A Fortune 50 Tech Company Builds One Narrative Architecture Across Five Divisions
A Fortune 50 Tech Company Builds One Narrative Architecture Across Five Divisions
ORCHESTRA
ORCHESTRA
A Fortune 50 Tech Company Builds One Narrative Architecture Across Five Divisions
ORCHESTRA
01 CHALLENGE
The phone rang a year after the first engagement had closed. A Fortune 50 global technology company — accelerating a fundamental shift in its business model from manufacturing to services — had unfinished work. The organization had grown more complex in the intervening year. The CIO now oversaw a multi-billion-dollar enterprise spanning multiple subsidiaries and a set of fast-growing business opportunities, each with its own audiences, its own competitive context, and its own version of the story that needed to be told. The challenge wasn't to produce five separate narratives. It was to design a single architecture that could hold all of them — vertically integrated from the enterprise down through its divisions, and horizontally consistent across target market opportunities — so that every audience, at every level, heard a version of the story that was both true to the enterprise and specific to their field of operations. Five instruments. One orchestra.
The phone rang a year after the first engagement had closed. A Fortune 50 global technology company — accelerating a fundamental shift in its business model from manufacturing to services — had unfinished work. The organization had grown more complex in the intervening year. The CIO now oversaw a multi-billion-dollar enterprise spanning multiple subsidiaries and a set of fast-growing business opportunities, each with its own audiences, its own competitive context, and its own version of the story that needed to be told. The challenge wasn't to produce five separate narratives. It was to design a single architecture that could hold all of them — vertically integrated from the enterprise down through its divisions, and horizontally consistent across target market opportunities — so that every audience, at every level, heard a version of the story that was both true to the enterprise and specific to their field of operations. Five instruments. One orchestra.
02 ADVISORY
Working with a small, board-commissioned client team, Stephen interviewed 22 senior executives and technical thought leaders responsible for the performance of a multi-billion subsidiary — capturing both common themes and message variation that reflected different but authentically complementary transformation streams. From those discussions, he designed an integrated set of Strategic Narrative Blueprints at three levels: the enterprise, its largest subsidiary, and three of the subsidiary's fastest-growing business opportunities. These were constructed to reflect a consistent message cascading vertically from enterprise down to divisions and horizontally across the three opportunity segments: independently coherent narratives that together reflected a single powerful composition.
Working with a small, board-commissioned client team, Stephen interviewed 22 senior executives and technical thought leaders responsible for the performance of a multi-billion subsidiary — capturing both common themes and message variation that reflected different but authentically complementary transformation streams. From those discussions, he designed an integrated set of Strategic Narrative Blueprints at three levels: the enterprise, its largest subsidiary, and three of the subsidiary's fastest-growing business opportunities. These were constructed to reflect a consistent message cascading vertically from enterprise down to divisions and horizontally across the three opportunity segments: independently coherent narratives that together reflected a single powerful composition.
03 OUTCOME
Five blueprints. One integrated architecture. An enterprise aria.