Unison is one of New Zealand’s largest electricity utility companies that plays in many parts of the electricity supply value chain from regulated electricity distribution to network management and transformer/switchgear manufacture. It had been run as a group of independent companies each competing for the resources to optimise the performance and growth of the separate organisations.
The opportunity:
The Board and the CEO had decided that it needed to pivot its strategy and start to create value across the various parts of the Group rather than just optimising the standalone business units. The challenge for Unison was how to define the role of the Group and the value that the Group could create. Unison sought help from our New Zealand based consultancy, Purple Shirt, based on their approach to strategy development and the need to bring some fresh thinking to the development of an integrated Unison strategy.
Our approach:
Our New Zealand based consultancy, Purple Shirt, took them through a Strategy best practice strategy development process that is anchored in Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad methodology. At its core, this approach recognises that strategy is fundamentally about responding to the key challenges or opportunities that are critical to an organisation’s long term success.
Purple Shirt worked with the Board and Executive teams to carry out a diagnosis of the organisation and the markets in which it competes. This diagnosis helped flush out all the major challenges that the business units and the Group were facing and where the biggest opportunities were emerging for Unison to create value from its group of companies.
The results:
This new approach to strategy development encouraged the Unison leadership team to take a much more holistic and broad view on the potential value creation opportunity of the Group. It forced them to elevate themselves beyond the challenges and opportunities for the business units and instead to consider the bigger opportunities where the Group could create value in addressing the challenges being faced by the electricity industry and the New Zealand economy. This process enabled the Board and Exec team to get fully aligned on the role that Unison Group could play in enabling a more efficient electricity industry that had the potential to generate sufficient cash flows to fund the next generation of electricity infrastructure to deal with widescale electrification and climate change. It was a strategy that would significantly elevate Unison as a critical player in New Zealand’s ability to respond to these significant global challenges.
