Global Pharmaceutical — Strategic Mandates
Translating a corporate strategy into a short list of mandates each business unit could actually execute.
Context
A global pharma group whose corporate strategy was coherent at the top and increasingly diffuse by the time it reached the business units. Each unit had reinterpreted the strategy to fit its own existing priorities.
Challenge
The CEO wanted mandates specific enough to drive investment and talent moves — but short enough that the units could not retreat into fifty-page "strategy on a page" documents that said nothing in the end.
Approach
We worked with the executive team to compress the corporate strategy into a small number of mandates per unit, each stated as a decision rather than an aspiration ("grow in X by shifting the sales footprint" rather than "win in X").
Each unit then had to publish, internally, what it would stop doing to free up the capacity. The honest-stop list did more to make the strategy real than any new initiative.
What shifted
Resource allocation inside the units moved to match the mandates. Pet projects without a mandate connection died. The quarterly review became shorter, sharper and better tempered.
What shifted: strategy survived translation to the units because it arrived with a stop list.
Client identity anonymised. Specific metrics available under NDA.