Sagepartners: Value-Creating Growth

Sage Venture Development | Sage Strategic Leadership

Rich Schneider
Director
Boston, MA
USA

One of the toughest challenges for executive management is to maintain an unrelenting focus and sense of discipline around profitable growth of the enterprise. Most companies have plenty of opportunities to grow embedded in their existing business portfolio. Not as many turn those opportunities into real, value creating growth. What happens in between? In some cases management lacks the courage to fully commit to the course of action and potential changes necessary to succeed. In other cases there is no discipline in selecting and differentially driving a limited set of the most promising opportunities. In some instances the company does everything “right”, but is overcome by external events and fails to adjust its priorities.

My last 25 years have been spent working with senior management teams to make the process of growing a more predictably successful and consistent corporate activity. I believe this can be achieved by combining solid analysis with a disciplined process of focusing on the priorities that management agrees it will execute against. Growth doesn’t have to be a mystery: Insight + focus + discipline creates and sustains the expectation that growth will be a more predictable result, not a stroke of luck.

Rich Schneider has almost 35 years of management consulting experience. He has worked with the boards and executive management teams of many of the largest Fortune 500 companies, both in the US and abroad. He has worked on issues of corporate, business unit, and functional strategy across a variety of consumer and industrial products and services. The common theme for that work has been helping companies grow profitably and achieve meaningful operational improvement.

Rich was a partner in the strategy practice of Deloitte Consulting LLP for 25 years and he led the strategy practice there for 7 years. In addition to his client responsibilities, he ran MBA recruiting for the strategy practice for 5 years. Prior to that he was one of the founding members of Braxton Associates, where he helped to start the London office. Over the course of his experience he has worked with clients such as Procter and Gamble, HJ Heinz, United Airlines, Aetna, numerous Blue Cross/Blue Shield organizations, DuPont, and Cardinal Distribution.

Rich received a BS in Chemical Engineering from Cornell and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell, and is an adjunct faculty member there, teaching courses in consulting. He is serving as a Career Coach for the MBA program at the Harvard Business School.