As we at The Clarion Group have worked with our clients to help them achieve the leverage they want out of these centers, we’ve found it helpful to talk of Centers of Acceleration, sources of meaningful help that truly accelerate the progress of each business unit that takes advantage of them. Before we look at the characteristics of our Centers of Acceleration, let’s examine what organizations set out to accomplish with their Centers of Excellence.

Centers of Excellence were originally conceived as shared services, where expertise could be aggregated for efficiency gains and made available to help business units. The premise was that certain functions had to be centralized because:

• Supply of the required expertise was limited due to market realities or company choice,
  
  
• The business units did not need the expertise on an ongoing basis, although they needed it to get started and for technical and strategic advice from time to time.

So the Centers of Excellence arose as a means of taking the specific, specialized expertise of a group and leveraging it across many business units.

The functions typically considered for Centers of Excellence were of three types: administrative functions (Benefits, Diversity, or Planning), functions more fundamentally rooted in the profit and loss equation (Research and Development, Pricing, or Marketing), or the highly technical functions embedded in any one of the broader functions (Benefits Design or Plastics Engineering, for example).

What Went Wrong
How is it that such a clear and obviously good idea was so often ineffective when put into practice?

In working with our clients, we saw that many of them were co-blending the concept of Centers of Excellence with traditional staff functions. The clients were frustrated because, although they knew the staff areas possessed the necessary expertise, the Cent-ers were not able to share it effectively with the business units. To the contrary, the Centers actually seemed to be hampering the business growth of the units.

What we observed was that the problem lay in how the people in the business units perceived the Centers of Excellence. They tended to think of the representatives as “corporate staff” who had more of a control role than an assistance role. More specifically, we found that while the Center of Excellence people did possess the needed functional expertise, they also held enterprise-wide accountability for their functions. As a result, they tended to serve their accountability first, which necessarily interfered with their ability to reorient themselves to serve the business units. They were simply too vested in their corporate-level initiatives and policies to listen to the business units and to understand their needs.

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