Build an agile culture by unshackling corporate leaders and helping them think and innovate like business owners.
Purpose-led has become the new business orthodoxy. The evidence that genuinely purpose-led companies move faster, grow faster and deliver greater long-term shareholder value is increasingly compelling.
Yet in most traditional organisations, purpose is just not working. Legacy, scale and complexity create a gap between the purpose articulated by the Board and the reality experienced by employees and customers.
A gap that doesn’t exist in the best agile, entrepreneurial businesses.
Our work bridges that gap. It develops, in corporate organisations, the beliefs and behaviours of the best of entrepreneurial businesses. It creates agile clear management, engaged autonomous people, and compassionate open innovative cultures.
Create sustainable, strategic relationships with your small business customers by showing your people what entrepreneurial businesses really think.
There is a major and often hidden dissonance between big companies and their small customers. Most relationships are devoid of what each party needs. Large companies – looking for loyalty – create ‘rapport’. Entrepreneurs crave value…
We’ll help you create sustainable, strategic relationships with your small business customers by showing your people how entrepreneurial businesses really think.
My customer said “I have never had a conversation like this with a bank”
Invest in and grow the small businesses in your community and businesses who buy or distribute your product.
Large organisations are increasingly seeking out ways to energise and grow the entrepreneurial community around them.
We work directly with our clients’ small business community, sharing a language and methodology for growing their businesses rapidly and sustainably. We create loyalty and a climate of ‘winning together’ in channel markets.
Our mission is to free large complex global companies from the mindset and structures that slow them down and to help them to build remarkable relationships with entrepreneurial partners and customers.
Contexis leaders have a rare combination of entrepreneurial and big business experience. All have built entrepreneurial businesses. All have been corporate leaders. Together, they have put the science and the soul into helping large corporates become agile again.
The Contexis leadership team has created a brilliant methodology that is now used by large companies globally both to remove corporate shackles, and to forge powerful partnerships with entrepreneurial businesses. Both to ‘think like the entrepreneur’ and to ‘understand the entrepreneur’.
These people are the face-to-face guides for your leaders, managers and employees, as they discover a new entrepreneurial mindset.
All our trainers and facilitators are internationally-acknowledged experts in entrepreneurial business. To deliver a Contexis programme, you must have held a senior leadership role in a global company as well as running your own business.
Credible, challenging and warm in equal measures, people find spending time with the Contexis delivery team addictive…
Behind each programme are customer services, finance and IT people who have specifically chosen to bring their skills to our mission: to free corporates to be extraordinary.
Our IT team enable us to scale any programme globally, our customer services team make your experience of it amazing and our finance team keep our wilder ideas in check…
These people make a transformational experience possible, whether it’s in Mumbai, Mexico City, Shanghai or Newcastle. That’s how we help global organisations change rapidly.
“What would your partners talk about if they found themselves stuck in the lift with the CEO of a client firm?”
In a big four accountancy firm, relationships proved to be the one domain in which partners had not deliberately developed excellence – and the key to unlocking truly long term, valuable relationships with clients.
The problem lay in confidence, not ability. A programme specifically designed for very senior fee-earners transformed trust with clients.
“We never realised how much there is to coaching and how much value it would add to communication and relationships. Trust levels have rocketed and our people are less scared to “have a go” now.”
One regional bank overhauls global competitors by providing truly strategic advice to its best customers – not just funding them.
The result? Dramatically deeper relationships and an increase in high quality lending opportunities and referrals which is already repaying the investment.
“My fellow directors and my non-executive director were amazed at this service from the bank”
A global bank is radically deepening relationships with the small business market internationally by teaching their relationship managers to understand the mind of the entrepreneur.
The programme has had a profound impact on the cultural and commercial performance of those who have participated. Since being piloted in early 2013 the programme has been rolled out internationally and vertically across the business.
“This has been mind-opening, game-changing. I have so much confidence now.”
Cultural transformation in one of the world’s largest financial institutions creates energy and alignment.
The bank survived the global financial crisis. But culture and confidence were at an all time low. What emerged was a golden opportunity to ignite everyone around a compelling future strategy.
Contexis helped them apply the trick that entrepreneurs know intuitively. Nail the ‘why’ and then let the next layer of managers down figure out the ‘how.
“As a self proclaimed sceptic of anything that didn’t conform to logical decision making I now have to admit I have been shutting off a large part of the opportunities for me to build a better team.”
How did the fastest growing commercial real estate company in the world use Agile Teams to double the effectiveness of their teams?
Colliers International is well known for its exceptionally high quality internal University. And the top performing programme in this University by team KPI? The teams programme that creates innovative, interdependent teams.
“Of all the training I have done during my career, this approach has had the greatest impact on my success in both sales and management.”
Agile companies know their purpose and use it to create opportunity and connect people. They see the big picture. They don’t seek to control. Corporates – well, they do the opposite.
Large companies of today are at risk of becoming the dinosaurs of tomorrow. “Small Think” encapsulates how the best entrepreneurial companies put purpose over process…
Why are relationships between big banking and professional service companies and their small business clients utterly devoid of value – despite a focus on relationship?
The key isn’t to know your ‘what’. That is just what you do. The key is to know your ‘why’.
The Purpose Gap
Purpose-led has become the new business orthodoxy. The evidence that genuinely purpose-led companies move faster, grow faster and deliver greater long-term shareholder value is increasingly compelling. Yet in most traditional organisations, purpose is just not working. Legacy, scale and complexity create a gap between the purpose articulated by the Board and the reality experienced by employees and customers.
Two minute watch.
Humans
Have big businesses forgotten that they are just a collection of human beings? Is a #PurposeLed company more real, more realistic and somehow more human?
Two minute watch.
Unstoppable Change?
“Fundamentally it’s about being able to look your kids in the eye and say ‘I did good – or at least I didn’t do bad!'”
We love The Eth Word unbusinesslike conversations (loads more at theethword.co.uk) – a couple of minutes of insight from a fantastic array of business leaders. In this one, John talks about the sustainability journey – what it’s all about, how to start and the importance of 15%. All in less than two minutes.
The CSR Trap
It is easy to confuse being #PurposeLed with doing ‘good stuff’. Yes, an organisation’s Purpose is about how they treat people and how they treat the planet, but it also has a clear and coherent commercial reason for being.
@jrosling explains the difference in just over two minutes.
Kindness in business! There’s a thought.
Kindness is not just about being all fluffy and nice. If you have kindness and respect then conflict can be a marvellous thing – driving creativity, direction and agreement.
Two minute watch.
Love in business? Now that is even more uncomfortable than kindness!
If love and compassion are basic human instincts, why do we feel so uncomfortable bringing this part of us to work?
One minute watch.
The Purpose Conversation
If your #purpose is congruent with the stuff you actually do then it can drive business performance.
One minute watch
#PurposeLed
Profiles of Purpose: A business with soul
Patricia Zoundi Yao, founder and CEO of Quickcash, tells how failure fueled her ambition, impact, and success.
Build an agile culture by unshackling corporate leaders and helping them think and innovate like business owners. 
Create sustainable, strategic relationships with your small business customers by showing your people what entrepreneurial businesses really think. 
Invest in and grow the small businesses in your community and businesses who buy or distribute your product. 
