Today's blog entry is by May Chang from Group 1
This is a unique opportunity for all of us, even for the entire IMD international consulting projects. So many attractive aspects about this project: private equity, sustainability, vision creation, implementation planning and definitely a strong fun team including 6 peers, 1 learning manager and 1 professor.
Our client company is a leading private equity fund of fund firm which invests in fund managers in private equity and doesn’t make direct investment in portfolio companies. The project scope is about creating shared vision and implementation of sustainability, which is set as strategic differentiator by top management.
Sustainability? Yes, contributing to make the world better beyond pure economic benefit. They focus on three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, social and governance. On corporate level, they are already deploying this value to daily operations, for example, no bottle water for employee in office, less paper printing, carbon compensation for each flight etc. More importantly, they want to embed this value into all the investment management. But there are different concerns around uncertainty and ambiguity of this topic. How to create a shared vision across different offices and teams, how to incorporate sustainability into investment process, and how to communicate with the industry about their actions… all of these are the motivation behind to work with IMD ICP project.
It is really a perfect practice of what we learned – leading change, which was not only addressed in strategy class, but also was covered by a specific 2-day session and also by organizational behavior class.
Our team quickly set the structure of our approach and is in the middle of our project work right now.
First we need to understand the situation. Over 20 individual interviews with investment managers were hold in the first week in client’s head office, from the top management to senior associate across different offices. It was such a fruitful learning experience! I never had the chance to explore so many variance and understanding on one same topic from a group of highly intelligent people. These interviews gave us very rich information to make further analysis and adjust our approaching plan.
One of the following key steps is workshop. We intend to create a chance for a small group of investment team members to explore this topic with each other. It will be a very important stage to help create shared vision and design the implementation plan. The workshop arrangement has been fully discussed and even put in a detailed plan based on minutes. We look forward to exploring more though the workshops......