 Hi I'm Tony Appleby with the Project Management Institute. I'm here at Rise 2019 in Hong Kong and I've been joined by Jessica Spence who's the Chief Commercial Officer at Carlsberg. Welcome, thank you for taking the time to chat with us. Now I understand that Carlsberg has just recently gone through a strategic refresh. Is that true? Can you walk me through it? Yeah, I think refresh maybe makes it sound less fundamental than it was. We about four years ago looked at the business. We had a new CEO come in, a change in the management team which was part of when I joined the global leadership and we realized we needed a big strategic rethink at a pretty fundamental level and that was a program for us that was called Sale22. There's lots of sailing boat metaphors in it but I think what was what was really exciting about that was I think we took a great approach to defining it and if I'm being honest I don't think the strategy was particularly rocket science, when we actually unveiled the strategy to a lot of people. A lot of people nodded along and they said that sounds like good common sense and I think some people would have thought oh is that enough but I think what we understood and particularly the CEO understood brilliantly was that the content of the strategy is in my view maybe a bit provocatively 20 to 30 percent of value. The importance is how did you create it, how did people feel engaged in creating it, how did particularly the people who will need to implement it feel they contributed to the creation process and then how well did you communicate and follow up on it and I think what we did very well was the way we created the strategy and then how we communicate and that made the difference to be honest probably more than the content of the strategy itself. That's spectacular to hear quite honestly so we're here in the Bright Line Lounge and Bright Line Initiative helps organizations and senior leaders understand how best to connect the critical dots between development of a strategy and realizing the intended outcomes and altogether two frequently organizations fail so kudos to you on your success. Can you walk some of our listeners and viewers through you know what some of the challenges were in making you know a strategic vision operational? Yeah I think one of the things that was is always challenging in a strategy is to make it very real in terms of what does this mean for me and also to enable everyone to understand the context behind why are they gonna have to start doing things differently. You know often at a senior level it's very easy to say well it's clear we should be doing this. For a lot of our colleagues it wasn't clear and I think one of the things that worked extremely well was having a set there was probably three or four really simple visualizations of where we were as a business and where we're trying to get to so we had one that we call the snowman and what that really was all about was demonstrating the financial position that we were in as a company the challenges we faced where we really were very constrained in terms of our investment capability and how we were going to journey out of that into a virtuous cycle of investment for growth and that gave us two programs which we called fund the journey which was a savings and efficiency drive and then sale 22 which was the growth programs. We could have intellectually explained that to people until we blew in the face and honestly I don't think it would have sunk in but this very simple story of you've got to go through the bottom half of the snowman the fund the journey to reach the top half and to start investing for growth just made it very immediately clear to people when you're asking people to you know change how they think about their personal travel plans or whether they use color printers all of those small things that unfortunately make up a big part of those types of programs if you can't very simply and visually explain to them why where does this put us on the map why does this change things it's really hard so I think one of the things that's tough is is driving that through an organization our case of about 40,000 people and the power of finding visual ways of doing that not relying on the traditional PowerPoint slides and the endless curves of what's going to happen but just a very simple picture that brought it to life was incredibly powerful. I think the second challenge we had was we were quite a new leadership team within the top 60 of the company we had quite a lot of flux during that time I think is in any turn around you often do and making sure that we brought people on board as we went through the journey recognizing that the top 60 who started they weren't all going to be there a few years later how did we bring people into the heart of what we created and give them sense of ownership and I think one of the things we did very well there was really dedicated serious time for the top 60 to spend face-to-face time together which is tough to do in an environment where you know you've got savings you know you've got a drive efficiency saying I'm going to take the top 60 and bring them all together globally twice a year and they're going to spend two to three days in person being trained being at top business schools being together in one of our markets and that's a huge investment to make but it was a wonderful way of ensuring that everyone who became part of the top 60 retained that sense of shared ownership it was our strategy and everyone who came into that team felt very strongly about that and that then gave us the ability to cascade it across the whole organization that's that's truly instructive and awesome to hear Brightline does have a pupil manifesto that you're describing aspects of an organizational change management function that has elements of I'm imagining cultural change and so can we dig into that just a little bit because you know changing culture is is really really hard but it's foundational for a lot of successful strategic enablements I'm a strong believer that I think culture is probably the strongest lever you've got generally and the hardest yeah but I think what we had that was good was a very clear vision of some things that we did well we recognized early on we're a very networked company we knew that about ourselves we recognized as well we were perhaps the Scandinavian heard quite consensus driven so quite flat quite unhierarchical good sides of that lots of challenge lots of debate outside sometimes slow but we did pull out very explicitly what are the things about us that we love and we want to keep not that they're always great but they are true to us and we need them and then we thought about how do we build a frame around that that can address some of the challenges we've got and I think we had two structures that really helped us with that the first one was the introduction of three values very simple alignment accountability action which built off where we were it said alignment is still key and we are you know within that we say this isn't alignment because you kind of have to this is alignment because you want to you join cars because you're the sort of person who loves building alignment you know that's part of what makes it tick but then driving into accountability and actions and starting to talk about those behaviors consistently across the company but in a weird way I think the most powerful thing was a metaphor our CEO brought in of talking about a football pitch or a soccer pitch and what he talked about there was how within a world where of course we play together as a team of course we're very networked of course we're very strong on relationships everyone still got a role to play and the way we talked about it was the local markets of the strikers they have to score the goals and they're the only ones really who are always up there doing that you've got the midfielders which is functions like mine the central commercial function my job is to feed them fantastic passes and make them look good and the midfielders can kind of always feel they're slightly controlling the game but at the end of the day you're a midfielder if you want the glory you're in the wrong job and you're in the wrong point in the organization and you have defenders we talked about sometimes legal or compliance and but it was a very good way of making it clear to everyone that of course we all have a voice of course we all engage very you know very fully I think in the organization but that you had to know where you sat on the on the pitch and you had to play that role really well and that changed the power dynamic it changed it from being very consensus driven but actually not always as as swift as we wanted to people being just clear on I get what's being asked of me I get the kind of way we want to live this and the transformation for me having lived in Carlsberg before this program and then afterwards has been immense and the culture has probably been the single biggest change congratulations seriously that's that's not an easy thing to make happen and I like the analogy of the pitch shift gears just a little bit still talking about people you know as part of that transformation what would you say would be like the number one skill that you would encourage the teams to pick up and learn and embrace in order to be successful in helping drive the strategic transformation can I have to you may I'm I think the first one I would say is resilience and I don't mean resilience in the sense of hardness almost I think in an organization going through change you need people who have flexibility but a lot of strength within that you need to be able to turn your hand to different things you need to be willing to change direction and yet have a very strong core of capability underneath that and I think sometimes we found the people who struggled the most were people who didn't have that combination of flexibility and resilience to be able to to ride the waves and to deal with the changes I think the other one is being particularly the senior leadership position acutely conscious of where the organization is at and there is always a bit of a gap between where you as a senior leadership team feel that you are and then the knowledge you have and the thinking process you have around where you are on the road but you have to know where the other 40,000 10,000 250 people are and you have to feel that in your fingers so for me I think that ability to connect and to read the organization which I do a lot by just physically spending time on the road spending time to feel you have to know where people are at and sometimes that gap between the leadership and whether the teams are at gets a little too big and you have to bring it back together again sometimes you feel they're right up behind you and you can push harder but that constant awareness that finger on the pulse I think is critical awesome Jessica Spence chief commercial officer with Carlsberg thank you so much for your time today