2012 Planning: Is your Organization ‘Lean’ or ‘Hungry’?

As the US economy continues to stumble along without a clear pathway to recovery Kantar Retail has been working with a number of companies on their 2012 plans. The phrase we keep hearing from everyone looking at 2012 is “doing more with less” – most companies have very conservative US growth plans, and therefore aggressive plans to reign in operating expenses and discretionary spending.

A lot of companies have therefore been pushing hard to drive efficiency out of everything they do. But at the same time, 2009-2011 have been challenging years, and most companies have been consumed with expense reduction/investment moderation during that time. For global companies with a US operation the pressure is more intense, since topline growth is coming fast – from markets where the short-term returns are far lower than the US.

That’s why in 2012 one of the things we continue to investigate is “A Quest For The New Efficiency”…in particular I’m intrigued by one simple idea – dictionary.com defines efficiency as “the ability to accomplish a job with a minimum of effort”. So many times,companies try to get to efficiency by minimizing the effort, but for 2012 the new efficiency is about redefining the job that needs accomplishing!

As a helpful reference point, I’ve put together a 10 point checklist so you can score your company on how you’re tackling the efficiency challenge – “Lean” companies to me are ones that have been strongly engaged in “redefining the work”, and as such have navigated the landscape of the New Efficiency reasonably well. “Hungry” companies are the ones that as part of their 2012 planning are going to need to look at the major areas of work and ask the tough, but fun to attack question – “is this the right work?”. Would love any feedback or thoughts from anyone on this….thanks for reading!

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Courtesy of < http://www.kantarretailiq.com>