The Two-Page Strategy

How Mars India Aligned Global Leadership Around an HR Blueprint That Left the Future Open

Mars Incorporated  ·  India & South Asia  ·  2008–2010

AIKYOS Consulting Partners — Leadership Intelligence Series  ·  Case Study 1

THE CASE IN BRIEF 

In early 2010, Mars India was navigating at least three strategic uncertainties simultaneously: a Petfoods category that had capital deployed but not yet ignited at scale; a Chocolates business still establishing its market position; and the recent global acquisition of Wrigley’s, whose India operation was larger and more established than anything Mars India had built. The HR function was asked to produce a five-year people and organisation strategy for the Global Board. Deadline fixed. Format: two pages.
What the process produced was not a comprehensive plan. It was something more valuable: a strategy deliberately designed around uncertainty — one that identified the decisions that needed to begin now, assigned ownership to the people closest to the facts, and held open the options that only the future could close. The Board endorsed it. More importantly, it worked.

THE STRATEGIC CONTEXT: THREE UNCERTAINITIES, ONE DOCUMENT

Mars Incorporated operates its HR function under the title People & Organisation (P&O) — a deliberate signal that people strategy and organisation strategy are inseparable, and that the HR leader’s role is to be a genuine shaper of both. In India in 2010, that role required navigating a landscape in which the right answers to the most important questions were genuinely unknown.

• The Petfoods factory existed. The category had not yet proven its India growth rate. A second facility was logically necessary within three to five years — but when, where, and at what scale depended on how quickly consumers moved.
• The Chocolates business needed leadership capable of driving category growth in India. Whether that leader would come from within the Mars global system or from the external market was an open question that the strategy could frame but not answer.
• Wrigley’s India — larger than the existing Mars India footprint — was agreed to run standalone during the integration period. The HR strategy needed to acknowledge this without prescribing an integration model that no one yet had the information to design.

The conventional response to this level of uncertainty is to wait. The Mars India team made the opposite choice: to build a strategy that was calibrated precisely to the uncertainty — mapping scenarios, identifying the people actions that needed to start regardless of which scenario unfolded, and explicitly preserving decision rights for the local management team who would have to live with the outcomes.

BUILDING ALIGNMENT ACROSS FOUR LEVELS OF LEADERSHIP

The stakeholder architecture for this process was deliberately compact — and deliberately confidential. Five principals were engaged directly: