can be added across its various branches and sub-branches. It would make the tree more precise, true, but also a lot harder to digest.

• Practicality: You should always ask yourself if you’re making your VDT as practical and actionable as possible (as opposed to being sound theoretically, but with branches that don’t really lend themselves to subsequent ideation). You might need to make certain compromises here in order to reach this objective (e.g., accepting not being 100% precise or comprehensive in certain areas). But it’s well worth optimising for practicality in most cases (unless you’re writing an academic paper).

It’s also worth noting that there is no single (‘strictly right’) way of constructing a VDT for a business like this (or any business, for that matter), as you can choose to prioritise certain branches more than others, or frame certain parts of the tree differently depending on your circumstances (and preferences). But if you aim to stay close to these three principles above, you’ll most likely end up with something useful (and powerful).

Let’s now use this VDT to brainstorm some improvement projects

It’s important to recognise that building a VDT is only the first step in your BI planning effort, as the VDT is not an end goal in and of itself. Rather, the value of a VDT (really) lies in helping you to better brainstorm and identify improvement opportunities. And because of the relatively tight logic needed to link various branches of the VDT together, it helps reduce the probability you’ll miss an important source of value for your company somewhere along the way.

In our example, what you do next after you’ve developed your VDT, is ask yourself: ‘What are the different improvement projects we (as a business) could pursue to improve the state of each (critical) driver of value in our company.’ And this is where the magic of the VDT will come into play. By its very nature, the VDT will force you to think through areas of the business that you might otherwise ignore (or forget to think about). And this gives structure and robustness to your overall BI brainstorm.

Have a look at what potential results of this activity could look like (using the right-hand side of the VDT from the previous snapshot as foundation):

As you can see, with some of the branches, you just can’t really do anything about them, particularly in the short term (e.g., being able to increase the size of your addressable market). However, all of the other areas seem quite capable of being improved. Your job then is to figure out what those improvement activities could look like, whether by yourself (based on your individual experience) or with stakeholders from across the business.

Speaking of which, doing this exercise as a workshop is a particularly worthwhile activity. Reasons are that (i) not only do you get the benefit of having more eyes (and brains) looking at the overall problem you’re trying to solve, but also (ii) that your stakeholders will have more buy-in with the resulting list of improvement projects simply by being a part of the exercise. It is always harder to subsequently criticise ideas that you (yourself) helped produce in the first place.

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What to do after you’ve populated your BI portfolio

Once you’ve got the list of improvement projects generated, you become broadly ready to start implementing them. This is where the rest of your BI schooling and templates comes in, whether it’s assigning project owners, agreeing on deadlines, estimating resource requirements, evaluating investment needs, comparing benefits vs costs, and so on. All of the classic project management activities.

One elegant activity you can do at this stage is to estimate the size of the possible improvement in each driver, which your projects are aiming to pursue. For example, your labour-related activities might give you a 5% (net) cost saving across the board for the year. At the same time, your corporate controls program and an update to your growth strategy might help improve your (future) valuation multiple by 0.5 points (which you could estimate by benchmarking to competitors who are ahead of you on these parameters).

The trick is that once you’ve done your (upfront) estimates for each of your key drivers of value, you can then come up with what you think will (ultimately) happen to your overall governing metric. As you recall, in our example it was equity value. Let’s say you’ve estimated that this particular portfolio of BI activities can (mathematically) increase your equity value by $70 million, if everything is delivered as planned. That is an extremely useful little number, because it then allows you to compare the cost of this BI portfolio to the likely benefit all of your shareholders will receive.

The other thing this number lets you do is establish the right amount of focus (and urgency) when it comes to your BI portfolio. After all, there may not be too many other activities across the business that are aiming to generate this much value to the company within the same timeframe. This might help you generate a bit more buy-in than you would otherwise have, open some further (internal) doors, and loosen purse strings should you require some more investment to deliver all of the projects contemplated in your BI portfolio.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you can see that VDTs can be a highly useful and effective tool in your BI arsenal, particularly if you get good at utilising it. It will make your overall BI approach look much more robust (even ‘scientific,’ if that is of value), and help ensure you’re focussing on the right projects. And it will make you (as Head of BI) a much better thinker as well. Having mastered this skill, you’ll become able to quickly and effortlessly prioritise projects from across the business, and develop a strong intuition for what types of activities would deliver the most value to your organisation.

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So how do you ‘sell’ (or ‘market’) your program properly? There are many approaches. Some people would make a presentation. Others would develop a full-blown board paper. It all depends on your context.

However, there are important principles that apply regardless of the situation. These normally help you ‘market’ your program in the right way.

1. Give it a brand

This one comes from the world of finance and investments, where projects are customarily given nicknames, in order to preserve confidentiality. Project ‘Eagle’ or ‘Red’, or ‘Leopard.’ Another sphere where group efforts are commonly branded is the military. Operation ‘Enduring Freedom,’ or ‘Desert Storm,’ or ‘Iron Justice.’

The reason you want to give your collective improvement effort a name is because it helps create an identity around it. It’s also just easier to introduce the program name once, and then refer back to it afterwards, rather than keep telling people about ‘this improvement thing we’ve been doing.’

A brand name makes the effort seem more serious. Like it’s something that’s been put together with proper thought and care, rather than a loose set of ideas that someone’s dreamed up and tried to give a half-hearted effort to implement. With a brand, improvements come across as a proper, well-integrated program of works.

Of course, when branding, it’s good to come up with a name that is evocative of the associations you want the program to have. No good calling it something meaningless, like Project ‘Cucumber,’ or something with a totally wrong association, like Project ‘Doom.’

Make it stand for something. Like Project ‘Lion,’ if you’re trying to increase market share (‘King of the Jungle.’) Or Project ‘Advantage,’ if you’re after improving your unit cost position relative to competitors. Or ‘War on Waste’ for a process efficiency program. You can definitely come up with something good using this train of thought as a starting point.

(Project ‘Penny Pinchers’ is probably not a good name for any type of program, regardless of your situation…)

2. Articulate the value

We’ve seen many cases where improvement programs are described using all kinds of wonderful-sounding, but extremely high-level words, but which don’t convey any real substance.

Examples include:

• ‘Achieving lasting competitive advantage over our peers.’

• ‘Becoming known as an industry leader for innovation and efficiency.’

• ‘Developing bullet-proof value proposition for our customers and stakeholders.’

• ‘Establishing ourselves as the best place to work at for our current and future employees.’

These goals all sound great. But they don’t really tell you anything. You can ask any company in any industry, and chances are, all of them would say that these statements describe their aspirations, too. This (be definition) means that descriptions like these aren’t specific.

What can be specific is something like the following:

• ‘We will bring our line’s defect rates from 3% last year to 0.5% over the next 18 months through projects X,Y,Z.’

• ‘This will help reduce our raw materials cost by $10 million, because we would need to buy less of them for the same quantity of final products.’

• ‘In addition, we aim to renegotiate the price we pay for these raw materials by 6-8% through testing a wider base of potential suppliers. The range is based on recent (informal) market testing, adjusted down for conservatism by 35%.’

• ‘We also plan to improve our Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 3-4 points driven by the 15 activities our customer excellence team is planning to implement.’

Now THIS sounds like someone’s done a proper job thinking about, and then articulating, the value your BI program is aiming to capture. If you’re the intended audience, which version of the narrative would be believe has more chance of success in actually being delivered?

An important caveat here is that articulating the value of your program of works is not always easy. It requires a multidisciplinary set of skills. For example, if you come from hardcore engineering background, things like EBITDA or NPS might not be intuitive for you.

However, you do need to develop sufficient skills (and overall financial and business acumen) to be able to articulate value in this way. Otherwise, it would just be too hard to convince your stakeholders that what you’re doing is worth supporting. And that you understand clearly why these are the right activities to be investing your time and energy into.

3. Demonstrate involvement

One other thing that normally helps convince stakeholders to support your efforts is to show some ‘social proof.’ It’s a lot easier to get behind something that other people already think is worth supporting. Much easier than if it’s just one person’s (potentially crazy) idea.

This, of course, requires some preliminary legwork. The overall name of the game here is ‘Consensus Building.’ You want to speak with many of the people who will be helping with your program, individually, explaining what you’re trying to do, taking and incorporating their suggestions and feedback, checking whether they would be supportive. It’s not easy, but it is an important step to take.

Once you’ve done it, you then need to ‘market’ all of this effort in the right way. So when you present your program, you can do something like the following:

• Show photos of people from across the business participating in your preliminary discussions and workshops.

• Take print screens or photos of the actual charts and data analyses (or other materials) used in those discussions.

• Use quotes of what people said, in terms of both the parts they thought were good, and also the risks and support they might have called out.

• Summarise the numbers to make it even more tangible, for example saying that you’ve ‘conducted 30 hours of brainstorms, workshops and consultations, which included inputs from 15 different team members, across 8 different departments.’

If you presented this much social proof transparently, it becomes very difficult to say ‘no’ to supporting your program. There would need to be a really good reason for that. And chances are, you would have already thought (or suspected) of that reason while doing your consensus-building activities. So you would have prepared counter-arguments, or pulled the pin earlier in the process.

In any case, it’s always a good idea to show a broad base of support that already exists for what you’re proposing to do. Just makes your case much more convincing and harder to resist.

4. Don’t forget about the costs

The final bit that really helps to ‘sell’ your BI program is being explicit about the costs involved in implementing it. And when we say ‘cost,’ it doesn’t include only the dollars.

Examples of what types of costs you should include in your case:

• The dollars (obviously.) How much money your company would need to spend to support your program. It also helps if you are able to split these costs into one-off items (e.g., capital investment into new pieces of kit) and recurring cash outflows (e.g., salaries of extra customer support reps you are proposing to hire.)

• Time. Chances are, everyone whose help you’re going to need in driving your program are busy with their ongoing daily activities. So they would need to re-prioritise their tasks. And that is an important time investment that the company needs to be comfortable with making.

• Management focus. In order for BI programs to run well, management needs to be fully behind the effort. And that means, they also need to be updated on the progress and areas where they might need to support or intervene. This, in turn, might require inserting additional (BI-related) agenda items into their existing regular meeting. That is also a cost.

• Political capital. There will most likely be detractors hiding somewhere in your organisation. Someone will need to talk to them and try to convince them to ‘play ball.’ That requires expending (or investing) political capital. The people who might need to invest that capital need to know that this might be required. It’s best to make them aware of this at the outset (to the extent you know.)

Being upfront and transparent about the costs helps put your stakeholders at greater ease than they would have otherwise. It shows them that you’ve truly taken the time to think the program through. And that it’s not all going to be rainbows and butterflies. It will take real costs to make it happen.

The other thing this helps your stakeholders with is calculating the ROI (return on investment). By understanding the costs transparently, they can weigh them against the benefits (which you would have also articulated as per one of the previous steps.) It then becomes a much more simple decision in terms of whether the program deserves to be supported.

Takeaway

In a nutshell, marketing your BI program well takes some real effort. It’s not just a powerpoint presentation you can make the day before you’re due to talk to your stakeholders. You should budget appropriate time and energy to do the preparatory legwork well. If you do it, marketing will come much more easily when the time comes to presenting.

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Similarly, running a (good) newsletter takes significant time and effort. If you’re finding it helpful, we would appreciate if you can forward the link to others in your networks who might also find it useful!

Let’s say you are a CEO or a BI Manager, and it’s time to think about what your BI project portfolio is going to look like for next year. You can just keep rolling existing projects over. Or you can take a pause and reflect. Is your portfolio well-balanced? Does it cover all the important aspects of your business? Or is too one-sided towards one particular theme?

We suggest that having a well-balanced BI portfolio is always a good idea. See below for what (broad) categories of projects it should have, at a minimum. Some are ever-green, and are relevant to the vast majority of businesses. And others are more of a case-by-case.

Evergreen themes

There are certain types of BI projects that work and add value to companies no matter what. It doesn’t matter where the bottleneck is located. It doesn’t matter if the market for your products or services is over-saturated. These opportunities are just always valuable.

The first of these types of areas is cost.

If you can find ways to obtain the same goods or services that your company buys at a cheaper cost, ideally without sacrificing the quality, that is always useful.

Step 1. To start, what you normally need to do is figure out what the business is already spending money on. Then you categorise the different spend items by type – maintenance services, consumables, and so on. You might want to sort them from biggest to smallest. The smallest ones are probably not that useful to chase, as even if you find cost saving ideas, the value might not justify the effort.

Step 2. You also want to categorise them by how easy (or difficult) it is to get those cost savings. If it’s a very competitive market for what it is you’re buying, getting cost savings is easier. If you only got one supplier, not so much.

Step 3. Once you’ve identified the types of cost you want to target, get busy figuring out how to lower those costs. Call alternative suppliers and understand how much they would charge if you switched to them. Talk to the people internally, who understand how the goods or services are currently used, and if there are inefficiencies or waste there. Ask them if there are lower-spec alternatives that might be good to consider.

Use common sense and a bit of commercial acumen to see what you can do to lower those costs. Pretend it was your money. Would you spend this much? If not, ask yourself, what would you do to make those costs go down, if you had full control of the situation.

Another type is bureaucracy and inefficiency

Nobody likes bureaucracy. If you can figure out a way to reduce the total amount of bureaucracy within your organisation, people will thank you.

Where does bureaucracy come from? Normally, there is some historical reason why a certain process was set up a certain way. Maybe there was a problem with insufficient approvals in the past. Or maybe there was an over-conscious manager running the process back in the day. That procedure was set up in those times and has been running like it is for a while now. So people just stopped questioning.

Step 1. Start by creating a catalogue of the most inefficient processes in your organisation. Those that have excessive or duplicative controls. Those that involve a whole bunch of people who treat it as a ‘tick and flick’ exercise. Where the intent of a rigorous process doesn’t match the reality anymore. Maybe even grade them on a scale of 1 to 10. That way, you will always have a source of improvements you can chase later, if you’re stuck with your initial pick.

Step 2. Question and interrogate these processes. Ask yourself, how can you simplify these processes? If you were designing it all over again, would you set it up like this? Draw the process out on a piece of paper, map out the inputs, outputs, stakeholders involved, time required at each process. Calculate how long the process takes overall. That often has some useful shock factor you can use later to convince everyone to adjust the process.

Step 3. Tackling inefficient process is usually not that hard intellectually. The real difficulty lies in managing the change. Convincing stakeholders to join you. Educating everyone on what the new process would look like in the future. Explaining how the new level of risk might just be a faulty perception. Documenting everything. It’s also a good learning experience for younger BI professionals on your team. And if they deliver it well, you know you got potential superstars on your hands.

Stakeholder experience is another area you should look at

Similar to bureaucracy (and dissimilar to cost), stakeholder experience doesn’t bring your company a monetary benefit. However, it does create a better working environment for everyone. And the definition of BI shouldn’t only include financially beneficial projects. It should be anything that helps your business perform better.

Stakeholders should include people like employees, customers, and suppliers. They are all critical to making sure your company is able to do whatever it is it does. So, making them happier to be a part of your business is good. If anyone asks you why you’re chasing these projects, remind them of this line of argumentation.

Sub-category 1. Ideas in this category include things like clarity of communication when certain events happen. Like when there is a delay in shipment to your customers. How do they get informed? Who calls them? Is there a standard script for how it’s done? What happens if they are unhappy and want to escalate? How do you reassure them and make them feel like you actually care? You can ask all these questions to find holes and improvement opportunities in your existing processes.

Sub-category 2. With your colleagues, you can look at something like their overall employee experience (EX). Do people feel valued? If they put that on a scale of 1 to 10, where would most people end up? Is there a difference by department? Or by how long people have been in your company? What makes them feel not valued? Ask a few of these and you’ll get some excellent improvement project ideas.

Sub-category 3. Suppliers are often the area that has the most opportunity for improvement. Companies often feel that if they gave business to a supplier, and agreed to pay money to them, that supplier should be eternally thankful and happy. And not even think about having any complaints. But the people who sign supply contracts, and the people who actually deliver the work are different. And those delivery people are often treated as second class citizens by many companies. You can unpack that whole can of worms and find great BI project ideas there. Happy suppliers mean better quality work. So there is your justification for undertaking them.

Non-evergreen themes

Unlike the ideas above, things like increasing production volumes may not be so straightforward. For a lot of companies and industries, you might be market-constrained. That means that even if you produced more goods or services, you won’t be able to sell them. So all of that fancy ‘Theory of Constraints’ toolkit might not be applicable in your instance.

But if it is, and you could sell more if you produced more, it might be a great area to explore for BI opportunities. There would typically be a hundred and one things you could improve in your production process. Just always remember to focus on the bottleneck. Because if you improve the process in other parts of it, you will likely not see the payback for your efforts or investment. Such is the nature of non-bottleneck operations.

Identifying bottlenecks might also not be so straightforward. The bottleneck might be shifting from process to process, depending on time of day, what you’re producing, or who is operating the machines. So you might need to do a whole bunch of analytical gymnastics before pinpointing where your bottlenecks really are. Which is actually quite a fun exercise to undertake.

For more complex areas like production, you might want to enlist the help of more experienced colleagues and experts. These also tend to be higher-stake projects than others. If you get it wrong, and the entire production line suffers, that will not look so good. So it should be treated with appropriate care and resources.

Crafting a well-balanced BI portfolio is worth it

The people working with you in your business, whether employees, suppliers or customers, will understand why you’re so focussed on cost. But if that is the only thing you’re doing, that will affect how they perceive your company. It’s generally not good if you’re seen to only care about the profits, but not the other things that less tangible, but equally as important for a successful business.

There might be more types of projects that are worth considering for your portfolio. If you’ve got great ideas about what they are, let us know in the comments on our website, or by replying to this email.

And if you need help with some BI coaching or an external perspective on your project pipeline, we’d be more than happy to assist. Just in touch with us at team@binewsletter.com.

I recently had to manage a complex project, which reminded me of everything I learned about this discipline while working in the top-tier consulting world. The goal was to prepare a complex package of documents for approval and sign-off by a certifier before construction works could commence for a small bricks-and-mortar project. And we only had a couple of weeks to get everything ready-to-go.

Needless to say it was stressful. And when it got really stressful, and it seemed like there is no way we would be able to hit our deadline, I just ended up instinctively relying on my trusty old project management toolkit from back in the day.

I believe this toolkit is applicable to any project, no matter how big or small it is. In fact, I know this to be the case 100%. So here it is - my top-10 tricks and best practices for managing your projects (better).

1/ Have a draft end-state in mind

This is a really important one. You need to invest some mental energy, time and effort in order to visualise for yourself what it is that you’re collectively trying to achieve in your project. Without it, you won’t be able to tell if you’re moving in the right direction, and how far off the destination you are at any given point in time.

In my project example, we received a list with ~20 items from our certifier. Some of the things on the list were pretty straightforward. But others - I had no idea what they were asking for.

For example, there was mention of inputs from a variety of engineering disciplines - mechanical, hydraulic, acoustic, fire safety. But it wasn’t very clear to me (yet) what those inputs needed to look like. Was it going to be a report from each qualified engineer? Was it a set of technical drawings? Or was it just a signature on some form? It was all a bit of a mystery at first.

And so I just picked up the phone and started calling around. In the first instance, the certifier was able to clarify some things for me. For example, fire safety consultants would need to provide assurance that the resulting project was going to comply with fire safety requirements. That gave me the initial 30% of the view. But I still had questions at a more detailed level.

And so I kept calling. One of the potential fire safety consultants explained that they would prefer to take our space designs and overlay their suggested fire safety management assets where they thought was fit best. They also told me they would likely need to fill out and sign off on an exemption form for certain parts of the regulation that wouldn’t apply in our case. And what that form would look like and what it would say.

After repeating this process on all of the items from the list of the ~20, I had a rough picture in my head of what it is we were looking to collect at the end of the effort. What’s more, because I now understood it better, I also had a rough idea of how long each item was going to take. Some of it, I was told by the providers. For others I just made my own assumptions based on most similar other items on the list, for which I had the information.

But the net result of all of this was having a pretty high-resolution view in my mind of what the package should look like once we are finished. And that helped me develop a sense of where the biggest risks were, and which items I had to pay particular attention to from our overall list. Which proved to be really valuable in the subsequent couple of weeks.

2/ Create and update a 1-page tracker

The next thing that proved invaluable was putting all my thoughts on paper in the form of a 1-pager. I used Excel, but you can use whatever is most convenient for you. I sometimes also use a small square-shaped sticky note, which forces me to be concise.

The biggest temptation you need to avoid with this trick is to jam it with too much information. You need to remember that this tracker is a management tool, not an information repository. Ideally, the fewer words that you use to describe each item on the tracker, the better. It just needs to be described in sufficient detail, so that you can later remember what it is you were talking about.

Reason why a tracker was useful for me is because life happens, and you get distracted with other tasks during the day. And before you know, you totally forget where you were with your project, and where the biggest issues were located. Having a short, simple tracker is a great way to quickly re-immerse yourself into the flow. And remind your brain where the latest priorities are located.

You can also leave notes to your (future) self in the tracker. Updates on each of the ~20 things that you are sure as hell to forget by tomorrow. Just remember not to overload it with information. Keep it short and to the point.

I usually refer to the tracker multiple times a day. In the morning, when I just get to my desk, to re-visualise the ‘battle map’ in my mind. At the end of the day, to see if there are any critical tasks that I might have forgotten to follow up on. And in-between, every few hours, as information and updates come in, or I need to see which items require a follow-up, because there hasn’t been enough movement compared to what I thought would happen.

Without a good tracker, you will lose control of the project faster than you can blink. And when you are playing the ‘quarterback’ (aka project manager) role, this can be really costly.

3/ Align people on ‘the why’

Projects are tricky mostly because they involve multiple people who need to work well together. And the natural tendency of people is to not do that too well. Everyone assumes that others are doing something they have in mind. People get irritated at each other. People forget to do their tasks, even though they are a priority for the project as a whole.

If your project is complex enough, and most high-value projects are, you should just assume that there will be friction in the way that people work together. And your job as a project manager is to reduce or mitigate the effects of that friction. To keep the harmony going as well as you can.

I find that explaining ‘the why’ is really important for this. If people don’t understand why you’re getting so worked up when they miss their commitments, it will not help you. They will just irritated at you, and might even jeopardise the project in retaliation. You need to take the time and explain to people why the overall outcome is important.

In our case, I would explain to the various project participants that we have a collective deadline that can’t be moved. And that failing to hit that deadline is going to cost a significant amount of money. And how certain participants are on critical path for others, and therefore their ability to stay on course was vitally important for the overall effort. I wasn’t picking on them when I chased them for updates. I did it because their role was critical, and they were able to better accept it once they understood the bigger picture.

4/ Put things on paper/don’t trust words

This one might be counter-intuitive and feel a bit micro-managey, but in my experience the dividends it pays outweigh these concerns.

The simple truth of life is that people often forget what they told you yesterday. Especially if they are busy. Especially if they are running multiple things in parallel, which most highly-skilled professionals do. And if you didn’t write down what they told you, it’s as if no promises have been made in the first place.

Another reason to do it is that you (yourself) will often forget what you agreed with people just a day or two ago. It just happens when you get busy. Your brain is only capable of storing a limited number of things in its short-term memory. And it’s very easy to overload your memory when you are multitasking. And then you remember nothing beyond that point.

The trick is to keep it professional. I often just drop an email or a text message after important verbal agreements or commitments have been made. You can say something along the lines of ‘I am just writing down what we agreed upon in case either of us forgets’. There were numerous times when I’ve been thankful for doing this afterwards, when I just couldn’t remember the details of what happened, especially if it was more than a day or two ago.

The other thing this habit lets you do is easier follow-ups. Let’s say some promised to produce a report for you a week ago. A couple of days before the deadline, you can forward them the old email where you documented the agreement, and tell them you’re just confirming they are still able to hit the deadline as was described in that email. And because you sent them the original email previously, they now don’t have an excuse of telling you they forgot.

It’s just one of those things that engineers possible failures out of the system. It feels redundant or intrusive when you do it. But you save yourself a lot of headaches, and your project valuable delay time, by being disciplined about documenting what everyone has committed to deliver.

5/ Follow up and ask for specific due dates

Speaking of uncomfortable things, here’s another one for you. The principle is that you can’t hold people to account if you haven’t specified the details of what they need to deliver to you.

A lot of the time, when you’re working with professionals, you don’t need to worry too much about the quality of their final deliverables. They are professionals at what they do, after all. And if the quality is lacking, you need to be more careful selecting your providers next time.

However, even with professionals, the biggest risk area tends to be around timings and deadlines. They can still deliver high quality outputs for you. It would just be later than when you assumed it would be. And if you haven’t explicitly agreed on the timings, it is almost guaranteed to happen.

One elegant way how you can do it is by saying that you need a due date from them ‘for your own planning purposes’. Then it becomes less about you not trusting that they would deliver their work, and more about them helping you manage the overall project schedule. It becomes about you managing the project and not about doubting their capabilities.

Similar to documenting the agreements as per the previous tip, it is also a good idea to write down the timelines that have been agreed. And once the timings and deliverables have been agreed, you can get off people’s backs for a while, which they tend to appreciate. Up until it’s time to follow-up and double-check they are still on track to hit the deadline, that is.

And it you didn’t explicitly agree on due dates previously, it’s really hard to know when is the right time to follow-up. So you either end up not following up enough, or over-doing it. Either case, it’s a really good way to annoy your project contributors. It’s much better to potentially annoy them once by forcing an agreement on due dates, then do it repeatedly later, or risk slipping the overall project timelines altogether.

6/ Build in buffer for errors and miscommunication

Buffers are a project manager’s best friend. Without buffers, if something goes wrong somewhere, it will most likely affect the entire project (timeline or cost). Therefore, it is very important to keep buffers in mind when thinking through the approach for your project.

In my project example, we had roughly 3 weeks to get the initial package of work delivered. Of the 3 weeks, we had roughly 1 to 1.5 weeks of buffer, in case things went wrong. And guess what happened? We consumed that buffer right upfront.

Some of the things that came up had to do with the initial misunderstandings and assumptions about who was doing what. As the result, there were things that nobody was doing. Because everyone assumed that somebody else is taking care of them.

Having a buffer helped us still stay on track overall, even though it made the back end of the 3 weeks more stressful than it needed to be. But we were very thankful for it to be that way. Better be stressed in the second half of the project, but still deliver within your timelines.

So it’s always a good idea to have buffers. If you don’t end up using them, that’s also good. Nobody minds positive surprises typically. It’s the negative ones that you should watch out for.

7/ Have plans B & C available

Similar to buffers, having contingency plans is something you should always strive for as a project manager. Life and work are simply way too unpredictable if what you’re doing has any degree of complexity at all. You should just assume that something will go wrong somewhere, and be prepared for it.

Having a plan B or C doesn’t mean you have to do double the work, because you’re duplicating your effort. It simply means doing enough thinking and checking, and being ready to activate an alternative when the time comes.

In our example, we were recommended certain engineering and consulting professionals for acoustic, mechanical, hydraulic and fire safety topics. We spoke to all of the recommended ones. But we also lined up another 1-2 backups for each discipline. We sent them our scopes of work and asked for quotes and terms of engagement. So that we were ready to go if needed.

The one thing that I try to do when putting in place contingency plans is being transparent and clear with your suppliers. I like to let them know that we have someone lined up, but are looking for potential additional suppliers. Just to keep expectations right and not have to deal with too much follow-up.

If you are in the middle of a project now, ask yourself - ‘do I have a plan B or C’ for the most risky parts of your overall plan. And if some other parts of the scope start smelling like risk, quickly brainstorm a contingency plan as a first step. It’s amazing how much peace of mind it can give you. As well as helping keep your project on track.

8/ Manage compromises and red lines

Whenever you’re working with other people, as is usually true for BI projects, you will inevitably run into conflicting opinions. The trick is to know which conflicts are resolvable and where a compromise can be achieved, and which conflicts are red lines. Knowing this can save you a lot of headaches and inefficiency, and helps makes the overall process more streamlined.

In our example project, we had an architect drawing up plans for the space, which then had to be reviewed by multiple parties. Some parties turned out to have very strong opinions about where things had to be positioned. Other parties had other opinions, and they often clashed with one another.

It can sometimes be confronting when you’re stuck with this conflicting opinions, but you are the one in charge of ‘quarterbacking’ the overall project. What I ended up doing is just have individual conversations with each party. I told them that their view conflicted with those of others, and asked whether it was something they were able to compromise on, or if it was a deal-breaker for them.

Once you repeat the process with everyone, you should be able to make calls on compromises where those are possible. For areas that can’t be a compromise, you have to then go back to each party and explain how a clash with their preference seemed unresolvable. And then you just have to be prepared that the whole project would get derailed. However, more often than not, when presented with the potential for entire effort to be put at risk, most parties would soften their stance.

Achieving this kind of outcome is, of course, a win for everybody. But getting to this point may not be straightforward. As a project manager, it is your job to navigate ‘the cats’ towards this kind of resolution. And you have to actively work at it, rather than hope that the parties involved will reach the same conclusion by themselves. You have to present everyone with the facts and frame the decisions correctly, so that everyone understands what’s at stake.

You also shouldn’t rush this process, or try to fix everything in one big go. Having a big meeting where parties with contradicting opinions would be forced to battle it out in front of others is often not the best way to resolve an issue. In my experience, it is much better to ‘soften the ground’ first. And you do that by having one-on-one conversations first.

9/ Vary format between group and individual sessions

This one is already alluded to from the point before. To be a good project manager you need to master the art of picking the right format for various kinds of discussions and inputs. And efficiency shouldn’t always be the deciding factor when choosing it.

Sometimes, it is best to start with smaller, individual conversations. This allows you to be more open, but also for your stakeholders to open up better to you. They might not be comfortable sharing their apprehensions openly in bigger groups. But if it’s a one-on-one conversation, they might let you in on why they prefer for things to be done a certain one. You need to be smart in the way you orchestrate these interactions.

You also need to be clear whether each of your interactions is an update, or an opportunity to provide inputs. Sometimes you actually don’t want too many inputs, because this can put your entire project timeline at risk of slippage. But at the same time, you wan to provide ample opportunity for inputs, within reason, as it helps you get better buy-in and understand the project from multiple different perspectives.

In general, I’ve found that big group discussions are rarely helpful or productive. But they might be an effective way to generate the final sing-offs and agreement. If you need to achieve a resolution, and it’s been providing difficult through one-on-one interactions, you might actually want to push the discussion into a group setting. And then the fact that parties might not want to share all of their concerns openly with everyone might come in handy for you.

Of course, that would be a somewhat extreme case, where you have to move the process forward despite someone having unresolved concerns. It is much better to be able to resolve those concerns beforehand. But the world is imperfect, and sometimes you just have to keep the process moving. Just do your best to avoid ‘steamrolling’ anyone if you can avoid it, as it’s just a much better way to do work.

10/ Keep information flowing / over-communicate

And finally, as the quarterback for the process, you need to always keep communication flowing in all kinds of different directions. It is usually best to control the flow of that communication, however. You want to avoid an uncontrolled flow, as it can create more chaos than good. But as a general rule, more communication is almost always better than less.

One thing I learned through firsthand experience is that whenever you’re communicating with someone, always start with context. People are often busy with multiple different things, and they not thinking about your specific project as much as you think they might. So starting with a context reminder always helps. If they already know or remember the context, they can always let you know and ask you to move on to the actual content of the discussion.

Similarly, after you’re done discussing the content, always describe the broader process (and where you are in it) and next steps. This helps people see and appreciate the bigger picture. They can also better understand their own role in the broader project, and be able to better contribute as the result.

Knowledge and clarity on next steps is also critical. Firstly, it just helps put most of your stakeholders at more ease, if they know there is a process in place for how things would progress from where you are now. But secondly, it is also helpful to you as the project manager. Because it can be a forcing function for you to put a process in place, if there isn’t one yet. Or remind yourself of critical activities that you might otherwise forget about (like sending out those updates to everyone, based on the discussion you just finished).

Finally, communication doesn’t have to be tedious and time-consuming. You can use multiple forms of communication, depending on your specific requirements. Sometimes, just a short text message is enough. Text messages do count as formal communication. And sometimes, you might want to write a longer email, or pick up the phone and give that call. You just have to strike the right balance between frequency and depth of your updates.

Conclusion

Hopefully some of these tips, tricks and best practices are somewhat helpful, as you navigate your own business improvement (or other) projects.

If you have and comments or suggestions, we would love to hear about them. Feel free to email us or leave comments on the web page below.

It is really hard to measure improvements in your business if you don’t know what your starting point is.

Knowing a starting point is also important because you can then know whether the improvements you’ve been able to achieve a significant or not. For example, a $10 million dollar cost saving off a $100 million base spend is significant. The same $10 million dollar saving off a base of $1 billion dollars of spend is not as impressive.

But establishing your starting point may not be as straightforward as it might seem.

Let’s consider an example here: You are a chemicals plant that produces 10 million tons of product. However, production rate is expected to come down, because some of your existing customers are going to a competitor. It is unclear whether you will be able to replace them with new customers.

What makes matters even more complicated is that there is a shutdown coming up two years from now. In the year when the shut happens, your production capacity will temporarily decrease by 35%. But after the shut is completed, your capacity will increase by 3% in the years that follow (slowing coming down to zero towards the next shutdown in the cycle).

That’s just the production part.

Let’s also think about financials. You expect that your revenues will grow by 2% per year due to inflation allowances built in to most of your contracts. However, you also expect that some of your costs will increase due to that same inflation as well. But inflation is going to hit your costs differently, depending on which part of the cost base is affect - e.g., higher impact on consumables, lower on energy, and something in-between on labor.

So if you tried to answer the question of what your starting point was for measuring business improvements, what would you answer?

Enter the Momentum Case

Momentum Case is something that can help you articulate your starting point in complicated situations like the one described above. It tries to answer the question of where your business would end up if you didn’t undertake any major interventions, and let the business run as it would more or less by itself.

The first thing you’d need to determine when estimating your momentum case is the period of measurement. Because the changes we described above vary over time, their impact on your base level of performance will also vary over time. And the only way to stabilise the estimate is to freeze your time period.

Let’s say you want to estimate your improvements over the course of the next 5 years. That could be a good period of measurement and for establishing a Momentum Case of where the business would end up on autopilot.

So what would you do next?

Begin by extrapolating the changes you already know about and expect forward into the 5-year horizon:

• Revenue / Production capacity: Calculate production volumes you can achieve taking into account both the upcoming shut and the increased production capacity following the shut (year by year)

• Revenue / Demand: Assume you will lose 12% of volumes because of competition, and only be able to replenish 5% based on your historical success rate

• Revenue / Resulting volumes sold: Take the minimum between production capacity and demand for each of the upcoming 5 years

• Revenue / Price: Assume linear growth of 2% year over year due to inflation

• Cost / Fixed: Apply inflation rates for each of the upcoming 5 years base on your estimated inflation drivers

• Cost / Variable: Estimate what it would look like pre-inflation based on resulting volumes sold from above, and overlay expected inflation rates on top

Once you have done this exercise, you can summarise your results in one of two forms - either (i) in a year-by-year format, or (ii) as a sum total of the entire upcoming 5-year period. You will need to judge which format is more intuitive, easier to digest and better suits your context, but otherwise the numbers would of course be the same.

And that is how you can estimate your Momentum Case.

What do you do then?

Once you’ve gotten your Momentum Case, you can move forward more comfortably with measuring your upcoming business improvements.

For example, you can start applying known improvements to the relevant production, price or cost drivers over each of the 5 years, to see how your production and financial performance would look differently compared to the ‘do nothing’ scenario (aka Momentum Case). And if you have more than one improvement project, you can what they do when delivered in aggregate, and which ones give the most movement to your proverbial needle.

Momentum Case can also help you with preparing and assessing business cases for the various improvement projects that might be on the table. As is often the case, many potential improvements would require some investment. And knowing how that project would affect the existing production or financial ‘flight path’ of the business is a critical input for deciding whether the results are worth the investment.

By now you hopefully see all kinds of possibilities that having a robust and well-estimated Momentum Case enables you to have. The rest is up to you and your improvement teams in terms of stretching the Momentum Case and seeing what kinds of creative approaches can be used to generate the best set of improvement projects to move your business forward.