WILL YOU BE A GROWTH ALCHEMIST? Jeff Chan September 27, 2016 One of the more interesting projects in my time at McKinsey & Company, was the research and writing of a book entitled “The Alchemy of Growth,” whose three principal authors – Mehrdad Baghai, Steve Coley and David White – were my co-founders of McKinsey’s global Growth Practice. The new concepts introduced in the book were: The Three Horizons of Growth The Seven Degrees of Freedom Staircases to Growth Differentiated Management Approaches THREE HORIZONS OF GROWTH Individual businesses, like any living organism, have a limited life-span. Due to new technology, new competitors, changing consumer demand, or other market discontinuities, any business, no matter how large or robust, will eventually fail....
Publications
How New Heights Health Centres and York Community Services minimized culture risk when forming Unison Health & Community Services December 12, 2011 By Jeff Chan There are many steps necessary for a successful merger or acquisition, including the strategic rationale, conducting rigorous due diligence, not over-paying and capturing the planned revenue and cost synergies. Bridging the culture gap between the organizations is the one most often overlooked and under-valued. The 2010 merger of New Heights Community Health Centres and York Community Services in Toronto Canada, to form Unison Health and Community Services, was one in which the boards and executive leaders identified and considered corporate culture as an explicit success factor in their planned merger. More importantly they utilized cultural...
TalentMap, December 12, 2011 By Jeff Chan From Hermann Hesse (Human life is reduced to real suffering only when…two cultures…overlap), to Peter Drucker (Culture eats strategy for breakfast) to Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines (Culture is the most important focal point for leaders) and Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM (The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything), important thought and business leaders have recognized that culture is an essential consideration — even more important than strategy — to any organization’s success. Corporate culture is a general social understanding that includes beliefs, assumptions, values and perspectives shared by an organization’s members. In turn, it affects behavior within the organization in areas such as management style and...
How New Heights Community Health Centres and York Community Services minimized the culture risk when forming Unison Health and Community Services Healthcare Quarterly Vol.16, No.1, 2013 p.85 By Jeff Chan Abstract Among the requirements for a successful merger or acquisition are strategic rationales, rigorous due diligence, the right price and revenue and cost synergies. However, bridging the culture gap between organizations is frequently overlooked. The leaders of new Heights Community Health Centres and York Community Services explicitly considered culture in their merger to form Unison Health and Community Services, and they used employee engagement surveys to assess culture in their merger planning and post-merger integration. How Unison Health leaders avoided the risk of culture rejection to achieve a successful merger,...
Companies need to balance present operations against future possibilities to ensure success Post 2000 Report On The Nation: Management National Post, Post 2000, November 22, 1997, p 18 By Mehrdad Baghai and Jeff Chan Many companies in Western economies are suffering from restructuring fatigue. Managers are asking, as are their concerned shareholders, about growth. Specifically, they’re asking about strategies to make their companies grow The need to grow is deemed to be so great that in some economies such as Germany and France seeking solutions to corporate growth has become part of the national agenda. This is because of its significant impact on employment For three years, McKinsey & Company has examined the ways companies grow. The research...