Start with the basics
Case started fine-tuning Aon’s vision by laying out three basic
areas of focus: First, clients would be given the best and most distinctive service possible, second, there would be a high level of
operational excellence that would be driven by the employees,
and third, new clients and talent would be attracted to Aon
because of the success of the first two.
“We’re really only trying to accomplish three things globally,”
Case says. “We’ve worked on that very hard and that actually creates a framework, a basis upon which you can have a dialogue
about how we’re serving clients. It lets us talk about clients in
Shanghai the same way we talk about clients in New York, and that
helps make us a global firm.”
By having a simple starting point, you have an instant screening
process to help you filter through feedback.
“We have a pretty simple motto internally, which is, ‘We will do
about anything if it helps our clients or helps our colleagues help our
clients,’” he says. “So if you put that lens against a global firm —
does it help our clients, yes or no? — it turns out you screen out a
lot of things that are interesting but in the end extraneous because they really don’t fundamentally help our clients or help our colleagues help our clients.”
The process also helped in tying accountability to the vision.
With a clear starting point of success, measurables were more easily created.
“Everyone talks about value, but we’re typically not very crisp in
the definition,” Case says. “So for us, helping clients means one of
two things: Have we helped increase their profitability or operating
performance? That is not an ambiguous question, we’ve either done
that or we haven’t. The second question is, have we helped them
strengthen their balance sheet? If we helped a client do one of those
two things, we’ve added value. If we’ve added value, then we’ve
served them well. If we’ve served them well, we’ll do great things as
a firm.”
As a result of creating that simple starting point, Case was not
only able to spark ingenuity as he toured the company, but he was
also able to put that ingenuity into the proper context.
“We are essentially saying to our firms, ‘Everything you do is
about your leadership in local arenas, these three things we want
to do globally,’” he says. “Turns out when we do those three things
globally, there’s a tremendous step change to the amount of collaboration, the level of how we trust each other to serve clients,
and it starts to shape the firm and its effectiveness shows on the
ground with clients.”
