STRATEGY & MANAGEMENT SERVICES.
Strategy & Management Solutions tailored and implemented to specific needs.
Leaders of an organization are right up alongside tight-rope walkers and circus acrobats amongst the balancing act elite. Albeit in an entirely different format, the art of maintaining comprehensive monitoring of key variables, ensuring availability of resources, realizing uniform alignment across stakeholders, executing comprehensive yet tactful communication, and keeping sight of that long-term objective makes organizational leadership a meticulous, indispensable balancing act crucial to the success of any given institution. The challenges in management are evident if you consider only 12% of transformation projects lead to lasting impact (HBR, 2024).
Considering the above, we firmly believe in our custom-made approach for every single one of our partners. Successful strategy and management understands it's organization, the people that make it up, and crafts custom and reasonably flexible strategies to navigate through each institution's unique dynamic landscape while remaining open to tweaking it when needed.
Maisha Mazuri believes in supporting strategic and management initiatives from start to finish, from inception to various iterations in the implementation process. It is imperative leaders understand the practical impact of their decisions in order to increase the likelihood of success in transformation projects. Our extensive experience in Operations, People & Organization, and Strategy guides our empathic and nuanced approach in this.
PROJECT EXAMPLE: AMSTERDAM OFFICE SET-UP.
Context:
We partnered with a business of ~100 FTE looking to set up operations in Amsterdam.
Maisha Mazuri took ownership of the set-up as the ‘on the ground’ representation while coordinating with the Ops team abroad.
Approach:
We established clear timelines, expectations, and budgets and activated our network to maintain momentum in the process.
In the meantime, Maisha Mazuri worked closely (in Dutch) with counterparties to get the bulk of the work done.
We aligned periodically with the Ops team abroad on updates and decisions to stay on the same page.
The Ops team abroad travelled to Amsterdam at key moments (e.g. when choosing between shortlisted office spaces).
Result:
Within a couple of weeks, our partner had a legal entity established in the Netherlands.
Within four months, the office was fully functional with a slick set-up, smooth operations, and the first five employees had moved in.
Our partner’s Ops team was able to focus on their core responsibilities and gained extensive knowledge of the Dutch entrepreneurial ecosystem due to our collaboration and the documentation we shared with them.
PROJECT EXAMPLE: BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION.
Context:
Maisha Mazuri led transformation efforts for an organization with faltering revenues, an unsustainable cost base, an unclear vision and strategy, paired with a weak communications- and evaluation- framework.
Approach:
It swiftly became clear the largest challenge was the organization of the set-up; all the ingredients were there but these couldn’t fuse together to realize their potential.
It was imperative to find a set-up that allowed the entire business to understand what they were doing and why.
We critically reviewed and adjusted the planning and decision-making process throughout all levels of the organization, overhauled the communications processes, and reorganized the business to improve autonomous decision-making when possible, common understanding, proactivity, and accountability within the organization.
We worked closely with the in-house team throughout so the transfer of knowledge at the later stages of the project was efficient and sustainable.
Result:
Within 7 months, costs had been reduced by >33%, revenues returned to a stable and healthy state, and staff satisfaction was rising steadily.
After the project, the in-house team was comfortable managing the new set-up independently and rarely needed further support.