From Vision to Reality: Executing Growth Goals with the Goal-Based Strategy

In the face of rapid changes in technology and customer preferences, conventional strategic planning and goal-setting approaches often prove inadequate to cope with the necessities of these demands. This is where the concept of Goal Based Strategy Office (GBSO) emerges as a guiding light for adaptive and impactive business growth.

GBSO is a breakthrough approach pioneered by BOD Consulting that empowers organisations to achieve their highest-impact goals for driving growth and sustained success. It follows an expert-led hyper-focused approach to help organisations achieve what matters most right now.

The Imperative for GBSO

High Impact Goals (HIGs) at the heart of GBSO, aim to create a foundational outcome for organisations necessary for sustained success and growth. GBSO follows an SOP-driven approach to set up new systems & build capabilities specific to the organisations’ HIGs, including transformational goals like business turnaround and digital transformation and creation goals like new business creation and new brand creation. GBSO aims to enable organisations to achieve their HIGs through an expert-led, hyper-focused approach. This is achieved with the help of three guiding pillars.

The Three Pillars of GBSO

1. Identifying & prioritising the goals:

It is essential first to break down the organisation’s ambition to prioritise goals. All goals should be sharply defined and easy to understand. These goals can be categorised into three categories –

1. Lifetime Goals: E.g., To be amongst the leading personal care companies in India with several category-leading brands in the portfolio
2. Long Term Goals: E.g., To build a portfolio of successful personal care brands in the Indian Market.
3. High Impact Goals in the Short Term: E.g., To launch and scale any one personal care brand. Lifetime and long-term goals are aspirational goals with a 5-7 years’ timeline. High impact goals in the short term are immediate goals that can be achieved in 1-2 years and are usually prioritised by GBSO.

2. Instil strategic thinking & planning

Strategic thinking and planning are essential for organisations. GBSO enables organisations to evaluate options and identify the right strategic initiatives to achieve their goals.

In the implementation phase, the role of GBSO is to provide research-based strategic inputs and drive alignment between teams for better planning, remaining focused and timely resolution of bottlenecks. 

Institutionalise systems & processes

Defining appropriate systems and processes ensures a seamless structure and provides higher visibility to leaders on the progress of strategy execution.

To ensure that there are no breaks midway, the implementation of proper management systems, processes, workflows, team training & development, knowledge management, etc., must be followed as per the defined timelines and budgets.

Once these systems and processes are institutionalised, the role of the Strategy Office is to track the progress of the strategic initiatives and how they impact the end goal. Timely strategic inputs are then provided as required, often necessary for course correction based on current realities.

From Vision to Reality: Achieving the Dream

A dairy sector client that we have worked with illustrates the impact of a Goal based systemic journey plan. It aimed to emerge as the preferred dairy brand in Central and Eastern UP. Over time, by setting timely, high-impact goals in the short term, it became the Top #2 brand alongside Amul in Uttar Pradesh.

The company set goals step-by-step, including gaining a dominant market share in Lucknow, a market where sales were hitherto stagnant for 3 years (2018-2019), by various initiatives including incubating a digital-first, D2C home delivery channel as a self-sustaining business unit (2019-2021).

These initiatives further triggered other transformations in the company, including in the domains of HR, marketing, financial management and business management; the firm has seen an 80% growth in sales in the last five years. A GBSO approach thus enabled the organisation to attain high growth as they gradually achieved clearly defined goals and targets through a strategic plan.

Conclusion

The Goal-Based Strategy Office pioneered by BOD consulting is a result focused approach that empowers organisations to bridge the gap between vision and reality.

This approach empowers organisations to accurately pinpoint, prioritise, and carry out transformational initiatives, allowing them to navigate rapidly evolving environments in a focused manner.

The author is a Senior Partner with BOD, an IIM Faculty and author. An IIM Calcutta alumnus, he has led Strategy for some of India’s largest conglomerates and presented papers in over a dozen countries.