In February of 2005, Royal Mail was undergoing dramatic changes that would require it to re-examine the most fundamental components of its business model. As the process of privatisation moved forward, Royal Mail was faced with the pressing need to develop a new market-focussed strategy as well as equip its leaders with the necessary skills to see the strategy through. In partnership with Judge Business School at Cambridge, Bridge was asked to work closely with Royal Mail sponsors to develop, design and implement a Managing Customers Commercially master class for the organisation's top 200 leaders to deal with these challenges.

After conducting an intensive Accelerated Design Workshop (ADW) where key stakeholders established the core components of the programme, a series of two day master classes was launched in June 2005. Leveraging the combined expertise of the internal Bridge team, Cambridge faculty and external experts, the course successfully assisted Royal Mail leaders in developing new skills in the areas of customer relationship management, understanding the competition, building a market focus, and thinking more commercially in general. To date ten of these programmes have been run. Participant feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

A second set of master classes, entitled Leading Strategic Transformation, was targeted at the same group of 200 leaders and focussed on building competencies around implementing strategy, accelerating change, building commitment, high performance teams, and the power of story telling for communicating the strategy.

In addition to this series of master classes, Bridge has worked with Royal Mail in designing the pilot and implementation plan for a lean design initiative as well as providing consulting services related to the co-development of a recently published industry white paper.

Client quotes: "The challenges we were facing were very difficult for this organisation - we really had to learn a completely new way of looking at our business. Working with Bridge has made all the difference!", "Bridge has delivered a high quality product. It was very thorough and very researched."