Turning a group strategy into a local plan

A group strategy fits in a sentence. A local business plan is a hundred decisions. Someone has to translate between the two, and in a subsidiary that someone is the general manager.

One country, two companies, one set of numbers

In China I ran two companies for the same group, each with its own accountant and its own authorities to deal with. One was a Tier 1 plant; the other was an engineering and purchasing company serving sister plants in Europe. A small sales office completed the picture. The customers were different, the carmakers we sold to and the sister plants we bought for, but the numbers had to read as one.

A method that worked

1. Say the group’s intent in one plain sentence that everyone on the team can repeat. If the team cannot repeat it, it is not yet a strategy.
2. Turn it into three or four local objectives. Each has an owner and a rhythm of review, weekly or monthly, so that nothing depends on memory.
3. Build the dashboards from standards, ERP and BI, not from opinions. A figure that two people read differently starts an argument instead of a decision.
4. Protect time for the people in the middle. Supervisors and engineers translate again, from objectives to daily work. If they do not believe the plan, nobody does.

Local ownership, upward honesty

An entrepreneurial way of working does not mean freedom from the group. It means owning the local decision and explaining it upward early. The best habit I had with group executives was simple: no surprises. Bad news travels fastest, and does the least harm, when it arrives with a view and a plan.

When the plan does not survive

Then came Covid, followed by a hard cycle for the whole automotive industry. No plan survives that unchanged. What held was the team. The plant had been open only a few years and the founding spirit was still alive, so we did not wait for the group to solve it for us. We looked for more local customers, cut costs and expenses wherever we could, and kept our team-building moments even when the calendar said there was no time. Those moments were part of the plan, not a break from it.