French-owned BIC launched the ambitious Horizon Strategic Plan to embrace consumer needs at a vigorous level to deliver growth and profit for the long term. They knew their people would be the critical force behind achieving this goal and they wanted every person to understand their role in the changing environment.
“As with any growth strategy, organizational changes happen pretty quickly,” says Kristie Raines, vice president, people and culture. “We centralized some functions such as supply chain and created new Centers of Excellence such as Revenue Growth Management and Ecommerce, and almost overnight became a heavily matrixed organization. Empowering people is in our fabric, and that will not change—but we needed to ensure that with the new structure, everyone understood their roles and still felt inspired to bring new ideas and help us solve problems as we navigated the new structure.”
