Let me start with a statement:
As a leader, you have to understand the ‘mechanisms’, what makes an organisation work. I have a strong positive belief in my employees. I believe that they want to do a good job and contribute to the company’s development. That’s why it’s important that I, as a leader, create the best possible conditions for the organisation to run as efficiently as possible.
As you may have read in my previous columns, I as the new CEO made a flying start in my mission to transform the fragmented Bisnode structure into ONE company.
The work of identifying economies of scale in Bisnode had been started by my predecessor. All operating companies around Europe belonged to one of the three selected business areas.
At the time of my appointment, Bisnode therefore had a relatively large head office, where many competent employees worked in one of these three business areas. Within each business area, various types of activities were conducted such as training, research, etc.
I started asking the P&L owners in the business about their views on the value of the work carried out at business area level. For example, it was appreciated that they could send their staff to training and conferences organised by the business area at no cost to their own business.
When I asked the P&L owners how they would feel about starting to pay for their share of the HQ cost, the answer was ‘no, we can’t justify that cost. These business areas are nice to have but not need to have’
Back to my introduction where I wrote about mechanisms. It is by refining this form of structure that you can build more efficient companies. I therefore decided to streamline our model. We decided that as much as possible of everything to do with HQ would be run and financed within each region. In order not to lose direction and co-ordination, the most senior regional leader would also be tasked with co-ordinating the business area.
In this way, we managed to increase the relevance of what the business areas did while drastically reducing overall costs.
hashtag#Leadership hashtag#Changemanagement
The picture below was once taken when I wanted to illustrate how we shrunk down HQ to a very small one …
Bisnode – The story of a HQ that shrank
