The company had grown and strengthened its brand by being experts in design and technical details in its product areas. The counterparty – the customers – had traditionally been just as interested in these areas. In recent years, however, the company’s salespeople had found it increasingly difficult to reach customers. Creating relationships was not as easy as had been and the sales process took longer. To become a salesperson at the company, you preferably had started in production, were able to assemble the products, and be aware of technical details. But more and more customers had handed over their family businesses to their daughters and sons, individuals who had a more holistic perspective for the company. When the company’s salespeople met customers, they now had different perspectives and priorities. The company had to update its entire recruitment process to find people who could match their new type of customers, and their needs and perspectives.

A company wanted to increase the proportion of women in divisional manager roles. Progress was slow. Few or no women met the requirements to apply for the positions, despite having the will, ambition and competence. It was all due to a requirement to apply for the roles that you had to have worked for at least three years on three continents within the company’s various international operations. Since most of the women had two or more children and lived with a partner who had a career just like them, they had not been able to prioritize working abroad. When the company discovered this problem, they instead started a programme where women could spend three months on three different continents earlier in their careers. After that, the proportion of female division heads increased markedly.

A consumer company planned all campaigns and sales activities from its head office in Sweden. Here were designers, creators, marketing and purchasing. But as the business spread geographically, with a presence in more than 60 countries with different cultures, climates, holidays and school terms in different regions, the company had more and more flops. In one country, local buses were decorated by an expensive artist who was completely unknown in the region. School start campaigns were timed right at home but came in the middle of the year at the end of term time in other regions. National celebrations that could mean billions in sales in just one day were completely missed, and shop fittings created for the Swedish climate were destroyed by the humidity in warmer countries. Eventually, the mistakes became so costly that the company decentralized the campaign process and let the regional offices – those who knew their market – manage the campaigns on their own. In addition, they developed a global calendar that they integrated into internal communication systems and activity planning process. In line with this, the company not only made more employees happy, proud and enlightened about the world’s different (revenue-generating) holidays, but also increased its presence and sales in other markets at more times of the year.

A company’s marketing department was under pressure to produce images for physical and digital product catalogues. It was a long process with many different steps: concept and ideas, casting, styling and shooting of models, captions for images and, lastly, packaging all material in a finished product for customers. The organization was acutely aware of the importance of reflecting diversity in their models, respecting different religious symbols and cultures, and using language that did not exclude or offend. Despite this, campaigns often backfired. Mistakes that resulted in the company facing criticism and being accused of racism and cultural appropriation. When the company screened its processes, it realized that the problem was that all the process steps were carried out separately. For example, people writing image captions had not seen the images their captions described. Models were photographed separately in garments with different prints, and then edited together afterwards. This meant that nobody was aware of the end result. Only when the company introduced handovers between the different steps of the process, so that everyone could see the whole, could they catch mistakes in time.