Conferences at HEC and in companies

Most companies lose their start-up mindset as they become bigger. However a few remarkable companies, like Google or Cisco, have maintained the speed, the ability to take risks, the openness that characterize young businesses.

In order to stay agile, the CEOs of these companies have refused the scourges that usually plague big organizations: bureaucracy, internal focus (instead of customer focus), lack of commitment, massive preoccupation with internal politics.

They have built organizational systems and encouraged cultural traits that avoid is for us the 12 plagues of modern corporations.

According to a McKinsey Survey, 58% of change initiatives fail to achieve their objectives. The resistance to change is the main cause of failure.
Rather than studying means of overcoming resistances to change, this lecture will provide an overview on how to minimize and possibly avoid them. The conception of change management that will be presented is based on the ancient china philosophy of Taoism.
According to Taoism, forcing through might be, in certain circumstances, an effective way to achieve one’s means but is a costly and a partly inefficient solution. It is rather suggested to follow the flow and lines of least resistance.

This lecture will aim at helping participants apply 4 basic principles.

In the globalized and liberalized world of today, competition is exacerbated. The imperative of performance has spread to all functions and all sectors.

To give ourselves the best possible odds in this bitter struggle, it is worth reflecting on appropriateness of the different corporate arrangements to generate high performance.

Some memorable success stories in the world of sport as well as a synthesis of the theories on performance management will shed a light on current business practices.

This panorama will enable participants to produce a diagnosis for their own entity and consider concrete measures, based on the two performance management styles, opposite but complementary, that we will define.

 

What is the key to the miraculous success of Low Cost companies? How do they reconcile the inconceivable: offering cheaper prices to the consumer without sacrificing quality and yet still be more profitable than their higher-priced competitors?
This outstanding achievement deserves our attention all the more as it is not based on cutting-edge technology.
We will investigate in this lecture the levers of Low Cost strategies, highlight the conditions for its success as well as its limitations. We will end by looking at what traditional actors can do to fight Low Cost rivals.

Workshop and Serious Games

Globstrat is a business game. In this sophisticated and realistic business simulation, participants compete against each other for market share.

This provides a unique opportunity to:

1. test one’s ability to formulate and implement winning strategies,
2. analyze decsion-making processes both at an individual and team level.

The AKVAR workshops are run at the executive committee level in order to raise the collective performance. They are a direct and pragmatic application of Michel Fiol and myself’s research on performance management.

This workshop is designed for managers who feel the need to broaden their consciousness when faced with a complex and difficult situation. This approach is particularly suited to situations where it is necessary to:

• Stimulate creativity,
• Find a third option to escape binary reasoning,
• Extend the range of possibilities,
• Break deadlocks,
• Conduct smooth transformations.