Advisor Insights with Peter Bagge

Louise Broekman:

Welcome to the Advisor Insights Interviews. My name is Louise Broekman. I’m the Founder of the Advisory Board Center and I’m here with Certified Chair Peter Bagge in Singapore. Welcome, Peter.

Peter Bagge:

Thank you, Louise. Thank you for having me.

Louise Broekman:

I’m always excited to have these interviews because we are getting the real experience on the ground of what’s happening in advisory boards across the world. And Peter, before we get into some of the really exciting work that you’ve been doing in Singapore as well as globally, would you like to share a bit about your background?

Peter Bagge:

Sure, be happy to. So I have a background in technology sales and consulting with companies like HP, Nokia, OpenText, and NCR. And one of my key things as a consultant was I helped establish a company from scratch in the Philippines where they wanted to become a telco operator. I did the entire go-to market strategy for them. I did a customer experience and distribution strategy and I helped them grow from two to 150 people over the time that I was there. So that’s one of my key highlights in the career as a sales leader, I’ve helped transform organizations to be more customer focused and helped develop their both direct and channel sales to optimize that for growth. And when I left NCR, I had a number of people come to me saying, approach me for strategic advice. And hence I started sort of thinking how do I get into advice advisory roles, how to get into consulting in the areas of sales growth, channel optimization, and building cultures of customer experience. So that’s really what my passion has been over the last year or so.

Louise Broekman:

Very exciting. And since doing the Chair certification, you’ve been involved in establishing and managing corporatized advisory boards with multinationals. So Peter, would you like to share a bit about that experience and what that’s been like for you as a chair?

Peter Bagge:

Yeah, it’s been a great thing and I really enjoyed the Certified Chair program that gave me a lot of insight and other things to think about. I think the value of that program is really the structured approach that we bring to the table. And so I obviously had conversations with a number of my contacts and one of these, the president of a large MNC here in the region was having some challenges in the business where we sort of said, look, there is a day-to-day business and we’ve all tried a number of things, but we’re just busy people. So it would be helpful to see if we could merge the roads of the two of us and see if an advisory board could help us. So that turned in to be two advisory boards that we have established in different countries. They’re probably what we would call more project advisory boards. So one is about growing sales and the other one is more on optimizing for profit.

Louise Broekman:

Very interesting. So what was the trigger, do you think, in the consideration of an advisory board in the first instance?

Peter Bagge:

So I think especially when you are in sales, there is ever demanding demands for growth and you try a number of things, but it becomes a plus plus mindset. And especially one of the businesses has been very successful but been stagnant in their revenue. So let’s get some outsiders in to help us to see if we can do something different. And that’s been quite successful date.

Louise Broekman:

That’s great. So if we think about that whole approach, you’ve got two different advisory boards in two different markets in a multinational, so there’s a lot going on. What have been the benefits for the organization? Because obviously they’re really well resourced, really talented people internally, what have been the real benefits of having advisory board and bringing the outside in versus maintaining a business as usual approach?

Peter Bagge:

Yeah, I mean that’s the key question here. I think first and foremost, the structured approach has been helpful for them. So bringing in external advisors and the way we have structured the board is that we have two people internal, and then we have myself as a chair, which is basically coming from out of region, but with some knowledge of the specific countries. And then we have identified a strong external advisor that has deep knowledge in the domain within the country. And that has helped a lot in terms of providing that. I guess when you are running a business, you very often get into your mindset of what we can do as a business, but getting that outside view as well, especially one of them is, I need to be careful what I share here, but one of them is a former CIO that obviously has the customer perspective and that has been tremendously valuable to the organization that you hear from the customer or a former customer, what’s going on in the marketplace from their perspective.

And where we are right now is that we are basically identified three to four initiatives in each of the countries that we are working on to establish or to help improve. And my view is that you would probably have identified one, maybe two of these as a max if the company had done it by themself. And it would probably also have taken a lot longer time the fact that on a quarterly basis we come in, we have the meeting, and there’s a checkpoint in between where we review the progress and give an idea about how could we accelerate that progress. But just the fact that every single quarter there’s a checkpoint about how are we progressing this, what’s the next step that has helped them a lot in terms of their execution.

Louise Broekman:

And just moving on with benefits, Peter, with you being an independent certified chair, what’s been the benefit of you having that independence in that construct?

Peter Bagge:

Good question. I think the president of reading, he said, we are actually talking about establishing yet another one, and he said to me, we actually don’t want you for your industry expertise. We have enough of that. But what you bring to the table is the structure. It’s the structure that keeps us honest on a day-to-day basis about what are we here for? What’s the purpose? How do we drive this forward? And so as an independent one, I have that luxury of driving things in my pace but also adapting to theirs. And that seems to have helped them a lot in terms of, alright, there is a deliverable, there is an expectation from an external party that something needs to happen over the next months or the next two months, so we need to roll up our sleeves and get it done.

Louise Broekman:

Interesting. And when we think about advisory boards are just being used in so many different ways in the market today, much broader than what we would’ve anticipated years ago with the rise of corporatized advisory boards in the corporate sector, what do you think is really driving that?

Peter Bagge:

I think there’s a lot of pressure on the governance boards today where they get more and more to deal with and it’s tremendous the amount of things that they have to prepare ahead of a board meeting and maybe a topic like we would spend half a day on as an advisory board gets 10 minutes on the governance board. And what that means is that you never get to that level where you are able to execute new ideas unless you take it in-house. And that’s where the external advisory board comes in that says, look, let us help you facilitate the process of identifying something and give it more time, as opposed to a governance board that basically would not have the time or maybe even the energy to do this unless you establish sub projects, subcommittees and so on. So that’s where I see that the real value is

Louise Broekman:

Interesting. So it’s a really important point, isn’t it, the difference between an advisory board and a committee type structure and carefully navigating what’s the right approach for particular environments. If we think about that whole experience that you’ve gone through, Peter, you’ve been inside organizations and growing organizations as a c-suite executive and then chairing advisory boards sitting on both sides of the fence. When you consider organizations bringing on an advisory board, what do you think they need to consider when evaluating the need for bringing that external input internally?

Peter Bagge:

I think what often happens is that you get too bogged down in the day-to-Day business, first of all. So you don’t get the right people to the table in the first place and you don’t allocate enough time to solve a problem. So obviously you need to have a challenge or a problem that you’ve tried to solve and you haven’t been successful doing it, or you feel that there’s more to it than you can just identify internally. And that’s where I think the external party comes in that brings that different aspect to the table. That brings maybe even a different methodology of going about it where you basically have, as we call it, the scope of the project and that’s our north star that we are all working towards. But often I think having been in the senior leadership roles, you forget that North Star you basically, you try and do some improvements here and there, but getting the external viewpoint in and helping facilitate it to me has been an eye-opener, both for me but also for the company that I’m working for, that we are actually achieving results a lot faster that I think I would’ve been able to deliver myself.

Louise Broekman:

Interesting. So that whole knowledge and experience that you’ve gained in multinationals, now that you are on the outside, you’re able to still add value to that because you understand the dynamics that they’re dealing with internally as well, Peter?

Peter Bagge:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that experience sitting on both side of the table is definitely valuable, right? Because I can feel the pain that they have and when they go into some of the meetings, it starts out being very day-to-Day operational topics that as an external party you’re like, let’s just try and extract this and get to something that is more long-term, more impactful means because I know what you’re going through right now, but let’s just see if there’s other way to solve the problem.

Louise Broekman:

And that’s when you’re external, you’ve got permission to be able to do that.

Peter Bagge:

You absolutely do.

Louise Broekman:

Peter, keep on doing the great work that you’re doing and I’m looking forward to developing some case studies with you over time as we’re really starting to see the output from these advisory boards.

Peter Bagge:

Absolutely. I look forward to that. Louis, thank you so much.