When Tufan Erginbilgic arrived at Rolls-Royce in January 2023, the share price was 91p. It recently passed £14.
There's a good interview with Nicolai Tangen, where he puts much of it down to a granular strategy. The company has a set of specific named initiatives, detailed on exactly where the company competes and how.
Once someone can trace what they do to a named part of the strategy, they stop needing to be persuaded of it. Strategy becomes something they are immersed within.
A granular strategy still needs machinery around it, or it sits on a shelf. Nicola Grady-Smith, the Chief Transformation Officer, keeps named owners accountable and the whole programme moving at pace. This turns a detailed strategy into a delivered one.
You can see this type of alignment in a radically different case study too.
IKEA has been giving away bottles of apple juice in Britain, made from surplus fruit, and calling it Great British Bin Juice.
Lottie Unwin's post on it is worth reading. Her point is that IKEA adapts its tone to feel genuinely local while staying itself completely, and that most global brands manage only one of those.
The interesting question is how they pull it off. I think the answer sits a long way upstream of the marketing.
Creative freedom at the edges runs on alignment at the centre.
In my "On The Same Page" work, Brand is one of five layers, and I treat it as the external expression of internal alignment. What people outside experience is a readout of how well the inside is joined up. A marketing department cannot manufacture that on its own.
The other thing IKEA seem to have done is separate the fixed from the flexible, and say so out loud.
- Fixed: affordability, the flat pack, the design principles, the meatballs, the Swedishness.
- Flexible: tone, humour, the campaign idea, the local reference.
Most leadership teams have never had that conversation. So they defend everything or they defend nothing, and the answer changes depending on who is in the room.
If you want a useful exercise, put those two columns on a wall and ask your team to fill them in separately, then compare. The argument about where the line sits is the valuable part.
A team that genuinely shares the picture can be trusted to run with it. That's worth the work of getting there.
Make a strategy granular enough that people can find themselves in it, then give someone the job of keeping it moving.
If this topic is interesting to you, I run a regular open workshop on Strategic Thinking. You can use the code OPEN15 to get 15% off.
