We believe that every successful client engagement begins with delivering unique insights for the business situation. These insights are the result of a rigorous development of facts, structured frameworks for analysis and the collective judgment of C3 and the client. However, insights do not necessarily to lead to wise decisions, and even elegant strategies often fail for lack of commitment/implementation. Instead, misaligned interests, organizational barriers to change, ineffective processes, and lack of functional capabilities can separate intent from results. We believe that it is our additional role as consultants to identify and characterize these impediments and design the comprehensive elements of strategy, organization and process that guarantee the best chance for success.
In order to be successful for our clients, we believe C3, or any consultant, needs to have several critical capabilities:
- Intellectual rigor and curiosity
- People skills
- Analytical skills and frameworks
- Process competence
- Mindset to deliver added-value, and
- Integrity
The foundation for any consultant has to be intellectual rigor and curiosity. Our clients are experienced senior executives with a deep understanding of their businesses. We deliver value to them through a passion to understand complex problems and critical thinking abilities to frame what often seem to be intractable situations. Our track record is one of success at delivering answers.
The elemental building block of a company is its people. This “human capital” generates superior performance when it is networked and aligned in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. C3’s consultants have the tact and experience, the people skills, to interact with the client organization in a way that incorporates their perspectives and addresses the reality of concerns that arise whenever consultants are brought into an organization. In addition, our principals bring an extensive amount of business experience and credibility to resolve conflicts among the senior management team and build alignment around a course of action.
C3 is not an advocate of any particular management or consulting methodology. We believe any singular approach just results in an answer in search of a problem. However, we strongly believe that analytical skills and frameworks are necessary for success. Methodology is useful only if it creates insight or expedites solutions. Our point of view is not derived from our absence of methodology. In fact our collaborative boasts some of the leading contributors to the practices of economic value-added, reengineering, activity-based costing, brand valuation, scenario planning, value based management, core competency assessment, and reinvention. We understand that any methodology or paradigm is only a tool, and useful only to the extent that it enables superior decisions.
Our work involves issues of immediate, critical importance to our clients. The effort necessary to meet this need requires timeliness, responsiveness and agility. C3 believes that consulting process competence – the ability to organize our own and client resources and drive them forward effectively – is a key component of success. In addition to the experience base of hundreds of client engagements, our professionals are responsive and accessible because we are the ones carrying out the work.
Most enterprises have a cultural norm that, formally or informally, helps focus and align its human capital. Some orient around a singular commitment to revenue growth, others follow a mantra of innovation, many are driven by some measure of “profitability”, and still others focus on brand value. We at C3 have our own organizing principle, that of a mindset to deliver added-value for our clients. In all phases of our work, we constantly ask how our effort will deliver multiples of value in excess of our costs. We believe we are structurally able to meet this objective because: our experience enables us to rapidly focus in on the key issues and their strategic levers, principals conduct the work - in concert with the client organization - eliminating the need for the traditional consulting team pyramid, and as a collaborative network we minimize overhead costs and pass the savings to our clients.
Developing and implementing winning strategies often requires facing unsettling truths about your organization’s capabilities and its market dynamics. Human nature usually works at cross purposes to this requirement, adding to the importance of an independent perspective. At C3, we fundamentally believe that we can only serve our clients’ best interests through the integrity of our analysis, insights, conclusions and recommendations. Guided by experience and judgment in how best to communicate our work, nevertheless we are always committed to the highest level of honesty in our advisory services.
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