'''## The Challenge: Developing Strategic Leaders in a Decentralized Firm
Imasco Limited, a $10 billion diversified conglomerate, faced a significant challenge rooted in its own structure. Its portfolio of companies in tobacco, financial services, drugstores, and land development operated with a high degree of decentralized control. While this autonomy had benefits, it created several problems:
- Leadership Development Gaps: Smaller operating companies could not afford extensive training or fast-track career opportunities.
- Siloed Knowledge: Managers had limited awareness of the corporate guiding principles, and successful initiatives from one operating group were not being transferred to others.
- Succession Planning: The company needed a more formal process to groom high-potential managers for leadership roles across the entire organization.
- Strategic Synthesis: A new CEO wanted to build a more unified strategy across the varied consumer businesses, which required managers to develop broader strategic thinking capabilities.
To address these issues, corporate Human Resources initiated a management development program to cultivate a general manager's mindset among mid-level managers.
The Solution: An Action Learning Program
Action learning was chosen as the ideal vehicle for this transformation. This approach emphasizes learning by doing, typically involving teams tackling substantive, real-world company issues. Imasco tailored an action learning program with three primary objectives:
- Develop the general management and strategic skills of participants.
- Expose participants to Imasco Limited’s guiding principles, as well as each company’s key issues, core competencies, and challenges.
- Identify and accelerate the leadership development of high-potential managers.
Annually, a select group of 12-15 high-potential managers were nominated for the three-and-a-half-week program, which was successfully run for five consecutive years.
Core Components of the Imasco Program
The program was designed around three interlocking components, each building on the last to create a cumulative learning experience.
1. Operating Company Visits as "Live Case Studies"
For two weeks, participants engaged in on-site visits to Imasco's operating companies. The purpose was to provide a "general manager's view" by exploring executive leadership, strategy formulation, and organizational change in real time.
Initially, these visits consisted of "silo" presentations from each functional department (e.g., finance, marketing). This failed to provide an integrated perspective. The program was redesigned in its third year to focus on one or two major strategic initiatives at each company. This format forced executives to present their functional roles within a broader, cross-functional context.
Presentations were framed around key topics:
- Strategic vision, values, and objectives
- Competitive and regulatory environment
- Internal organizational environment
- Principal strategic initiatives and changes
- Key resources and distinctive competencies
Facilitated briefing and debriefing sessions were crucial. Before each visit, participants reviewed information on the company to develop a critical perspective. Afterward, they analyzed what they saw, consolidated learnings, and applied strategic models like Porter's Five Forces and the 7-S model.
2. Customized Management Education
The third week was a customized educational program designed to integrate the learnings from the site visits with leading-edge management theory. The curriculum was dynamic, evolving each year to reflect the current challenges facing the operating companies.
Subject areas included:
- Globalization
- Consumer Demographics
- Organizational Change
- Leadership
- Getting Value from Information Technology
- Market Segmentation
- Strategic Use of Financial Controls
Facilitated discussions at the end of each day helped participants directly apply these new theories and models to the real-world situations they had observed in the operating companies.
3. The "Imasco, the Next Generation" Work Project
During the education week, participants worked in multidisciplinary teams on a capstone project. They were tasked with preparing a presentation on what Imasco Corporation should look like in ten years. This project required them to synthesize all their learnings into realistic, implementable action plans for both the corporate strategy and each operating company.
On the final day, teams presented their recommendations to Imasco's Chairman, CEO, and CFO. This high-stakes presentation provided another opportunity for learning through direct feedback from senior leadership and fostered a healthy sense of competition among the teams.
Critical Success Factors and Lessons Learned
Analysis after five years revealed several critical variables for the program's effectiveness.
Gaining Full Commitment
It took three years to gain the full trust and candor of the operating companies. Initially, executives simply delivered existing internal presentations that were not suited for the program's goals. Only after seeing the program's value through alumni experiences did they invest the necessary time to create candid, integrated presentations.
Managing Team Dynamics
Team dynamics significantly impacted the quality of the final project. Teams that fostered candor and diverse perspectives produced more creative and insightful recommendations. Facilitators had the responsibility to establish team norms that supported openness and constructive confrontation.
The Essential Role of Facilitation
Facilitation was a critical success factor. Facilitators helped participants make sense of the overwhelming amount of information from site visits, guided them in applying strategic models, and role-modeled the kind of candid, challenging questions required for deep learning. The program evolved to include more structured briefing and debriefing sessions to better consolidate learnings at every stage.
Program Impact and Conclusion
The Imasco action learning program successfully developed a multifunctional and strategic mindset in its participants. By using its own operating groups as "live case studies," the company created a powerful learning experience. The program's impact was seen in the promotion of participants into general management roles and an increased flow of best practices and competencies across company boundaries. For example, the fast-food division leveraged the brand management expertise of the tobacco division to help with a market repositioning effort, a collaboration that originated from relationships built during the program. '''