THE ACADEMY OF BUSINESS STRATEGY - UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Dr. R. KRAFT BELL (SGP) PhD MBA BA
SENIOR GLOBAL PARTNER (SGP)
RELATED LINKS
Certified Business Specialist (CBS) Web Site
Certified Business Specialist (CBS) Professional Articles
Senior Global Partner (SGP)
GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION: Raleigh NC (United States of America)
HISTORY
Today’s global economy is turbulent. Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, a crossroad of commerce, has from its inception faced turbulent times and partnered to manage transitions. Originally named Wake Crossroads, the city provided a break in the flow of commerce between the north and south. Chosen as the state capital, Raleigh was a southern city planned to reflect Philadelphia, the nation’s capital and a prominent seat of commerce. Architectural changes reflect the cultural transition from ostentation to simplicity to practicality. Raleigh’s Greek revival architecture with vast facades and columns in the 1840s capital building came through the turbulence of the Civil War relatively unscathed. Over 100 years later modernism emerged with its simplicity of form, minimal ornamentation, and innovative use of materials. In 1989 The Center for the Universal Design transitioned to physical facilities and products with the pragmatic focus on assuring universal access to all. Raleigh, the “city of oaks” is surrounded by pines that fostered yet another bustling nearby industry, furniture. As a crossroads for railroad commerce Raleigh transitioned from cotton to tobacco in the 1920s. In the 1950s an innovative plan inspired a unique public / private partnership, the Research Triangle Park, one of the top five US research centers, with its “crop” of new technologies. The Triangle itself, Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill with North Carolina State University, Duke, and the University of North Carolina respectively, is not only a hotbed of collegiate sports, but increasingly supports world-class health care and IT research and facilities.
CURRENT POSITION
The Raleigh Triangle is consistently ranked as a top place for: young singles to live and launch careers, families to educate their children, a university education, buying and selling a home, and retirement. The area also ranks highly as a “wired,” “brainy,” “liveable” place to launch a small business, seek employment, foster women entrepreneurs, do business, engage politically, and be involved in high tech. Raleigh is a microcosm of the other cities where Dr. Bell worked. He witnessed the negative parallels during 17 years in South-Eastern Michigan. Detroit and the auto industry ignored turbulence and yielded to comfort in calm times. When successful they overreached and ignored the Japanese competition. While they intermittently focused on cost, quality, and cycle time, in good times executives negotiated unsustainable agreements and only reluctantly partnered with community leaders. Then it “crashed,” several auto companies and unions were bailed out by the government, and unemployment soared. Raleigh cannot afford to be caught off guard like the auto industry or the Midland, Michigan region and Dow Corning, one of the most successful joint ventures in the world. With 40 years of improving profits Dow Corning executives ignored that profits were no longer a result of operations, but reflected currency and other financial manoeuvrings – a precursor of things to come in the US and Europe. They were literally blind-sided by the silicone gel implant controversy that required a $3B payout. Only by facing reality and following through with a companywide “Renewal” change effort was Dow Corning saved. The same is true for businesses in the Raleigh Triangle.
FUTURE OUTLOOK
he calm of Raleigh’s current prominence presents great opportunity to partner, plan, and manage transition before the next storm of turbulence. In the face of tremendous change in national healthcare, the Raleigh community could partner and support healthcare providers, university medical research, and emerging high tech healthcare companies like Quintiles, Allscripts and Research Inc. National emphasis on healthcare funding must be balanced with the risk of overdependence on politically volatile largesse. In ongoing cycles of turbulence and calm partnering through strategic collaboration is required across organizations. Concurrently each business must pursue its own reality-based, yet visionary strategic planning, restructuring, and change for competitive advantage. These community and organizational efforts can be difficult. One illustration is Detroit’s business community, stymied in the 1990s. After several failed attempts no cross-enterprise priorities existed. The Greater Detroit Chamber of Commerce leader used an intensive, professionally facilitated session with auto company, bank and other CEOs to reach consensus on priorities. Reflecting on the difficulty of partnering, a bank CEO lamented: “This was painful. In my company I don’t have to set criteria. I don’t even have to listen to ideas if I don’t want to. I just review what’s brought to me and make a decision. I don’t fool around with priorities. I just decide.” Each company in Raleigh and elsewhere faces external turbulence from competitive pressures, shifting regulations and rising customer expectations. These are often coupled with internal inflexibility issues that necessitate learning how to strategically plan, restructure, and lead change effectively. As executives seek new strategies and business models, systems and cultural constraints often emerge that opens a gap between policy and infrastructure. MichCon was one of the US’s largest natural gas distributors when deregulation brought the threat of new competitors. They invested heavily in technologies to enhance customer service and sales, while reducing costs. Unfortunately, the systems did not work for employees. Only through brutal honesty, “war games,” and a disciplined approach to to enterprise change did they link policy, operations, and technology investments and decisions with process and cultural changes that achieved business results. On both a community and organizational level, facing reality—turbulence or calm, recognizing it may change soon— with a partnership and plan is required to manage the next transition or strategic change. Similar issues and opportunities exist around the world. Dr. Bell researched, strategized, coached, and consulted with leaders from San Francisco to Detroit, Washington DC, and Raleigh in the US, from Madrid to London, Brussels, Copenhagen, and Stockholm in Europe, and from Sydney to Taipei, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Seoul in Asia Pacific. Even with geographic, political, and cultural differences, they all faced similar challenges for how to thrive in ongoing turbulence and calm.
PERSONAL DETAILS:
Dr. R. Kraft Bell
Global Partner status (Associate – Executive – Senior): Senior
Country of registration: United States of America
City of registration: Raleigh NC
SERVICE SKILLS:
Business Strategy and Executive Decision Making
Strategic Planning, Restructuring, and Verticalization
Strategic Collaboration and Partnering
Strategic, Large-scale Enterprise Change
Organization Development and Facilitation
Leadership, Development, and Executive Coaching
Process, Cultural, and Mindset Change
Learning, Teamwork, and Problem Solving
Process Design and Reengineering
eLearning and Training-by-Doing
INDUSTRY SECTOR EXPERIENCE:
Information Technology
Financial Services
Healthcare
Chemicals
Logistics
Retail
Automotive and Manufacturing
Higher Education and Training
Military and Government
Utilities
QUALIFICATIONS AND EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT:
PhD Area 1: Organization Development / Design – Syracuse University Whitman School of Management
PhD Area 2: Organizational Behavior / Leadership
PhD Area 3: Social Psychology / Measurement
MBA Business Administration and Strategy – Syracuse University Whitman School of Management
BA: Business and Human Relations – Hanover College
CLIENTS OR EMPLOYERS:
Gartner (Group), Inc.
Air Products and Chemicals
FX Coughlin (bought by Exel)
Dow Corning
Ford Motor Company
Children’s Memorial Hospital of Chicago
SAP
El Corte English
ALX pallet Systems
LANGUAGES
English – Fluent
Spanish – Limited
PERSONAL PROFILE:
Dr. R. Kraft Bell is recognized as business savvy visionary and strategic thinker with MBA and PhD in OD credentials. He designs and develops practical and proven frameworks and tools. He has worked as an HRD executive and trusted advisor to top executives and teams. This work on strategy, design, collaboration, development, and change has delivered dramatic results for clients. He was an NDEA Title IV Fellow who earned both an MBA and PhD in Organizational Development / Design, Organizational Behaviour / Leadership, and Social Psychology / Measurement from Syracuse University Whitman School of Management. Dr. Bell’s dissertation successfully validated his hypotheses about “Consensus, Subsystem Climate, and Workgroup Relationships…” contribution to workgroup performance. He taught innovative undergraduate, MBA, Doctoral courses at Syracuse and Lehigh Universities. Through his graduate study, business research, and client work Dr. Bell developed practical frameworks and proven tools to make organizational design, strategy alignment, and accountability assessments. He researched and applied a methodology to properly fit structure with competitive situations, along with a framework to war games business strategy for competitive advantage. Dr. Bell also developed an approach to analyze and link integrative or strategy-aligned change with built-in mechanisms to monitor progress and accountability. Dr. Bell designed and developed executive and HRD programs to provide the necessary frameworks, tools, and training to insure success. He has always worked with top executives, starting with the Ford executive team. Dr. Bell was lead consultant on the now classic Ford Strategic Quality and Concept-to-Customer change efforts. These achieved an ongoing competitive advantage with a 40% reduction in cycle time, 50% improvement in quality, car of the year 4 years in a row, and a reduction of cost by $1.2B a year for over ten years. As a world-class facilitator, Dr. Bell deftly manages disparate groups through transitions. He applied this through his strategic collaboration for partnering outside normal organizational boundaries, such as the Detroit example mentioned in the future outlook above. In the 1980’s he facilitated “How do We Fix the Troubled Economy” with bi-partisan top government officials like Paul Volker and Murray Weidenbaum in the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta. Prior to the recent US elections Dr. Bell facilitated a similar session for the Common Ground Committee, “What is the Role of Government in the Nation’s Economy?” that featured former congressional Representative Christopher Shays, Steven Moore of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board and Dr. Mark Zandi, the Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics. The video of the Public Forum can be seen at the Common Ground Committee’s “.org” website. In terms of Organization Development and Design Dr. Bell created theoretical frameworks he then systematically researched, applied, validated. These were made practical through his corporate situations and a wide range of clients across industries, governments, and the military. As a result he was awarded Gartner’s prestigious Thought Leadership Award in 2005 for published research on “Market Verticalization” and “Proper-Fit-Restructuring.” Market Verticalization was initially developed out of the requests, input, and application from his GartnerG2 clients from Intel, Cisco, SAS Institute, PeopleSoft (now Oracle), SAP, and Cap Gemini. Dow Corning used “Proper-Fit” approach to restructure, as part of its company-wide Renewal effort. In 2006 Dr. Bell’s research was recognized by a 4 Star CIO as a blueprint to properly restructure his branch of the US Military. Dr. Bell was the lead consultant on eight multi-year, large-scale, enterprise change efforts in the USA, Japan, and Europe. These clients ranged from the Fortune 50 Ford, Fortune 250 Air Products & Chemicals, the entrepreneurial logistics provider FX Coughlin, as well as the utility MichCon referenced in the current situation above. In Asia Pacific, Dr. Bell facilitated all-day meetings in Japanese with a bi-lingual recorder documenting in English, as a crucial part of the global development of Dow Corning’s commercialization process that eventually reduced the cycle time by 75% across 1,000 products. As VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, the leader in IT research and consulting, Dr. Bell was a trusted advisor to CEO and CIO executives, top generals, government, and university officials around the world. He researched and published 10 extensive case studies, as well as 40 in-depth research articles on strategy, strategic collaboration, leadership, decision making, IT, and change. Dr. Bell completed a yearlong engagement with retailer Lego to help the CIO strategize with the CEO and CFO to frame a successful large-scale business process, executive development, and cultural change process—conducted entirely over the phone and internet meetings. Dr. Bell researched and published in-depth case studies on CGI of Canada’s “secret” to 25 accretive M&As and on Denmark’s Nykredit, a giant financial services company, 15 year struggle with change, and used his strategy-aligned and change struggle frameworks to explain why it finally worked. Dr. Bell have been a regular keynote speaker and highly rated presenter for a wide range of Business Week, Gartner, CEO Magazine, and IT conferences on business strategy, leadership, decision making, learning, business value of IT, and strategic collaboration and change. He was the keynote speaker in 2007 at the Technology at Business Schools Roundtable co-chaired by Georgetown University and held at Smeal College of Business at Penn State on “The Crucial and Potentially Transformational Role of IT Leaders in Business Schools.” In 2006 he regularly travelled to Madrid to consult with top executives at El Corte English, largest retailer in Spain, on an integrative strategy, and innovative IT change effort. Throughout this time Dr. Bell designed an eLearning software and eBook articles with application templates. It includes many of the frameworks and tools he developed and applied through practical “training-by-doing” experiences. Dr. Bell created the Work Frames business software at clients’ requests to enable internalization of these proven and practical frameworks. It is used to strategize, plan, meet, problems solve, make decisions, manage projects, and design processes. Work Frames expedites enterprise change, including structure, infrastructure, process, and mindset or cultural changes. The website now has eBook articles and version 7.0 incorporates 25 templates with over 200 built-in tools.
GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION
Raleigh, North Carolina – USA
Atlanta, Georgia – USA
Washington, DC – USA
San Francisco, California – USA
London, England – United Kingdom
Global Partner preferred location
City: Raleigh NC
Country: United States of America
CONTACT
To contact Dr. R. Kraft Bell (SGP), please forward an email to the Academy of Business Strategy.
RELATED LINKS
Certified Business Specialist (CBS) Web Site
Certified Business Specialist (CBS) Professional Articles
Senior Global Partner (SGP)
