CEO message

We at Denscombe Corporation have had a long experience of challenging organizational change and new business development with the objective of better creating sustainable and growing stakeholder value. This started a long time ago, when our CEO – as a British born graduate from Harvard University – took on the challenge of entering the French cosmetic and skincare market as a key team decision-maker with a global American company, Avon Products.

This tough – and rare for a new college graduate – first career assignment taught our CEO a lot about what to do and what not do in order to gain new market share in a hostile competitive and cultural business environment. Equally important, he learned early on about the need of aligning the organizational resources and assets with both the opportunity and also with the stakeholder priorities.

And while this assignment did actually result in great success at meeting the firm’s key short-term strategic business goals, perhaps more by beginners luck, the rationale and suitability of entering this market made our CEO question whether it was the right to blindly follow corporate directives without asking “why”, to pursue the best road to sustainable shareholder growth. Indeed, many should have questioned the wisdom of attacking a market (French) with a product portfolio not aligned for the market need and other resources/assets not in place to be able to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

The strategic decision-making at the firm’s corporate level seemed ill informed and inappropriately focused for a publicly controlled firm. This thinking pushed our CEO to expand his business vision and understanding of corporate decision-making, as well as his ability to directly impact positive business change in a professional capacity as a “change agent”, through a Harvard MBA education.

As a fresh Harvard MBA, our CEO chose an opportunity not by the money it paid but the challenges it offered and the ability for him to act as a corporate change agent. He joined a big New York bank that had seen its competitive business position weakened, and indeed was able to create substantial organizational change by recommending a radical new corporate strategy for the overall organization. As a co-team leader, he was given responsibility to come up with a strategic business plan to lift the bank from its bad situation into the top US profit position.

The core strategic choices were simple: (1) drastically expand the retail side of the business, or (2) give it up and build an innovative new business model to meet the key stated shareholder objective. Both options would critically change the organizational resources needed to meet the new mission/vision/goals. Our CEO’S recommendation was to push the bank into an innovative new direction as a trading/fee-focused lean organization requiring much lower assets (HR 60% down); the business plan was implemented and key objectives of top profitability were reached.

1) Strategic management consulting

Strategic management consulting, new business development and organizational planning

Advising company clients about strategic growth possibilities, corporate restructuring/downsizing, business re-alignment, recapitalization and other value-added options

Change agent

Through this impressive financial sector change agent experience, our CEO was able to understand the importance of linking answers to three simple strategic questions:

1. (1)Where are we now?
   

2. (2)Where do we want to go?
   

3. (3)What is the best way for us to get there?
   

It also highlighted that the implementation and organizational culture issues were equally important to the change plan itself. On the other side, it taught our CEO that change is always necessary, but that change comes at a cost and that their will always be difficult tradeoffs to be made.

This big business accomplishment – a first in the banking sector in the US – led our CEO at Denscombe Corporation on a long career path connected to change agent: Business planning, strategy development/implementation, change management, business repositioning, business model re-alignment, and other business/market change related management issues. In fact, his next professional career assignment was as a Managing Director at Bank of America given the dual responsibility of building-up a new world class securities/investment banking business for the bank in the corporate lending head office in Los Angeles, while at the same time shifting the bank’s lending-oriented organizational culture to a more flexible position to meet the changed industry/market situation.

Our CEO at Denscombe Corporation has continued a long and accomplished professional management career over the past 20-plus years, focused on strategic change and corporate repositioning, either as a principal through his own firms (Denscombe & Co, Inc. and its current follow-up company: Denscombe Corporation), financial intermediary, outside advisor, strategic consultant, or strategy educator (now strategically aligned with Waseda University School of Commerce and CICOM Brains).

As such, our firm has a special experience and ability to help our corporate clients achieve new growth and better optimized organizations/business models under changed circumstances, whether it be at the higher corporate office level or lower down in the functional/operational level in the business units. Of course, key strategic advice and recommendations do not end there, but include concrete action plans for implementation and ongoing follow-up.

Nigel Denscombe

Denscombe Corporation