![]() ![]() The Action Lab (see accompanying article, page 69) is a short, extremely intense collective effort to telescope time frames and promote radical new behaviors that companies may have talked about for years but never been able to achieve. He turned to a radically new approach for Shell - a series of Action Labs. Knight needed to achieve a change in both levels of service and strategic ambition - and in real time rather than the 24 or 30 months any major change would have taken the company in the past. Finding a way of managing this delicate relationship creatively - balancing competition and cooperation - was crucial. On the other, as the national oil company, Petronas owned all the underground assets and mineral rights in the nation, so Shell was obliged to partner with it in negotiating upstream exploration and production contracts.Įffectively, Petronas held the key to Shell's success in Malaysia. On the one hand, Petronas competed against Shell's downstream business. The newly privatized downstream portion of Malaysia's national oil company, Petronas, posed a particularly tricky problem. ![]() Meanwhile, prime sites for new service stations were becoming harder to win. An initial cost management drive had improved financial returns but not the allure of its gas stations, whose unappealing exterior was turning off increasingly picky and affluent customers. For the first time in memory, Shell was contemplating a decline in its gasoline market share in the face of aggressive competition. Take, for example, Shell Malaysia, where the chairman, Chris Knight, needed to create a whole new direction for the downstream marketing and distribution part of its $6 billion, 6,000-person business. At every level its traditional change-management approach - painstaking analysis and planning followed by careful consensus building and sequential implementation - was powerless to move it from where it was to anywhere it wanted to be. IN THE MIS-1990's, Royal Dutch/Shell, like many other large companies, was nagged by a sense of unfulfilled ambition. ![]()
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