With sustainable growth increasingly difficult to achieve and cost-cutting efforts not enough to spur it, organizations need a new approach to meet their business goals. A new book from Accenture highlights how instilling a “zero-based mindset” can help companies release funds that can drive innovation, growth and competitiveness.
The Big Zero: The Transformation of ZBB into a Force for Growth, Innovation and Competitive Advantage – co-authored by Kris Timmermans and Christopher Roark of Accenture Strategy, along with Rodrigo Abdalla – shows how a transformation of employees’ behaviors toward aligning investments and costs around the strategic priorities of the organization can help boost competitive agility by ensuring lasting and sustained growth.
A zero-based mindset is an organization-wide approach centered around forensic visibility into resources that allows companies to take non-working money and reinvest it to ignite growth via new products, capabilities, services and skills. The approach calls for action in four areas: zero-based spend (ZBS), zero-based organization (ZBO), zero-based commercial (ZBC) and zero-based supply chain (ZBSC).
“Companies across all industries and markets are under pressure to innovate and grow. But the cost of nurturing new growth sources is high,” said Kris Timmermans, senior managing director at Accenture Strategy. “Through this book, we show how a zero-based mindset can help organizations shift resources to growth strategies and pivot to new business models. It requires an entire cultural transformation, but the rewards are high when done right.”
The Big Zero is a must-read for companies that are starting out or already on a zero-based journey and looking for inspiration on how to transform culture and engender buy-in and ownership across the organization – from the executive team down. The book features compelling stories from global companies across industries including consumer goods, healthcare, industrial products, retail, and others that are applying zero-based principles to fuel greater competitive agility and accelerate growth.
The zero-based mindset principles showcased in the book have been endorsed by C-Suite of leading companies and academics from top universities alike.