Business Services & Products

The team at Gordian Business coordinate their efforts to create an effective and professional service for all our clients. The Gordian Business team focuses on learning through creativity, systematic thinking and the application of theory to actual business challenges.

Gordian Business has developed a reputation for delivering programs with enduring impact. This has prompted increased demand for Gordian Business's services throughout Australia, Asia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

One of our competitive edges is that we do not have standard programs; we find different industries and different sub groups need a personalised, structured approach to each problem or opportunity. However, our broad expertise allows us to work with frameworks to establish how a proposed solution can be of benefit to the organisation.

Areas of Expertise

Our areas of expertise are designed to give you an opportunity to decide whether to contact us to organise a meeting. This section will give you some examples of our capabilities, which can then be tailored to create programs catering to your specific needs.

Persuading for Results ©

Advancement in today's business world means being able to create an impact in your presentations, meetings and daily interactions. Your goal is not only to impart information, but also to stimulate thought and energise the group to move forward and take action.

We have developed advanced processes that will help you to persuade your audience to take action. Our processes are based on the importance of understanding the strengths of different persuasion styles and tools: to understand, captivate and keep the audience focussed and compel them to take action.

In this increasingly complex world, the skill of persuasion is becomming more valuable. Each day thousands of people use some of the approaches of persuasion; yet few people understand why they work and fewer people use any structured approach at all. This program provides you with information on the range of persuasion tools available, from change management, strategy, sales and psychology. These processes offer an opportunity to develop greater self-awareness and to learn to make conscious, informed choices about how to persuade and influence.

Improving Profit Performance, Implementing Strategy and Change

A manager's prime responsibility is to create, sustain and increase profit. There are just two ways to increase profit - by increasing sales or reducing costs.

To increase sales, a manager may: acquire a company, restructure (adding new services to products), improve customer service or implement a new business ctrategy. To reduce costs, a manager may: restructure (downsize), implement a new IT system or inrcease productivity.

Ever effort to improve productivity has a common element - change. To improve profit, a manager must make some sort of change: to the people, structure, systems or company culture. Most managers are unaware that typically, 70% or all change project fail and only 30% succeed.

Companies have 2 types of capabilities: operational capabilities and reshaping capabilities. Operational capabilities are essential in changing today's organisation to produce the best profit from tomorrow's organisation. Organisations that are successful at change have strong reshaping capabilities.

At Gordian, we provide the tools, processes and assistance to develop customised programs designed to improve profit, implement strategy and instigate change. These processes identify the key issues to allow you to improve profit and apply strategy.

Produce Breakthrough Ideas Fast ©

For many years, strategy and innovation have developed separately. Recently, as both economic pressure and competition continue to increase, strategic innovation has become more important. Essentially, strategic innovation is redesigning the business model and reshaping markets to dramatically increase the value for customers and to create high growth for companies.

As competition increases, and not just traditional methods of competition, the value of taking a fresh approach is critical for your mamangers and your business. Innovation is about meeting the challenge of change, to raise quality and service reliability, to minimise risks and to decrease costs. However, innovating means changing, changing brings risks and embracing change can create fear. It is vital for leaders within your business to embrace the innovation process.

Continually striving for new ways of doing business will keep the organisation alive. This means renewing the organisation when there is no pressing need, not simply solving new problems as they arise. This does not mean organisations should innovate for the sake of innovating. Innovations which are clever do not always have market value. Constant and sustained innovation needs a long-term perspective,a willingness to get feedback and then the ability to act in response to the feedback. This workshop models this learning process and will challenge your strategice views, allow you to debate your strategic issues and show you how you can create, choose and implement strategic options.

Innovating strategically involves both creation and choice. This program will hlep you to identify whent to choose and when to create, enable you to understand the power of your options, and allow you to analyse the drivers of the market and the impact this has on your choices and creativity.

This workshop incorporates tools to promote both divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking is good for generating lots of ideas. Convergent thinking is good for picking the best ideas to work on. Without convergent thinking, teams will just generate a long list of interesting ideas. You, like most businesses, have limited resources (time, money and people) to exploit ideas. So safter creating lots of good ideas, it is critical to use a tool to help choose the best idea to work on.

The process for the workshop:

 Review what has happened in the past and how to learn from it

 Generate ideas for action

 Choose ideas for action

Negotiating with Style®

Negotiation strategies are currently being reviewed across many industries and market segments. Business success requires team members to think strategically and negotiate accordingly. Usually, these skills do not come naturally. They must be learnt.

There are several critical competencies for successful negotiation. First, is the ability to prepare comprehensively for negotiations by gaining a thorough understanding of the core issues, each party's negotiation style and the conditions under which negotiation takes place. Second, is the ability to translate this knowledge into a workable negotiation strategy. Third, is the ability to implement this strategy in negotiations for desirable outcomes.

This area of expertise focuses on developing strategic negotiation techniques that provide desirable outcomes while building business relationships that will endure and provide long-term value to all parties involved.

Recent research conducted with Gordian Business and the University of Technology, Sydney, focuses on four negotiation predisposition styles: accomodating, avoiding, collaborative and competing predispositions. This research will contribute to providing an intial basis for measuring negotiation styles within contexts such as account relationship and a variety of other sales management contexts.

Strategic Account Management

The way an organisation manages its strategic relationships with alliance partners has a dramatic impact on the success and profitability of their business. As the pace of change accelerates, it is critical that all internal and cross-functional teams within the organisation focus on how to make the alliance work.

Strategic account management focuses the total team on how to learn more about key issues with their counterparts in the strategic alliance or key account. Critical to success is the knowledge of your clients' and partners' approaches to decision-making, and negotiation strategies. The process for strategic account management collects extensive information, particularly business histories and key plans for the future.

The result is a set of comprehensive relationship plans that build and maintain the key alliances. This is facilitated by a framework to allow a CRM (Client Relationship Manager) process to work. This means that we do not recommend any proprietary software as part of our intervention.

Clients have become more sophisticated in their buying strategies and consequently today's sales teams need to be equally sophisticated in their selling strategies. Rethinking and adapting your selling skills to each client and situation is now imperative.

Creating a Sustainable Business

The lifetime value of a customer, in terms of repeat and referral business, can have an astronomical impact on the growth and success of your business. It is therefore essential that the needs of each individual client are clearly understood, and that every client's interaction is ultimately 'value-adding' to the business relationship as a whole.

The concept of 'service leadership' begins with employee satisfactions. Hisghly satisfied employees drive increased loyalty and productivity, which then increases the value of service to the client. Value in this sense does not only refer to value for money, but also to the quality of service and the personal cost to the client. The greater the value the client receives, the more statisfied the will become.

Customer satisfaction has been identified as one of the keys to increased layalty and ling term business relationships. In turn, loyalty drives profitability and growth. Extensive research has uncovered an extraordinary result. A mere 5% increase in customer loyalty can result in profit increases of 30-85%.

Service leadership focuses on all the necessary elements to increase the loyalty and satisfaction of your clients, and directs you to develop unique, innovative and flexible strategies and techniques in order to gain competetive advantage in the market.

Leading and Managing for Team Results

As today's organisations move towards more team-based operations, ironically, the need for greater leadership and management increases, not decreases. The challenge for our aspiring leaders is to tap into the human desire to be part of organisations that create positive and meansingful results for all.

These workshops support and challenge leaders and managers at all levels of the business to clarify what results are important to them and their teams, what underpinning values drive these results, and what skills and behaviours they need to develop to achieve those results.

This workshop focuses on maximising the leader's existing strengths. Leaders are encouraged to develop their own style of engaging with and leading their team, on the basis that there is no single "best" style of leadership. The workshops also focus on the leader in the role of "captain-coach", and the capabilities requred to coach a team while on the playing field themselves. A critical factor is the ability of the leader not only to talk the talk, but also to walk the talk.

In the new world of organisations, teams are ofter lean and cannot carry non-performers. Leaders are only as good as the weakest link in the team, so everyone needs to contribute to the team effort. The leader needs to clarify and pioritise the important results and ensure that personal values are aligned to organisational values. As researchers have found, it in one thing to be a top performer in a team, but better results come from a top-performing team.