"Developing Sustained Excellence"

Abstract

A Strategic Management Model for Establishing A Center for Transnational Leadership and Entrepreneurship
Professor Dennis J. Bava, Franklin College Switzerland

The relentless forces of globalization, cost containment, deregulation, technological change and the need for growth are driving companies to continually rethink, redesign, and improve their business strategies and processes. Based on "value added" experience which is multidimensional, the strategic management model serves for launching the Center for Transnational Leadership and Entrepreneurship. The model employs the strategic management paradigm of identifying the principle players in the process; identifying stakeholders; defining goals; analyzing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis); establishing consultancy relationships; and evaluating measurable results.

The Center’s unique approach of combining practical experience in a range of industries with expertise in various functional areas to help organizations reach their goals is highly valued by clients. Our approach is collaborative, always respectful of the client’s insight and experience. Our stakeholder approach considers the involvement of our clients’ employees as a prerequisite for durable improvements.

Mission

Through the Center for Transnational Leadership and Entrepreneurship, our spectrum of innovation- our integrated expertise in strategy formation, process improvement, change management, and technology and product development- we help organizations establish a sustainable innovation premium, creating strong financial performance and accelerated growth. The Center distinguishes itself from competitors by the caliber of industry professionals, academic researchers and honors students, and the breadth and depth of their experience.

We are also unique in our commitment to helping our clients reinvent their organization, enhance their capacity for learning and change, and create lasting value. When we complete our engagement, we leave behind not only successful ideas, but also a new level of understanding, a more robust and agile organization, and an expanded capacity for learning, changing and growing. We treat our mandates in a holistic way, building a bridge between strategy and implementation. We are neutral and independent and pride ourselves on "developing sustained excellence."

Vision

The Center for Transnational Leadership and Entrepreneurship will be a pre-eminent learner-centered community shaping business practices for tomorrow’s converging economies.

Convergence

We are living in a period of business revolution, revolution driven by tools and approaches that can have a profound impact on organizational effectiveness and long-term success. It is a time of challenge, but also a time of momentous innovation in how businesses create and respond to market demands, as well as boost productivity and effectiveness.

How? Through the transparency and rapid deployment of information across traditional functional silos, business processes, communication media, company boundaries and geographic borders. As a result, ideas, functions, products, and processes that have existed separately for centuries are being woven together in many novel ways. In the Center for Transnational Leadership and Entrepreneurship, we call that "convergence." Convergence across functions, processes, channels, organizations, industries, media, and markets offers new opportunities for organizational innovation, effectiveness, and competitive advantage. In the Center, we seek to understand how to create and exploit opportunities for convergence, improve models of leadership, gain competitive advantage, and share that knowledge with our students and business partners. Convergence is a theme, a core agenda that distinguishes our faculty’s research, our partnerships with corporations, and our Undergraduate and Executive Programs.

Convergence is a business reality. Through the power of information technologies, companies can now reach markets on a global scale; yet foster intimate and immediate connections among sellers, producers, service providers, and consumers. This as true for global corporations, as it is for small businesses operating in remote settings. These technologies have prompted convergence across industry boundaries, propelled mergers across previously unrelated lines of business, enabled simultaneous connections across multiple channels, transformed consumer expectations and experiences, and revolutionized daily living practices across the globe. For businesses, convergence enables new ways of operating, executing, competing, and innovating.

These tectonic shifts require the Center to prepare our students to leverage and exploit new rules and opportunities. But not everything is new. Students and executives must still make decisions that build on business fundamentals—finance, accounting, management, marketing, operations, quantitative skills, strategy and ethics. But beyond this foundation which underpins the Center’s raison d’être, students and managers must see the opportunities for connection between information technology and information content, between customers and suppliers, between alternative providers in the supply-chain, between project innovators within large corporations and those who execute with the agility of entrepreneurs.

At the Center for Transnational Leadership and Entrepreneurship, we will advance understanding of convergence on the business landscape by refining our learner-centered principles, advancing research, innovating through our industry-supported projects and professional engagements, and academic partnerships. The Center draws on a tradition of excellence in the fundamental disciplines of business, and then shapes that knowledge into a boundary-spanning capability. For example, our professional portfolios in strategic management consulting, finance and investment analysis, organizational behavior, marketing and entrepreneurship create conceptual and practical linkages between the traditional business functions within an organization. Both students and clients emerge with alertness to new business opportunities that can be created through various forms of convergence, but they are disciplined in the application of analytical business tools to examine, experiment with, and evaluate these opportunities. The Undergraduate Program and Executive Programs will all include similar distinctive features that prepare students and participants for convergent thinking and action.

Although technology opens new frontiers for business opportunities and challenges, these opportunities do not fit into neat boxes. They require collaborative endeavors across traditionally separated silos. For example, to join the accelerating biotechnology race, scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and seasoned managers must come together. Similarly, risk management today covers a far broader landscape than in the past, encompassing bio-threats in agriculture, security management of facilities, weather risk management in the energy, manufacturing, and agricultural sectors of world economies, and financial risk management affected by the complex interaction of geopolitical, economic, and psychological factors. All of these opportunities and challenges facing the Center require creative thought leadership and business solutions that span traditional industry or functional boundaries.

The Center focuses on innovation from within to spur growth and continuing innovation of large, mature companies, as well as start-ups. We have the advantage of proven professionals, a world-class faculty, and high aptitude students that advance and disseminate boundary-spanning thinking. When you consider these distinctive elements-- reflective practitioners, world-class faculty, motivated students, linkages across colleges and universities, and business partnerships-- the Center for Transnational Leadership and Entrepreneurship is positioned to lead thinking on convergence. The market winners will be those who exploit the opportunities for convergence, without losing sight of business fundamentals.

Key Attributes

"Knowledge is not codified- it’s in people’s brains. The successful exploitation of ideas is the key, taping into knowledge within the company, and transferring that knowledge among employees. Knowledge transfer is a body-contact sport."
Dr. John Beacham

Culture At the Center for Transnational Leadership and Entrepreneurship there exists a culture that promotes camaraderie and teamwork. This culture transcends faculty, staff and students.

Experience Proven professionals and a world-class faculty are uniquely positioned to help clients improve operating margins by reducing operating costs and improve cash flow. Using the Center’s portfolio of risk management and international consultative services, we can help businesses reduce and control operating costs associated with human resources, plant and equipment, supply-chain and logistics and net revenue reimbursements; enabling these firms to grow surplus, attract capital and compete more effectively.

Education The Center has some of the leading and multi-talented business professionals. Students receive a strong business foundation through a rigorous set of core courses. Beyond electives in traditional disciplines, the Center affords honors students the opportunity to intern and "put in practice" their particular strengths in strategic management, finance, and marketing.

Affordability The Center charges client fees based on a "Balanced Scorecard" approach. The key concept behind a Balanced Scorecard is that Executives and Managers need easy "at-a-glance" access to a variety of key performance indicators to efficiently run an operationally and fiscally sound organization. Through use of a basic formula, which measures strategic, tactical and operational performance improvement indicators, a fee scale is applied. Put simply, the core objective of the Balanced Scorecard approach is to convert information and intelligence into bottom line success and to share the results.

Knowledge Transfer The Center focuses more clearly on providing benefits to all stakeholders, and on building mechanisms for rewarding collaboration. It promotes a knowledge-transfer culture by matching financial and other incentives to individual needs; by dismantling barriers to cooperation along the value chain; and staying flexible in funding and organizational solutions which will change as businesses start-up and mature.

Location The Center provides a unique draw for students wanting to study in a safe and secure environment for reasons of climate, culture, geography, and international business opportunities.

Key Priorities:

"Research organizations must recognize that customers are people with problems and money. There must be a balance between scientific excellence and customer need."
Dr. John Beacham

The Center for Transnational Leadership and Entrepreneurship has the potential to be truly great. The small size affords the opportunity to reach businesses and ensure excellence in knowledge transfer. Mutual understanding is the key to successful knowledge transfer. Because collaborative, team-working models are widespread, the onus is on both sides to recognize the importance of the human factor. The Center will select faculty and students who are alert to commercial context, and industry must choose people who are sensitive to the interests of academia.

Degrees of Involvement

A distinctive feature of the Center is its knowledge-transfer culture. Innovation management is not, primarily, about technology. It is about people, culture and communication. The key to the Center’s success is to create a business-aware culture, without devaluing science and technology. This requires managing the interfaces between the functions in the value chain. Change can easily be blocked, because of the many independent players involved, and the cultural misconceptions, or even hostility, which may have arisen. The Center can act both as a catalyst and trainer to companies in identifying knowledge brokers, people who are well connected and can build bridges across functions.

One size does not fit all when it comes to deciding how to exploit new ideas commercially. New ventures can be a source of renewal and growth for a parent company, but the route taken will depend on the core competences of the organizations involved. The Center also can play various roles in encouraging new business creation and entrepreneurship:

• Commit itself to the new venture and supporting the client in the development of business plans.
• Undertake joint research and development programs, licensing technologies to spin-offs, and participating in incubator projects.
• Network on behalf of the new venture, giving it access to management expertise, and acting as a reference customer.
• Provide support in the form of training and student internship resources.
• Recognize that new ventures are inherently risky, and provide risk planning (technical people are not always good at anticipating the downside).
• Communicate success stories within and outside the parent organization.

In such a competitive market, company communication for finding university and/or college graduates has become of the utmost importance to recruit the right candidate for the right job. The Center will act as a partner and conduit to identify suitable graduates for both national and international companies. The Center will organize "Informational Workshops" and "Career Days" so that companies invited to campus to give presentations and conduct interviews will have the best possible view of the graduates.

Financing the Center

"What are clients looking for? Give me something that I can understand, that no-one else has, that might make us all rich, and with someone attached that can make it happen."
Dr. William Bains

Three phases are involved in building a Center for Transnational Leadership and Entrepreneurship from an idea into a market player:

• Defining the concept- crystallizing the idea in terms of key players, general market, and business plan; creating a core team, a legal entity and a business model.
• Developing management consultancy services and market- designing and testing the product, beginning operations; gaining customers and developing market channels.
• Growing the business to become a revenue enhancer to the hosting institution.

The Center’s focus at each stage, and the networks at each, will change accordingly. The due diligence requirements for funding the Center will include:

• Seed funding from the hosting institution for example, 80% of the operating budget (Euro 120,000 for salaries and expenses) in Year 1. and breakeven in Year 3.
• Grants from the U.S. Government and/or the European Union.
• Business development and educational research loans.
• Client fees from professional engagements and project management assignments.
• Direct and indirect contributions from philanthropic foundations.

The key is to identify the value inflection points- those milestones in the Center’s development where funding requirements take a quantum leap, usually at the start of each of the three phases and to match the source of funding to the amounts required. In sum, the more the Center becomes self-sustaining and a revenue enhancer long term, the more advantageous to the hosting institution not only financially, but also from a multi-dimensional perspective.

Overarching Philosophy

The Center for Transnational Leadership and Entrepreneurship like any business entity has a philosophy which evolves as a set of laws or guidelines that gradually become established, through trial and error or through leadership, as expected patterns of behavior. Although such basic beliefs inevitably vary from company to company, here are five that I find recurring frequently in the most successful corporations:

1. Maintenance of high ethical standards in external and internal relationships is essential to maximize success.
2. Decisions should be based on facts, objectively considered- what is referred to as fact-founded, thought-through approach to decision making.
3. The business should be kept in adjustment with the forces at work in its environment.
4. People should be judged on the basis of their performance, not on personality, education, or personal traits and skills.
5. The business should be administered with a sense of competitive urgency.

A Center of high principle develops better and more profitable relations with clients, competitors, and the general public because it can be counted on to do the right thing at all times. By the consistently ethical character of its actions, the Center builds a favorable image. In choosing among suppliers, clients resolve their doubts in favor of such a Center. Competitors are less likely to comment unfavorably on it and the general public is more likely to be open-minded toward its actions.

Many companies claim to have strategic partners, but do they also have partnering strategies? What is important is the strategy behind a partnership, not the partnership itself. In order to realize the full potential of partnering, a Strategic Management Model for Establishing A Center for Transnational Leadership and Entrepreneurship, as proposed above, describes a blueprint for developing partnering strategies and managing strategic alliances.

The Center’s value driven management approach establishes an integrated plan without discontinuity considering hard quantitative facts as well as behavioral aspects, and enabling value oriented decision-making. It is a win-win-win outcome which ultimately increases the visibility of the university, serves as a strategic recruitment tool, and enriches local and international constituents through "developing sustained excellence."