From Disruption to Domination: Thomas Roland Of MorganFranklin Consulting On How Companies Are Thriving in the Age of Chaos and Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity
An Interview With Cynthia Corsetti
Establish a space for feedback: Encouraging people to feel comfortable pointing out flaws and pitfalls, along with what’s working well, creates opportunities to fix issues in real-time. In my experience, when there’s not a strong feedback channel, the process stalls. Problems surface too late in the game, forcing you to stop and fix something that could’ve been addressed months prior if people really felt invested and excited about being part of the team.
In today’s world, uncertainty has become the new normal. Yet, some companies are not only surviving but thriving by leveraging disruption as an opportunity for growth and innovation. What strategies, mindsets, and practices enable businesses to navigate chaos and come out stronger on the other side? As part of this series, we are interviewing Tom Roland.
Tom Roland leads MorganFranklin Consulting’s Technology and Transformation team to drive initiatives for our clients that accelerate successes around acquisition integration, transactions, technology implementations, and process re-engineering. Further, Tom leads the end-to-end service delivery for MorganFranklin’s carve-out offerings as well as ESG services and associated initiatives.
Tom’s client-facing role is primarily in support of multi-national organizations, and over the past 18 years, Tom has run engagements in 49 countries and delivered services across MorganFranklin’s solutions. He prides himself close collaboration with clients to properly identify challenges, understand options, institute effective governance and communication, and implement sustainable solutions to successfully scale their organization to support growth and stakeholder objectives.
Prior to joining MorganFranklin, he worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers in the firm’s assurance and advisory practice.
Tom has a BBA in accountancy from the University of Notre Dame.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
I went to school for accounting hoping to land a role that offered security and career growth without needing to move around. The possibility of getting a job in the Big Four, as an auditor, was a really attractive path to me, thinking it would suit my personality. My view was all created without me knowing what the job at all meant. When I started as an auditor, I quickly realized it wasn’t geared to be hands-on with my clients. From my perspective, my job felt more like I was hired to point out problems, not solve them — and that’s what I realized I really wanted in a role. Early on, I did work with a few clients who needed more help with their operations and were searching for a business partner to guide them toward solution implementation. That experience made me realize I wanted to pivot my career toward consultative support, partnering with exciting companies that are trying to do innovative things and really be hands-on in that.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
When I left PwC, I joined a seven-billion-dollar startup in the telecommunications sector. In my first few months, the company was piecing together parts of two businesses and forcing them together as one, which wasn’t exactly working nor setting them up for long-term success. During that process, part of my job was to evaluate and explain performance against plan. I remember one experience where our audit partner was nearly at her wit’s end over the lack of quality data and information. My company kept pushing out work that we thought “met the mark,” but the deeper I dug, the more I realized the depth of the data issues were and how the reporting we were doing was not accurate. I started spending a significant amount of my time identifying the root of the problems with our data processes and creating my own understanding of the results.
Once I got to the bottom of it all and attempted to explain to the partner the complexity of the issues, and what it would take to fix them, it helped her understand and appreciate the complication with the business. She probably felt validated that what was presented to her previously was not accurate, and the challenges and investments the company needed to do to solve the problem. That experience showed me the power of truly understanding a problem and developing strategies to engage others in shared perspective — and the real impact that can make.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Every day, businesses face new challenges that reveal we’re not working in a linear or easily understood market. Geopolitical tension, economic uncertainty, and countless other disruptions are forcing businesses to evaluate new risks in different ways. The companies that succeed are those that use multiple sets of data to make collaborative and informed decisions.
MorganFranklin Consulting helps business leaders stay mindful of where they’re going while evaluating how they’re getting there. One challenge we see is when other consulting firms provide advice from a singular perspective, such as a strategy deck with no active involvement in the project to implement the strategy. MorganFranklin Consulting brings together teams that collaborate from different vantage points, offering diverse perspectives, at times in conflict with one another, to provide a rounded assessment to guide companies through the recommendation and execution to a more complete solution.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
I think the first trait is that I’m very intellectually curious. I want to understand, seek and learn. I knew consulting was the right path for me when I discovered my tendencies, or at times obsessions, with diving into problems and familiarizing myself with the variables, was something I really enjoyed doing.
Second, I believe having conversations and building authentic relationships with associates at every level of the organization is essential. When I’ve found people that I can get past that awkwardness of hidden agendas and judgement it becomes a really great space to share ideas.
Finally, I’m a huge fan of collaborating with others who offer or come from a very different perspective I’ve never considered. Being able to get someone interested in sharing totally different perspectives, while willing to challenge and support better understanding has been key to my success. And through input from different areas of focus even in our business helps identify risks or render proposed solutions suboptimal and better informs the problem sets we have to solve or consider.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. How does your company foster a culture that embraces change and innovation during periods of uncertainty?
While we want to bring industry standards into every business, we also welcome alternative views, as they can be beneficial to where your company is headed, not just where it’s been. As an example, It only takes three Lego bricks to create 256 different combinations. So, while we’re focused on using business-standard solutions, there are countless ways to combine them for success.
Even with decades of experience, if I’m the only one talking to a client about our proposed plan, they’re missing out on many facets and perspectives they could gain in understanding a whole team with different points of view. If we have a conversation where people with diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise are actively engaged, we are way more likely to provide that complete solution I mentioned earlier.
What are the key strategies your business has used to turn market disruptions into opportunities for growth?
There’s always a desire for a multi-lens approach. In the ’90s, everyone wished they had data at their disposal. Now, we have an infinite amount of data, but it doesn’t always inform what you need to do. The key is having the lenses that not only let you see the data but also analyze it and test it against your assumptions. But the key is to understand the key drivers and hypothesis for why those drivers are relevent because if you don’t the data can confuse as much as it can guide. We bring some of these effective tools, but it’s equally important for us to help enable you to do it on your own, so you can execute even in suboptimal conditions with imperfect reports.
Can you share an example of a major pivot your company made in response to unexpected challenges, and the lessons learned from that experience?
We’re all aware of inflation’s radical impact on businesses in recent years. Our firm adapted by realizing that without cost certainty, you can’t have price certainty. Now, we advise companies to be flexible in how they market their products and offer services, leaving room for price fluctuations. It’s not always about finding a consistent answer. What’s truly effective is the ability to evaluate what’s working — and what’s not — so you know how to adapt to those changes.
How do you identify and act on emerging trends that could impact your industry before your competitors do?
We really challenge our people to balance industry perspectives, technology trends, and business objectives to answer the question, “What are we trying to solve?” In most situations, where issues arise, those three views (industry, technology, business) are misaligned. The most obvious issue is that you can’t optimize if you have misaligned objectives/outcomes with an undefined business process that lack clarity on the desired output. Further, using technology or probably more simply, using tools in ways they weren’t designed isn’t that effective, it’s more expensive and less effective. Finally, if there’s uncertainty about your objective, let’s pause on optimizing processes and systems until we fully understand what the high-priority goal is. That can be done by answering questions like, “Should we revisit the strategy?” or “Do we need to adapt our process to current market conditions?”
By continuing to focus on those three factors, and their potential differences, we create a shared knowledge set that’s more fluid, can feed into one another, and drives success around a common objective. This is where we bring different perspectives and facilitate conversations that I think we do better than our competitors.
What are your “Five Things That Leaders Can Do To Turn Uncertainty into Opportunity”?
1 . Truly understand the risk: Risk has become an overused term with an underappreciated meaning. When considering risks like market, competitive, or political risk, business leaders need to honestly evaluate what it means for them, their employees and their customers. Very often companies don’t understand the risk and therefore do nothing, doing nothing is a valid outcome, but it should be because the risk is clearly understood not because it is hard to understand.
Once companies we’ve worked with have clearly addressed their problems, we’ve been able to design potential solutions to test against those challenges. Then, as we train the client’s team, we focus on highlighting the solution’s benefits and showing how it directly addresses those pain points.
2 . Raise common awareness of the risk and its factors and key early indicators: The more people that understand what those risks and challenges are, the more people you’ll have by your side. For example, leaders need to acknowledge when their competitors launch a cheaper product that resonates more with customers. By helping the team understand this, you can work together to explain that cheaper is rarely better. We all instinctively know this, we all embrace this, but when pressed quickly we tend to think the cheaper option is the better option — all things equal, but without the all things equal part it’s likely something is lacking.
3. Create collaboration around the solution: Once you’ve raised awareness and the solution process begins, provide the team space to dive into something cool and exciting. This is the time to welcome alternative ideas. Bring stakeholders with diverse perspectives together so they can combine their puzzle pieces together in ways that wouldn’t be possible if they were working in isolation. Let them ask outlandish things, they may prove helpful later when solutions are agreed on — do they stand up to different risks well?
4 . Establish a space for feedback: Encouraging people to feel comfortable pointing out flaws and pitfalls, along with what’s working well, creates opportunities to fix issues in real-time. In my experience, when there’s not a strong feedback channel, the process stalls. Problems surface too late in the game, forcing you to stop and fix something that could’ve been addressed months prior if people really felt invested and excited about being part of the team.
5 . Leave space between the feedback and the reaction: Fixing the process in real-time doesn’t mean rushing it. Taking the time to fully understand feedback is essential, and sometimes, the best approach is to do nothing initially. You might need to test some theories before you figure out how to address the feedback effectively. For example, we’ve worked with companies needing to develop better user interface experiences, which involved re-imagining their solutions. Those companies succeeded by broadening their perspective beyond their initial user feedback that was “fine” when the reality was the user experience took too long and while comprehensive was not going to scale and, therefore result in low adoption.
What role does resilience play in your leadership approach, and how do you instill that resilience in your team?
I love this question and it relates back to something we talked about above. If you have someone that is willing to put themselves out there to tell you something about your team or your solution that isn’t going to work and they are right, what a gift to have that information to act on it. Resilience is the ability to handle and adapt to new information or different risks in your business practice. For us, we’ve seen technology partners benefit from thousands of people providing feedback on their products and services. When a client says their specific tool isn’t working, we’re not trying to pile on and put a product team down or disparage the tool, we’ll often ask them to look internally and consider, “What are we trying to change that’s preventing the system from doing what it was designed to do?”
If you’re facing challenges, has the business model shifted so much that the tool is no longer doing what is was designed to solve? Are there adjustments we can make as a business to help the tool function as intended? Software doesn’t replace people — it accelerates how transactions in our brains can operate and process information. Let the tool do its job. Sometimes, it takes trial and error. Sometimes, it’s about uncovering tangential capability. Don’t get caught up evaluating surface-level features and lose sight of what the core is meant to be.
How do you balance long-term strategic planning with the need for rapid adaptability in an unpredictable environment?
The key is to take a phased approach to growth. To maximize your company’s growth, you need a long-term strategic objective. Leave space between your budgets and strategy to clearly define the problems you’re going to solve today and build toward the vision of where you’re headed. That way, as you roll out functionality, you can reevaluate your priorities and the tools you’ve enabled.
If you’re considering a specific tool now that will scale with the business, take the time to ask questions like, “What do its core enabling processes look like? and “What are your volume drivers?” Evaluating the true break points will help guide the support you’ll need as the business begins to succeed. This approach helps you as the architect designing your company’s success.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
It’s less about my perspective and more about creating a comfortable space for people to interact and collaborate without feeling challenged. I want to be in a space to share my thoughts with the ability to completely appreciate and understand that I am entirely wrong, but that can only happen if you to feel empowered to share your differing ideas, so we work together more effectively. The most empowering experience is when both people truly appreciate the difference in experience drivers that informed the different proposed outcomes and are willing to re-evaluate the ranking of those input factors to arrive at a potentially different recommendation built on shared perspective.
A key part of this is being present and listening to those involved in the details of a problem. They often bridge the gap and provide clues for a more informed path to a solution. I was lucky to work for business founders who encouraged me to explore different ways of attacking a problem, while also challenging me when I became too fixated on my own ideas. If I suggested an idea, they would let me try and implement it, and asked me to report back on how it was going and what feedback I was receiving along the way. Now, I want to offer that same opportunity to my team and help them create that same level of excitement.
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About the Interviewer: Cynthia Corsetti is an esteemed executive coach with over two decades in corporate leadership and 11 years in executive coaching. Author of the upcoming book, “Dark Drivers,” she guides high-performing professionals and Fortune 500 firms to recognize and manage underlying influences affecting their leadership. Beyond individual coaching, Cynthia offers a 6-month executive transition program and partners with organizations to nurture the next wave of leadership excellence.
From Disruption to Domination: Thomas Roland Of MorganFranklin Consulting On How Companies Are… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.