Creating a Growth Culture for SABMiller.
Equipping senior leaders to create a growth culture through leading innovation and collaborating across this global B2B business.
sabmiller.
SABMiller is a multi-billion dollar global beverages company, ranked 5th on the FTSE 100. OneLeap partnered with SABMiller as part of their flagship leadership development programme, working with 42 of the company’s global country MDs.
CHALLENGE.
SABMiller wanted its leaders to “create a growth culture through innovation,” and to innovate more strategically. This meant focusing on the whole business model, including new situations and ways in which people might buy and experience beer. These models could then be shared, and with appropriate adaptations, tailored to new markets, enabling the organisation to innovate at speed across multiple markets and geographies.
To do this, MDs needed to think beyond executing the plans of a single market. They needed to value the experience of their peers. MDs were increasingly being asked to act more collaboratively, as a way to bring in resources, partners, and to share in the risk of experiments.
What we did.
OneLeap created an experiential programme to enable MDs to collaborate and lead experiments within their own markets. This equipped leaders with the capability and tools to innovate in strategic areas of SABMiller, and lifted thinking beyond products to the business model.
Diagnostic interviews:
We began with diagnostic interviews with the MDs, to co-design the programme and ensure its commercial relevance.
Venture Sprint in London:
Led by our experts and coached by successful entrepreneurs with experience relevant to SABMiller market challenges, teams of MDs learned how to create rapid consumer experiments by building and testing the basis of a new business - in just one day. This included:
Using practical ideation processes to identify overlooked opportunities;
Direct interactions with customers on the street to better understand their needs;
Validation with partners and suppliers, prototyping a solution;
Crafting and delivering compelling pitches for the new business opportunity.
A notable example was challenging the industry belief that the lack of “feminine” beer products in developing markets was a barrier to female consumption in those markets. One group focused on an alternative hypothesis: that the barrier to consumption was the low quality and safety of the bathroom facilities of bars in those markets. They rapidly validated this with on-the-ground representatives, which led to on-the-ground testing with partners in just a few months.
Facilitated reflection points throughout the day made the MDs aware of the challenges they were experiencing, and the behaviours they responded with. After the final pitches, we systematically identified the skills, mindsets, and cultural conditions that supported or detracted from rapid innovation. The MDs then reviewed their role as leaders in providing the norms, direction, and environment to support experimentation in their daily life.
Global launch support for experiments:
Following this experience, we put in place an ambitious six-month program of in-country experiments: 21 individual business experiments led by the MDs in their own markets.
Small groups of MDs worked intensively with their team, an entrepreneur, and a OneLeap strategist to apply the mindsets, process and principles they used in London to real opportunities in their local markets. The work balanced entrepreneurial challenge with facilitated peer-to-peer collaboration to improve each MD’s new venture.
OUTCOMES.
Five experiments were implemented in-market, either as direct product or venture implementations, or as new processes to accelerate internal innovation. The MD’s presented their impressive results to the global board and the program was renewed to drive further innovations.
Feedback.
“Working with OneLeap provided the energy and momentum for our senior leaders to really explore what is meant by innovation. By partnering with dynamic entrepreneurs, our MDs were able to experiment with in market innovations that delivered value to the business. The magic of OneLeap is the ability to show how easy innovation is if you are prepared to lean into the experience, to practice new ways of doing things and to grow from mistakes made.”
