In flatlining Western economies, growth isn’t guaranteed by scale alone. This article explores how major organisations, from automotive to defence, are re-engineering their strategies, operating models, and leadership alignment to drive deliberate, customer-relevant growth. It outlines practical levers for leaders to stay competitive amid structural headwinds and organisational inertia.
Reading time: 7 minutes
In today’s economic climate, major organisations can’t expect just to inherit growth because of their scale and market position. It’s something they have to earn.
Western economies are flatlining. Competitive intensity is rising. And the old playbooks – scale, efficiency, capability-led differentiation – aren’t delivering the same returns. From super scale automotive giants to infrastructure consultancies and defence contractors, the challenge isn’t just how to grow. It’s how to grow deliberately as a sector-specialised firm – in spite of structural headwinds, organisational inertia, and saturated markets.
At Q5, we’ve been working with leaders across sectors, from automotive to infrastructure to defence, who are wrestling with this exact challenge. In turn, this article explores the deliberate, growth-focused executional and operating-model decisions that we’re seeing are effective today.
In low-growth environments, market share becomes the battleground. And to win it, organisations must become more relevant to the customers they serve.
That’s not a throwback to “customer centricity” as a buzzword. It’s a structural shift. Take Jaguar Land Rover: they’ve reorganised around four core brands, elevating brand leadership to the centre of their commercial strategy. Why? Because brand differentiation is a proxy for relevance – and relevance is what drives pricing power, margin, and loyalty.
Similarly, Arcadis is pivoting to a sector-led model, ring-fencing expertise around verticals like airports, highways, and banks. It’s not just about selling capabilities. It’s about having expert-to-expert conversations that resonate with clients’ real-world challenges.
These aren’t just strategic pivots. They’re operating model transformations.
In defence, BAE Systems isn’t chasing volume growth – the pipeline of UK side work is well understood and planned for. Instead, they’re targeting margin growth by accelerating delivery and reducing excess cost. That requires a shift in pace, mindset, and capability – especially after decades of underinvestment.
Across sectors, we see the same pattern: growth demands building a new operational ‘gearbox’. That means:
There’s a lot of talk about “taking bigger risks” to drive growth. But in our experience, the real challenge isn’t boldness – it’s comfort.
Growth in a flat market always means challenging or overturning comfortable and settled areas of the business. That might mean stepping out of familiar territory from a supply chain perspective, investing in less-proven capabilities, or repositioning the brand. All of that carries strategic as well as operational risk.
But the bigger risk is sticking with ‘inherited’ decisions, processes, or strategies that were made prior to 2023. The context has demonstrably changed for all major industrials – tariffs, cost inflation, interest rates, taxes, and supply chain disruption have all changed both the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ business cases for most businesses, and the seductive familiarity of internal habits from a different era can obscure a very different set of strategic risks.
The best leaders aren’t reckless. They’re choiceful. They make targeted bets, aligned to strategy and market dynamics. And they’re willing to change & stop things – even cherished projects – if they no longer serve the growth agenda.
In theory, every well-trained executive team knows the importance of prioritisation. In practice, few follow through.
That’s common at the start of a growth journey: leaders nod along when told they need to prioritise in the abstract, but there are always good tactical reasons why it should be someone else’s initiative that takes the fall.
I saw one particular example recently, where the ‘ultimate leader’ communicated a very clear set of overall outcomes, but the translation down through management levels became incredibly vague, and specific implications for each team were successively softened.
By the time it reached operational budgets, what had at the top been ‘strategic priorities’ had been reduced to ‘broad pillars of activity’ under which bundles of pet projects, hobby horses, and political slush funds could be hidden.
The difference between success and stagnation often comes down to alignment – not just of adjectives but of commitment to action and resources. Where growth strategies succeed, there’s:
Where they fail, misalignment at the top magnifies as it cascades – until the front line has no idea what the strategy actually is.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that growth doesn’t happen by accident. It requires deliberate choices – and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths.
Here are three unlocks we believe are essential:
These aren’t just ideas. They’re levers leaders must pull – strategy redevelopment, investment alignment, operating model redesign, and behavioural transformation – and pull hard, to make sure that they bite across and down through a complex organisational system.
Growth isn’t dead. But it’s harder than ever. The large company leaders who succeed won’t necessarily be the ones with the wildest vision – but the ones with the clearest focus, the strongest alignment, and the courage to build and use a new set of machinery.
If this resonates, let’s talk. We’re partnering with organisations across sectors to unlock deliberate, focused growth in complex markets.
Partner
Associate Partner | Defence, Nuclear & Industrials Lead
Principal Consultant
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