IA Forum:  You’ll be presenting a session as the upcoming ASP Conference on the Gear Up strategic tool. Would you explain the basics of it?

Dr. Tanai Charinsarn:  Sure, but first of all, let me share some background information. I’ve been in strategic consulting for 15 years. I’ve used many tools available in the market, read all the popular books, and we have our own strategic planning framework as well. But three years ago, I met Tom Kosnik, one of the authors of the Gear Up strategy. He was a professor at Harvard Business School (currently with Stanford University) and has done a lot of consulting to help small companies in Silicon Valley grow. He introduced me to Gear Up strategy and gave me the book. What I found is that Gear Up summarized the key elements of great strategy.

It lays out nine elements: nine gears. As I read it, I realized that when I do strategic planning, these are all things that I need to consider, everything that I need in order to develop a great strategy. I spoke with Tom and asked if was possible for me to try using Gear Up strategy with my consulting clients in Thailand.  Last year I performed three major projects and found that it works very, very well.

Gear Up is based on Tom Kosnik’s experience in helping companies, especially small ones that are struggling to innovate, to grow their markets, and introduce new products into existing markets. That is essentially what everyone is trying to do that the moment, right? The startup is trying to create disruptive markets. Large corporations are trying to reinvent themselves and even the government is trying to transform itself into new government models such as eGovernment. There’s a huge transformation going in every sector.

I think Gear Up is really a different shade of strategy tool. As I mentioned, it touches nine elements. The first element is about customers. I like this because business nowadays is very customer-centric. The world of product-centric is long gone because of increased competition. So everyone starts on customers. The second gear is delight. Delight creates repeat customers and loyalty. Businesses talk about customer loyalty all the time and need customers to come back. Customers also spread the word about organizations. So delight is a major factor. The third one is customer acquisition. These days we have to find creative and efficient ways to acquire customers and, of course, everyone is looking for customers, and customers have many choices. The fourth gear is the business model. This is, of course, critical for successful identification and implementation of ideas. For example, customers may love an idea if but if it makes a small profit – or none - the business will eventually disappear. The fifth element is partners. This touches on the fact that it is hard to do everything alone in business because you’re not the best in everything. So partnerships become a key strategy to help you grow the business and become successful. The sixth gear is competitors. Of course, we all know that great strategy needs to be unique and we can’t be unique without looking into what competitors are doing and will do into the future. The seventh gear is about global aspects. As globalization has become the norm, needs of the customer in one country may be needed in other country as well. So, it’s not just developing a strategy for the market in a specific country or specific groups anymore. An organization can go global by changing the way of looking at how a product or service could be used by someone in another country or part of the world. The eighth gear is the team: human resources, the people, and their capability. Organizations understand that without a team, you are nothing. You cannot do everything alone and everything can be built if you have the right team. Capability can be built with a team. If you don’t have the right team, you don’t have the capability. But if you have a team with no capability, the team can develop capability for you. So putting together the right team to drive the business is really important. It’s not just a supporting function in HR as in the past because now, business is driven by the people. The last gear, the ninth gear, is reality check. With the world marketplace being very volatile and uncertain, risk management becomes important. So we have to think about the level of risk, what kind of risk, how to mitigate risk, and contingency plans.

I found that all these set of synchronized gears touch the major elements of a great toolset. It helped me gain insight and develop strategy much faster than using multiple tools I’ve used in the past, tools which are not synchronized. It’s helped me perform strategic planning from beginning to end and synchronize everything very quickly.

IA Forum: This would seem like an attractive approach for startups – in particular, tech sector ones – that change quickly and often until they find their true business.

Dr. Tanai Charinsarn: In today’s world, everyone is looking for growth, the new idea, the next wave, future business. That’s a main theme for business these days. I think we will still talk about Six Sigma and operational effectiveness but real strategy is moving more towards looking at the future of the business. You can have standardized processes that and get results but it won’t provide competitive advantage and for the future of the business.

IA Forum:  You mentioned that you’ve used Gear Up strategy with some of your clients. Would you discuss your experience with it?

Dr. Tanai Charinsarn: Everyone who is performing strategy has to start with an understanding of situation, inside out and outside in. I use the Gear Up ninth gear as a lens eye to look into the situation and gain a lot of insight. During the ASP master class, I’ll talk in more detail about how the model helped me work with three clients. One is in the mattress industry, the second is in the snack food industry, and the third is the media industry. I completed work for them in one year, from the beginning to the end.

During my work with clients, I found a couple other applications for Gear Up that can be applicable for organizations. Some organizations need to perform a diagnosis, one that is doing well but they want a health check. To see if it is it moving to this direction or if it does their job.

For one client, I used the Gear Up model to perform a diagnosis of their current business. So, this can help the organization become more and more confident and we provide some comments relating to the current strategy as well. Even though some organizations don’t need a new strategy, Gear Up is still very useful. It’s much like an annual health check-up where, even if we feel well, we should see the doctor to perform a health check.

Another application for Gear Up concerns those organizations that are not happy with their current strategy and they want to move into a new direction, to improve performance. In fact, I’ve been talking to a global company that has many ideas about how to move forward, but they cannot implement all those ideas. How do you know which idea is good for your organization? This tool can help you refine the ideas by using those nine gears – nine lens, if you will. For example, who is the customer for these ideas? How large a group are they? How much revenue can you receive from them? What are the delighting factors that can put into this idea? Are they going to be extremely happy and are they going to talk to other people about it? Do we have the capability? Do we have a team? Who should be partnering with in order to make this idea become reality? If you can answer those questions, at the end of the day you become very confident that this idea, if implemented well, will get the result. On the other hand, if you can’t answer those questions; for example, who’s the customer of this idea and nobody can answer, it’s probably not a good idea because if even you implement it nobody is going to pay you anyway.

One of the things that I have found over my 15 years of consulting is that every project is different. So every time I start new project, I have to think about the framework, the tools, and how to use them. But what I found with using Gear Up with these clients is that it’s so comprehensive that I can use one gear for all the clients in different phases of the business in various industries yet I can get the results.

IA Forum:  How do you feel participants will benefit from attending your session at the ASP Conference?

Dr. Tanai Charinsarn: I think our job as either a consultant or strategy professional within the organization is to craft a strategy and support senior management in developing strategy that works into the future. We’re always looking for the tools to do so. Senior management wants a quickly developed strategy, backed up by analysis.  

I think it will be beneficial for attendees to learn one more tool which is comprehensive, provides insight into strategic planning, and that facilitates speedy development. I hope participants will see understand that Gear Up is such a tool, that fits in very well with this environment of innovative ideas, where we have to develop a strategy that moves forward, is innovative, and speeds up the strategy process within the organization. Moreover, it will be beneficial to attendees from the for-profit, non-profit, and governmental sectors.

This is a strategy that’s comprehensive, looking from the business side, looking from the customer side, from the risk management side, from capability, the team side, and also looks at things from the partnership point of view. So it’s all synchronized and makes the strategy align very well within that particular organization.

Dr. Tanai Charinsarn is a Strategy Professional with more than 15 years of experiences working with the Top Management Team in various industries such as financial services, foods, industrial products, and healthcare on strategy formulation, reorganization, re-engineering, corporate planning, operational effectiveness, strategy implementation, IT strategy, and strategic capability development. He is well recognized among the international Strategy Professional communities internationally. He holds a designation of Strategic Management Professional (SMP) of the Association for Strategic Planning (ASP), a Fellow of the Strategic Planning Society (SPS), and a Chartered Director of the Thai Institute of Directors (IOD).

Dr. Charinsarn will be leading a session on Gear Up at the Association for Strategic Planning Annual Conference this March.