Management Consulting

High motivation and excellence at all company levels start with determining a mission and a vision - we can assist you with this tasks:
> Mission: What is the raison d'être of your company? What benefits do you wish to generate? What if your company would not exist?
> Vision: Where do you want to move to? What does your company need in the future? Where do you see your position in the business of the future?

When competing, the company with the best strategy wins. Therefore, it is imperative to constantly revise, question and improve your own strategy. Use the St. Gallen strategy knowledge:
> Secure and increase your success permanently and for the long term
> Remain or become the leading company in your industry
Do not let external consultants dictate your strategy. Because: if your own executives answer the really decisive strategic questions and provide the key for a successful future, you reach your objectives in a better and quicker way. The silver bullet for your ideal strategy is to cooperate with the best strategy consultants in a joint project, which leads to applicable solutions -individually tailored to your company and its market situation.

Successful entrepreneurs have a different relationship to their company compared to employed managers. The company is their life's work. Therefore, they have a strong interest in keeping their company permanently successful. Regardless of the entrepreneur’s age, clear ideas and concepts are imperative for the strategic company succession. We advise and accompany you on your challenging path that is the long-term succession planning of your company. We offer the complete knowledge of our business school - and the personal coaching from one of our experienced executive partners.

If someone buys another company, he is pursuing clearly defined goals such as:
> Growing faster
> Using synergies and reducing costs
> Acquiring of new/additional skills
> Occupying new markets or target groups
> Establishing new distribution channels
In more than 50%, these goals are not achieved. Why is this the case? Virtually all available studies show: It is because of the heads, not the concepts. 80 % of post-merger integration is cultural integration. When merging your company with the acquired company, there are winners and losers. Until it is clear, who belongs to which group, anxiety, and restlessness prevail. It is crucial to pass through this unstable phase quickly and competently.

One could think that successful, well-established companies with solid foundations and favourable earnings could take a break - and at least a large part of managers and employees think that way too. A fatal misjudgement, because: Standstill means a step backwards. Instead, it is crucial to use your good starting position in order to secure your future now. We help you launching innovation campaigns to achieve this objective. Is size important to your business? If so, are you already working on your next growth leap? The key success factors for your growth are always being one step ahead of the competition and taking things into your own hands - especially in industries where consolidation through innovation, new technologies, the development of new markets as well as merger and acquisitions are part of the rules. We help you carrying out your growth-leap ahead of the competition in order to have the edge in the market.

All employees should regard profit as something positive. Only those who generate more than the average EBIT can, to the benefit of all:
> Invest in the future
> Create new value for customers
> Secure jobs and generate new ones
> Invest in education and training
> Satisfy shareholders
The art of generating outstanding financial results starts with a simple insight: All the actions in a company combined ultimately decide whether you make profits or losses. Therefore, turning a great number of top performers into "profit-managers" surely is promising. Together with your employees, our St. Gallen Consultants can identify the fallow potential within your company to improve your profits. Eventually, the sum of numerous different individual measures leads to amazing results.

Organisational structures are essential drivers: You determine how a company is being developed. There are structures that foster growth and innovation, and others that cement the existing. Some structures promote entrepreneurship within the company, and others prevent it. Still other structures allow you to exploit market opportunities, to be close to customers and to respond quickly and flexibly. A high-performance organisation aims to awaken an inner strength and to steer its effect in the desired direction.

There is more than one way to see things and there can be different views regarding what should be done in a company and what not. In practice, this can lead to arguments, which may be fueled by personal differences or power politics. If everyone wants to do the right thing, but everybody pulls in another direction, the effectiveness of the company will suffer - this can reach threatening levels of paralysis or deadlock. It is nearly impossible to extricate oneself from this deadlock. In this case, you need external moderation. We have high-profile leadership specialists in our ranks. Together we will choose the perfect coach or coaching team to assist you in your specific situation and tasks. In sensitive areas where emotions, conflicts, power politics, sympathy and antipathy, hope and despair prevail, the chemistry with your coach needs to be right. Our leadership specialists have substantial competence and experience as well as the best references. We get your Power Team on track!

The situation on the chessboard of success is clear: Your products and services, customers and their needs, your employees, your managers, skills, structures, culture, and systems are set on the board. But: How will you use them? Thousands of management decisions at all hierarchical and informal levels are made day in day out. These decisions and the way they are implemented determine how effective your leadership is. But how well can you and your employees achieve outstanding performances?

For some time, corporate governance has been a topic of discussion, especially the question: How are power and control in the relationships among shareholders, board of directors and management to be regulated? Many discussions of corporate governance were sparked by scandal and managerial mistakes, and nearly every case involved management consults. Consultants have been accused of hubris, unprofessionalism, ignorance of the client's business, unfairness and even greed. 

The blanket condemnation of the consulting industry bothered Hans Knöpfel. He assumed that a few black sheep among consultants were tainting the industry. The predominant majority, he was convinced, work professionally and correctly. Knöpfel's discussions with customers and colleagues showed that a more differentiated view of consulting is in order. Dividing the consulting world into "good" and "damned" doesn't resolve the problem any better than holding on to a strictly positive view of the consulting world. 

After analyzing some early consulting projects, Knöpfel concluded that consulting projects always succeed when, from the outset, measurable goals, approaches, competencies and responsibilities are clearly defined in a set of rules. Or put another way: Where such rules don't exist, the projects flounder, or fail.

The Program
Following various codes of best practice in corporate governance, Hans Knöpfel developed the concept of Consulting Governance – designed to ensure safe, lasting project success through close co-operation between client and management consultant. 

The Consulting Governance Program
Consulting Governance is a philosophy, a system and an action framework. The goal: to realize consulting projects in a more targeted way, faster, more economically and with greater success. The Consulting Governance Program: 

• builds, though its values, confidence among all involved in the consulting process.
• increases the Return on Consulting through systematic procedures and a clear action framework

The Success Factors
Seventy per cent of all mergers fail. Eighty per cent of all change projects are described as "unsuccessful." Everyone knows these and other numbers. The reason so many improvement or change projects miss their goal is clear: the people involved follow a purely linear process and fail to account for influences or groups that lay outside their purview. For these reasons, the Consulting Governance Program relies on approaches that are unique to the consulting world.

Integrated Approach
Corporate performance improvement and transition methods are integrated. Every optimization project is a change project, and vice versa. Systematically linking these disciplines guarantees that all project-specific needs (and thus all factors relevant to success or failure) are considered and treated. 

Networked Approach
The process illustration, The Consulting Governance Approach, is founded on networking, so individual stages and/or activities can run, at least partly, in parallel. The result: a shorter project, higher yields, lower costs. 

Project Approach
Consulting Governance clearly defines project procedures. All responsibilities are clearly defined. Phases and stages are fixed.