Future Talent

The PDP is our first “must have” leadership program for top executives. The program is six-month comprehensive leadership curriculum with 360 assessment, coaching, in-class trainings and online materials. It differs from other programs with digitalization focus, new leadership skills and intense body-mind activities. The program comprises three phases in which senior executives take part in groups of twenty-five. By now, 150 general managers and deputy general managers in 6 groups completed the program. 7th group will be completed in 2021. Our aim is to cover at least two thirds of senior executives to this program.

The first phase is a one-week camp with a theme of "Personal Awareness", aiming individual transformations through mental and physical awareness. In the interim period, the participants complete Harvard Business School's HBX – Disruptive Strategy program in smaller groups. The second phase, also a one-week camp, has the theme of "Change." McKinsey instructors provide trainings on digital trends, design-thinking, digital marketing, big data, agility and change management, which are tailored to address leaders’ specific needs in the digital age. The last phase carried out abroad and focused on experience, has the theme of “Renewal”. It aims to empower senior executives’ adaptive leadership skills by uncovering the adaptability and flexibility of them in challenging natural conditions. The PDP is selected as a best practice case for McKinsey worldwide.

Our research shows that almost 70% of Fortune 100 companies have already started their agile transformation journey. These companies are customer-oriented, take actions quickly and strong in technology. Agile organizations foster more disciplines towards a common goal rather than allowing individual success. They work autonomously and are aligned through a common goal. Customer orientation is the foundation of the agile organizations.

Being aware of this approach, Koç Group has initiated its agile transformation exercises in 2018. Four companies were selected as pilots in 2019; Ford Otosan, Koç Finance and two subsidiaries of Arçelik, WAT Motor Company and Token Financial Technologies, created agile transformation teams. Agile coaches played an important role to raise awareness regarding the transformation within the company from top management to all employees, who supported the process through creating teams and providing training and coaching.

As a solid example to what the agile organizations are capable of, Ford Otosan’s agile transformation teams solved a wrinkled headliner defect ongoing since 8 years in just 2 weeks, decreased marketing request feasibility check process from 6+ months to 6 weeks, achieved almost 180k € per annum cost savings on Ford Courier car model's back seat in 4 weeks through ideation and implementation of these ideas, such as size and geometry optimization of trim support wires allowing deletion of some sub-components. In WAT’s Agile Transformation, the first pilot team achieved significant lead time improvement by decreasing new product configuration duration from 21 days to 8 days which resulted into 3 times product definition in the same time period. Additionally, in terms of the overall lead time perspective, the lead time from order to delivery has been decreased from 300 days to 125 days.

The teams’ works have shown that agile organizations can provide efficiency in finding solutions to existing issues as well as increasing customer satisfaction and employee engagement which enable them to create value for the business and the shareholders. At Koç Group, our goal is to spread agile transformation to all group companies in 2020.