facilitation

workshops

Dr. Clifford Saunders has facilitated hundreds of executive workshops during his career. A modest sample of his work follows:

• Held a two-day session for a large number of senior cost managers from around the world with a $25 Billion multinational manufacturer. The brief was to consolidate the managers into one team by setting aside once and for all the petty bickering and backbiting that had impeded their ability to provide the President with timely, accurate and detailed product cost data.
• Held a number of electronic commerce boot camps, designed over two days to take "traditional economy-based" client organizations through the prevailing fundamentals of electronic commerce, the Web and the Internet, helping them see what is and will be possible in an online world, and designing a strategy and implementation plan to take advantage of that world without falling into a mire of hype.
• Helped an ailing, second-tier PBX supplier to successfully refocus its new product development activities and discard wasteful and irrelevant marginal projects.
• Helped members of the American Public Power Association use scenario planning as a component of their Strategic Planning initiatives in the light of deregulation legislation.
• Worked with a North American organization to operationalize and streamline their contract manufacturing interfaces.
• Using the fast track Time to Market methodology, helped a newly assembled group of senior managers scope, prototype, refine and implement a completely radical approach to Customer Care for their multinational client base.
• Helped a growing US Bank refine and strengthen its approach to new financial product risk management. A by-product of this initiative was a massive reduction in political ‘churn' that turned out to be a result of how new product risk had been handled in the past.
• Helped a large multinational streamline and implement its cost reporting data from an annual reporting mode to bi-monthly.
• Has developed and regularly holds e-boot camps for organizations of all sizes to help them figure out their short and medium-term Internet, Web, and related IT directions with an emphasis on complementing core business strategies.
• Worked with various Internet startups in their ‘Quarterly Annual' planning meetings. These sessions focus on the short-term turbulent surprises that seem to appear from nowhere, need immediate attention, yet have the very potent danger of disrupting the principal focus of the organization.
• Helped a City Planning Team rapidly and successfully work through the issues resulting from an enacted metropolitan merger.
• Spent three years continuously supporting a multibillion dollar manufacturer in business cost management. This support consisted of training the cost management team in effective team cost reduction methods, and taking the lead in running cost reduction workshops. The organization was recently awarded the title of ‘Best in the World' by Arthur Andersen. The results of Dr. Saunders' intervention are measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
• Assisted a Canadian Trust Company to identify and evaluate new financial products and later set up a new product idea system for the whole company.
• Worked with the Carter Foundation's Blue Ribbon Committee on Georgia's Urban and Rural Regional Development plans.
• Helped a provincial education board rethink its vision in the light of reduced budgets and designed an extensive resource allocation exercise to support the new vision.
• Designed methods for a major Canadian Bank to improve the coupling of its learning center to the day-to-day business.
• Quickly helped a small ailing telecommunications company to get out of an unprofitable aging product line and into a much more satisfactory niche.
• Worked with customers and a new product development team of a major US based telecommunications manufacturer to identify, prioritize and roll out new feature enhancements for a main line of business.
• Helped a major American hand tool manufacturer to anticipate plausible future scenarios and develop a comprehensive employee skills program to support the expected growth.
• Retained by a major Australian brewery to develop with the executive team a system wide strategic and operating plan for the next five years.
• Developed a complete "end-to-end" strategic operating plan, which dealt with long-term strategic uncertainties as well as operational activities to support the long term, and monitored its implementation, for a major point-of-sale equipment manufacturer and service supplier.
• Facilitated an extended series of sessions with a major Canadian brewery starting with an environmental scan and company repositioning exercise, followed by war gaming to test assumptions about likely competitor responses, and ending with an extensive brand management exercise where new products were launched and old ones relaunched.
• Trained senior managers in the design and use of effective methods to "break the steel makers' mold" for a major client. This involved a number of workshops with senior executives which focused on questions such as "What are the unquestioned assumptions we have about steel making?" and "What would REALLY frighten us?" These workshops led to a number of cost cutting projects and the initiation of new market developments.
• Developed with Senior VPs of a major Canadian Telecommunications Company a multidisciplinary group which dealt with international investment plans for the next ten years. The extended project used the internet to run an extensive Delphi on likely important and risky trends in the marketplace, and was followed by a number of intensive workshops which involved the use of our modeling tools to build and explore plausible worlds that might significantly affect international investment decisions.
• Hired by the British Broadcasting Company to use own proprietary modeling technology with seven young people to explore the issue of the British Revised National Curriculum. The program was broadcasted in Prime Time.
• Put 100 Senior Managers through an intensive two-day, fast-track Scenario Planning exercise which explored likely scenarios for the evolution of the client's main market. As well as identifying and developing the scenarios, the Managers produced contingency "could care less" responses, the environmental monitoring system and the human resource training needed to meet the coming challenge.
• Designed and facilitated for Industry Canada and Human Resources Development Canada an in-depth 100-participant, two-day session dealing with Information Technology and the Public Schools curriculum for the next ten years.
• Designed and facilitated the use of group decision support technology for the Chief Executive Officers Summit held in 1995 where 400 CIOs gathered to learn about and discuss the latest issues around information technology.
• Designed and facilitated a session of 125 senior individuals representing 16 different stakeholder groups (with the help of seven facilitators he had trained) - a two-day Visioning exercise for The Corpus Christi Bay National Estuary Program under the auspices of the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
• Designed and facilitated the use of technology for a 500-person Interloquium in Mexico to help plan the development of the state over the next 20 years.