A rigorous read of the distance between where the organization is today and where the strategy needs it to be — across structure, capability, systems, and culture.
Translating the gap into a sequenced, prioritized plan the leadership team genuinely owns — with clear decisions on what changes, what doesn’t, and in what order.
Disciplined execution of the plan in waves, with course corrections as reality teaches us things the plan assumed away. Change happens on the ground, not in the program office.
Staying alongside the organization through the six to twelve months where most programs quietly unravel — reinforcing the new behaviors, governance, and decision habits until they become default.
The organization has grown past the point its original operating model was designed for. Decisions are bottlenecking at the top, middle management feels under-equipped, and the leadership team is spending its time on work that should be delegated two layers down.
A merger, acquisition, or carve-out has created a new organizational reality that needs to be designed rather than allowed to settle on its own. The first eighteen months typically determine whether the value in the deal actually materializes.
The market has shifted, or the strategy has, and the organization needs to move from one way of competing to another. The existing structure, talent mix, and cultural habits were optimized for the previous era.
A new product line, a new geography, or a new business unit is being layered onto a structure that was built for a simpler company. The shared-services model, governance, and culture all need to evolve together.
We begin by making the implicit explicit. Interviews across levels, a review of how the current structure actually functions, a clear-eyed look at the gap between stated strategy and current capability. Often the most valuable output of this phase isn’t what we find — it’s giving the leadership team a shared reference point for conversations they’ve been having separately for months.
You leave this phase with a specific, defensible view of what needs to change, what doesn’t, and where the genuine constraints are.
With the gap analysis in hand, we work with leadership to turn it into a prioritized roadmap. Not everything changes at once, and not everything that could change should. The planning sessions are structured to force real choices — what we’re doing first, what we’re doing later, and what we’re deliberately leaving alone.
The deliverable is a plan the leadership team genuinely owns, with clear decisions that hold up when the inevitable counter-pressures arrive six weeks in.
This is where the program either earns its name or doesn’t. We work in waves—structural changes, governance updates, capability build, and cultural reinforcement—each phase small enough to absorb and large enough to move the needle. Our team embeds alongside yours; we’re in meetings, not just reviewing minutes.Course corrections are built in. The plan is a working hypothesis, not a contract with the future, and we adjust it when reality teaches us something the design assumed away.
Most programs declare victory at go-live and disappear. That’s precisely the moment when the old habits start pulling the organization back. We stay through the six to twelve months after implementation — reinforcing the new governance, coaching leaders through the harder moments, making sure the new ways of working become the default rather than the aspiration.
The goal of this phase is straightforward: leave an organization that’s genuinely operating differently, not one that’s still rehearsing the change.
Consumer products · 1,800 employees · 16 months
A consumer products firm had grown rapidly from one state into twelve, but the operating model had never caught up. The leadership team was still making decisions the way they had when everyone sat in the same office. Regional heads had accountability without authority. Strategic initiatives were being approved at the center and then quietly reinterpreted in every region, because nobody had built the governance to hold them together.
The gap analysis surfaced a handful of structural issues — unclear regional P&L ownership, a shared-services function that wasn’t actually shared, a planning cycle designed for a smaller company. Underneath those, a subtler pattern: the founding team had built speed by keeping decisions informal, and that informality was now the primary bottleneck.
We moved in waves. A redesigned operating model with clearer regional ownership came first, paired with a new governance rhythm that replaced informal decision-making with visible, accountable ones. The shared-services function was rebuilt around actual service levels. A twelve-month leadership development track ran in parallel with the structural changes, because the new structure required behaviors the existing leadership bench hadn’t yet needed. Through the handholding phase, we stayed close as the new governance found its feet — including the moment, about nine months in, when everyone quietly wanted to go back to the old way and it took real discipline to hold the line.
By the end of the engagement, strategic initiatives were moving through the system at roughly twice the earlier pace, and more importantly, the leadership team was spending its time on the decisions only it could make.
An operating model that fits the strategy rather than quietly resisting it
Clearer accountability and cleaner decision rights across levels
Faster movement from strategic decision to organizational action
A leadership cadre aligned on direction and confident in execution
Culture and systems that reinforce — rather than undermine — the new strategy
An organization genuinely capable of its next stage of growth
Most end-to-end programs run between fourteen and twenty-four months, depending on the scope and the organization’s absorptive capacity. The handholding phase alone is typically six to twelve months — it’s the part that makes the rest of the work hold, and we don’t compress it to fit a shorter proposal.
GPIH is a backbone, not a script. The four stages reliably apply to most transformations; what happens within each stage is shaped entirely to the organization in front of us. We don’t believe in methodology for its own sake, and we’ll tell you if a stage doesn’t need the depth a standard engagement would give it.
The biggest difference is where the center of gravity sits. Our work is designed to leave capability inside your organization rather than build dependence on ongoing external support. We also stay much longer into the execution phase than most tier-one firms do, because our experience is that the handholding phase is where programs succeed or quietly fail.
For a full enterprise transformation, yes — anything less and the program won’t hold the political weight it needs. For unit-level or functional transformations, a credible business-unit or functional leader is sufficient. We’ll be upfront in the first conversation about what level of sponsorship your proposed scope actually needs.
This happens more often than not, and it’s often where the real work begins. Our role isn’t to push the leadership team past its readiness — it’s to surface the finding honestly, map out the trade-offs, and let the team make an informed decision about what to take on now versus later. A transformation the leadership team isn’t ready for will fail no matter how well designed it is.