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Insufficient knowledge and understanding of the facts and key constraints

Lack of engagement and alignment of the senior team

Managing the effort like a set of initiatives versus an integrated program

Forgetting to go slightly slower, to go a lot faster

Forgetting the customer

Targeting too much of the benefit to occur in the out-years

Lack of transparency and clear ownership of milestones / targets

Organizational issues such as change management, culture, and capabilities not addressed head on

Declaring victory too soon: failing to follow through and track promised changes

Leading a transformation requires specific and acute focus on avoiding these pitfalls. It also requires rising above the management level to inspire the organization in the case for change and to lead them through it. But, this is not a black art: armed with the knowledge of what is required and the pitfalls, a committed management team can and will succeed.

We work diligently with CEOs to help drive significant, accelerated change. We address what the change required is internally: how to motivate our clients’ teams, how to ensure ownership and commitment, and how to make sure the efforts are translated into real results.

Our experienced team members are working full-time to support ongoing client cases, connect our employees, build new knowledge, and develop our unique point of view on specific topics within sustainability. Our internal knowledge base and network are comparable to those of some of the leading universities, and we are continuously learning by helping clients around the world.

Our clients include:

Basic materials and energy companies. We work with mining companies, oil companies, chemicals producers, and utilities to reshape business models, enhance regulatory strategies, introduce more resource-efficient new technologies, manage environmental liabilities, and make step-change improvements in operational resource productivity.
High-tech engineering companies. We support engineering companies in building clean technology businesses, optimizing R&D portfolios, shaping regulatory strategies, developing financing arms, and introducing energy- and resource-efficient production processes.
Consumer companies. We help consumer goods producers develop new green products and implement transformation programs to increase resource productivity and sustainability throughout their supply chains.
Financial institutions. We advise banks, sovereign wealth funds, institutional investors, and private equity firms on investment opportunities in sustainable businesses and clean technologies. We also help clients analyze their exposure to resource risk, including regulatory and carbon risk.
Multilateral organizations. We serve multilateral bodies on issues ranging from low-emissions growth to energy access and clean technology to international financing mechanisms.
Philanthropic organizations. We work with many philanthropic organizations to address global challenges such as promoting sustainable agriculture and fishing, reducing deforestation, and responding to climate change.
Cities. We help implement programs covering infrastructure, transport, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste and water.
Countries. We help develop national strategies to reduce emissions, pursue green growth, address land use and food supply challenges, adapt to climate change, and transform water supplies.

Our work draws on more than 1,000 consultants and experts from McKinsey offices across the world with academic backgrounds in fields such as development and environmental economics, chemical engineering, oceanography, weather modeling, waste engineering, and international affairs. We combine this expertise with deep industry insights developed through decades of advising companies in sectors from energy, mining, and forest products to consumer goods, infrastructure, and logistics.

Our expertise is in five specific areas:

Vision and Mission
Identifying and defining the organization’s mission, as well as a shared vision of the future, to inform strategy and guide actions.

Corporate Strategy and Portfolio Management
Assessing the corporate portfolio of business units and developing strategies to maximize advantage, growth, and value creation.

Business Unit Strategy
Defining the path to sustainable advantage for a specific business unit.

Strategic Planning
Fine-tuning, supplementing, or entirely redesigning planning approaches for greater effectiveness and agility and tighter linkages with business and financial plans.

Future of Strategy
Applying new lenses, tools, and frameworks from the emerging frontiers of strategy to help clients enhance their advantage today. Examples include intellectual property, network analysis, and simulation.

Fusion’s Organization practice helps clients address six main challenges:

Creating an organization design that maximizes efficiency, management effectiveness, cooperation, and employee commitment.

Designing a role of the center that is both lean and active and that enables the organization to create value.

Focusing on people management and human resources by hiring the right talent, ensuring that employees are performing the proper activities to the best of their abilities, helping them develop the appropriate skills and capabilities, connecting them with one another, and attaining excellence in the Human Resources function.

Raising performance by working explicitly on engagement and culture in ways that are both measurable and supportive of strategic goals.

Identifying, developing and deploying highly skilled and adaptive leaders prepared to successfully navigate the changing requirements of 21st century leadership, supported by robust metrics, systems and development programs to generate the bench strength required for long-term success and achievement of strategic goals.

Rigorously instilling change-management capabilities to ensure that the full benefits of any change program are realized through six key actions: creating the change agenda, mobilizing the organization, hard-wiring the organization for change, managing for results, communicating strategically and consistently, and sustaining and reinventing change as necessary.

Fusion’s expertise in operations covers eight areas:

Cost Efficiency and Asset Optimization. Our approach is to find and implement opportunities to improve cash flow. We help companies release cash from the balance sheet, cut costs from operations, and improve asset effectiveness.

Lean. Fusion views attaining leanness as a way to deeply transform business competitiveness. Our approach ensures success by integrating four critical areas: business strategy, operational effectiveness, staff engagement, and performance management.

Manufacturing. Fusion helps companies build trim, flexible manufacturing networks that can adapt quickly to changing market needs. We focus on reducing costs, increasing capacity by improving efficiency, and helping companies find and leverage capabilities that generate competitive advantage.

Outsourcing and Business-Process Offshoring. Fusion helps companies achieve a competitive advantage through the prudent use of outsourcing, which can improve quality and productivity, power innovation, provide new sources of revenue, open up new markets, and deliver a sustainable cost benefit.

Program Management. The ability to manage large-scale change is critical to operations work. Our proprietary approach ensures that change efforts deliver the intended results and that new capabilities are embedded in the organization.

Service Operations. We help companies pinpoint which customer encounters really drive behaviors such as attrition, advocacy, or greater spending, and then focus improvement efforts on these critical points.

Sourcing and Procurement. We work with companies to reduce unnecessary complexity, develop needed purchasing strategies, create low-cost global building blocks, and construct stronger and more-productive relationships with suppliers.

Supply Chain Management. We work with companies to redesign their supply chains for optimal flexibility and the strategic advantage gained by being able to deliver the right product—at the right time and in the right way—to each customer segment.

We leverage our deep insight into consumers and customers to inspire frame-breaking and high-impact thinking in all aspects of marketing, branding, sales, and pricing. Our goal is to help clients realize sustainable economic results. Therefore, our work extends across strategy, planning, execution, and capability building.

We help our clients achieve their goals through these specific areas:

• Insight into consumers is crucial to the development and execution of successful strategies on a wide range of issues, from uncovering growth opportunities to refining pricing and promotion plans. We understand how consumers make their purchase decisions at a granular level. These insights often challenge conventional wisdom and allow us to develop effective strategies to influence consumer decisions at every touch point of the complex process.

• Marketing can become more effective through our knowledge of consumer and customer needs, which helps clients determine buying behavior, develop useful offerings across channels, and clearly present their products to customers. We work with companies across all industries to analyze their “return on marketing investment” and to upgrade their marketing capabilities.

• Branding and communications involve fashioning a brand-portfolio architecture and positioning and then connecting each brand with the customer—using both deep perception into customer behavior and rigorous business analysis. We help our clients become leaders in the brand-driven management of the complete business system—increasing the value-added potential of the brand with customers, employees, and capital markets.

• Sales and channels are becoming more challenging to manage as customers, channels, and markets rapidly evolve. Our experts create more-effective sales-force and channel arrangements by applying our broad experience to each client’s individual needs; developing clear, customized strategies; and driving a disciplined implementation process.

• Pricing has become even more crucial in these challenging times, as companies face shifts in customer demand and the threat of price wars. We help clients use pricing as a powerful tool to shape customer behavior, boost earnings, and drive brand perception. We also ensure that companies capture immediate profit through optimal pricing.

• Go-to-market strategy combines all the commercial functions—sales, marketing, brand management, pricing, and knowledge of consumers—to drive the bottom line. We use an integrated approach to help assess the effectiveness of our clients’ current marketing and sales capabilities, identify the areas most in need of attention, and design a comprehensive program for improvement.

Our expertise falls into six major areas:

• Alignment of business and new strategies
• Internal and external idea generation, capture, and management, plus portfolio composition
• Innovation process and functional productivity and effectiveness
• Organizational alignment and design, plus leadership behavior
• Measuring innovation
• Business model innovation

These are typical of our projects:

• Redesigning and optimizing a new product-development process and organization
• Developing a future research-and-development strategy and aligning the organization around it
• Identifying and realizing breakthrough innovation through the gathering of relevant information about the customer
• Fundamentally increasing an organization’s ability to produce new and original thinking by transforming the culture, leadership, employees, and processes

To create a strategic and sustainable long-term approach to constant renewal, Fusion also has a special focus on business model innovation. Whether we are transforming a company’s core business model or designing new business models to capture growth from new segments or markets, Fusion incorporates creativity, analytical rigor, deep industry knowledge, and rich insights from the study of transformative models.

We work closely with companies around the world with one goal in mind: to increase the returns on their investments in innovation.

Fusion’s IT expertise is concentrated in five critical areas:

IT Strategy
We help clients leverage IT in their business-planning and innovation efforts and develop strategic IT architectures and road maps.

IT Transformation
We help clients use IT to transform their value propositions, organizations, operations, and financial results.

IT Sourcing
We develop overall IT and business-process sourcing strategies and help clients select, make agreements with, and manage outsourcing and offshore units more effectively.

IT Organization
We help clients define the role and mission of their IT organization, design more effective organization structures, improve governance, and identify new people-and talent management practices. We also help new corporate leaders set agendas.

IT Performance
We partner with clients to delineate key IT-performance objectives and metrics and improve IT efficiency and effectiveness.