Rob Brickman leverages over 25 years of strategy and transformation experience to bring a “Stepladder to the Maze”. What exactly is a Stepladder in a Maze?
“A national retail hardware client had made repeated, unsuccessful attempts to harmonize their online and bricks-and-mortar businesses. They hired IBM to design the IT “plumbing” to support their planning, but the executive team told me that they felt that their entire online strategy was “stuck in a labyrinth”. The organization desperately sought fresh thinking and an innovative approach.
I brought my childhood love of mazes to a facilitated session with the client. I knew that while there are typically two approaches to escaping labyrinths, neither is innovative or efficient because they are constrained by 2-dimensional thinking. [If you’d like to know more…contact me!]
I knew that my client sold step-ladders, so I brazenly suggested that having a step-ladder in a maze would give them a different perspective, add a third dimension to the problem and potentially let them see a way out. The idea tickled them and we spent the afternoon exploring what that third dimension would mean.
By bringing a conceptual step-ladder to the discussion, I created a risk-free environment for my clients to consider new perspectives, try out ideas and dream of what could be, without bumping into walls. We were able to build the detailed plans for an expedited, integrated multi-channel strategy within weeks.”
Together with our associates, RB&A offers a broad suite of business strategy and transformation expertise across multiple sectors
Business Transformation:
- Adapt rapidly to new technologies
- Sustain process improvements through technology
- Assess what type of transformation is feasible
- Bring clarity to roles and responsibilities across business functions
- Define principles for workforce management under conditions of disruption (e.g. outsourcing, merger, acquisition, divestiture, cost containment, globalization)
- Re-design business processes to adapt to both automation and human intervention
- Define metrics on performance before, during and after transformation
Performance Improvement
- Discover Opportunities for Performance Improvement
- Initiative-Specific Improvement
- Strategy Implementation
- Transitional Management
- Organizational Development
- Goal Driven Transformation
Business and IT Strategy
- IT Strategy and Roadmap – business-focused IT strategy that drive adaptation despite changing technologies (e.g. Cloud, Analytics, IoT, Cognitive computing, Robotic Process Automation)
- IT Sourcing Strategy – enterprise sourcing strategy with domestic, offshore and hybrid elements
- IT Organizational Structure – Adapt to current and future requirements with an effective IT organizational structure.
- Retained Organizational Structure: Review the impact of outsourced/offshored skills transfer on the retained IT organization and define organizational structure to support harmonized service delivery.