Philip Marris: in order to deliver extraordinary results, we...

Philip Marris' speech in this video

Marris Consulting has a reputation for producing extraordinary results, by the speed by which they occur, by their size, the step-change in results and by their durability. One of the ways we do this is to increase the ambition of our client's management: top management, middle management and shopfloor.

I think this is one of the keys to success because, as consultants, we don’t really do anything. We have to get the company to change. To change individual and collective behaviour the way it practices. And it also require them to become more ambitious. More ambitious for themselves and more ambitious for their company. We often find that the level of ambition is insufficient. So we try to increase that and we have a process to do so.

The first thing we do is “bad consulting”, that is to say we will be fairly active initially in actually identifying the key problem to be solved and solving it. We use Theory of Constraints and its laser sharp focus to identify the one or two subjects that need to be dealt with first: the constraints of the system. And we improve the performances of those constraints. When you do this, you can very very quickly get quite extraordinary results. And so the people throughout the company will see this and say to themselves: “how did that happen?”. How come in two weeks we are now doing twice as much as before? How come we are twice as fast we were one month ago?

Once they realize the potential they have for improvement in their organization, then we stop and at last start talking more explicitly about the ambition they could and should have for their company in all aspects of their performance: cost, quality, speed, due date performance and so forth.

When we do that properly, because they have just surprised themselves by improving through a very rapid step change, they become a lot more ambitious. I think this is very important and my clients joke about this because it is true I am systematically more ambitious for them than they are for themselves. That’s because I can see what they are capable of, and I can see by focusing exactly on the right subjects, one after the other, they can rapidly and dramatically improve their performance.