Business Reviews: Why Large Organizations Must Transform Their Approach in 2025

When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, Nokia held nearly 50% of the global mobile phone market and their leadership felt seemingly confident in not reacting to this event. By the time Nokia realized they had to pivot (which was four years later), their share had already plummeted to around 15%. Today, Nokia has lost its relevance in the mobile device market. 

While Nokia failed to adapt, Netflix demonstrates the power of rapid strategic pivots. When the company announced its streaming-first strategy in 2011, CEO Reed Hastings pointed out that the company needed to radically pivot toward streaming to stay ahead of market changes. And by 2021, they had grown from 23 million to over 200 million subscribers worldwide, while former video giant Blockbuster had disappeared.

Similar scenarios play out daily across all industries. While markets move at digital speed, many large organizations still rely on business review cycles designed for a slower, more predictable era. 

The result? Billions in lost opportunities and market share erosion that could have been prevented with more responsive review processes.

Think about everything that has changed since the beginning of this year, and what it would be like to only react to these changes now. How would things be different if you had course-corrected when they happened? If you had checked in every six or even every three months?

The fact is, traditional review cycles are too slow for modern business dynamics, creating significant strategic and financial risks. Annual business reviews (ABRs), once the backbone of strategic control, have become a potential liability in today's fast-moving markets.

The Critical Impact of Modern Business Reviews on Enterprise Success

Market volatility and interconnected business ecosystems demand faster, more informed strategic decisions. While traditional organizational structures struggle with this new reality, leading companies are transforming their business reviews into dynamic strategic steering mechanisms. The goal is to bridge the growing gap between long-term strategy and short-term execution needs.

“The best way of dealing with today's uncertainty is to shorten our planning and review cycles”, emphasizes the CFO from a major automotive supplier.

In addition, economic pressures are exposing the hidden costs of delayed strategic decisions. The market cost of inaction is growing—Nokia is only one example. Organizations maintaining traditional review processes are increasingly finding themselves at a strategic disadvantage, missing market opportunities that more agile competitors capture.

This raises the question of how organizations should transform their review processes. The answer isn't simply to schedule more meetings—it's to fundamentally reimagine how business reviews serve strategic needs and ensure organizational health. Organizational health in this context describes how efficiently leaders manage the organization—encompassing decision-making, resource allocation, daily operations, and team leadership—with the aim of achieving both short-term results and long-term success.

A McKinsey study reveals that firms maintaining organizational health will outperform their peers:

• Healthy organizations deliver three times the Total Shareholder Return (TSR) over the long term, regardless of industry.
• In mergers, healthy organizations see a 5% median increase in TSR, while unhealthy organizations experience a 17% decline.
• Companies that improved their organizational health achieved an 18% increase in EBITDA after one year.
• Organizations embedding health initiatives in transformation programs achieved 35% higher TSR over 18 months.
• During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthy organizations were 59% less likely to face financial distress compared to unhealthy ones.

A Framework for Implementing Effective Business Reviews

Let's first examine what isn't working: Traditional business reviews follow a predictable annual or quarterly cadence. These formal meetings, often characterized by extensive PowerPoint presentations and backward-looking financial metrics (what we call “lagging indicators”), were designed for a more stable business environment. In today's rapidly evolving markets, this approach creates dangerous blind spots and delays.

However, three key shifts have transformed how leading organizations approach business reviews today:

1. From annual to adaptive: Traditional annual planning cycles with rigid quarterly check-ins are giving way to more flexible, responsive review frameworks.
2. From activities to outcomes: Where traditional reviews focused on project status and activity reporting, modern reviews prioritize business outcomes and customer value.
3. From manual to data-driven: The days of spending weeks manually aggregating data from various departments are ending. Leading organizations now leverage real-time data and analytics to drive more informed, timely decisions while reducing preparation overhead by up to 70%.

To address these challenges while maintaining organizational alignment, leading companies have adopted a multi-tiered review system that balances strategic oversight with operational agility. This approach operates on three distinct levels:

1. Quarterly Strategic Reviews: These reviews focus on the performance of major business units, strategic shifts, and resource allocation decisions—made by the C-suite, Business Unit heads and strategy leads. The goal is to analyze market performance data, strategic KPIs (leading and lagging ones), and resource utilization patterns to make enterprise-wide decisions that shape the organization's direction.
2. Monthly Business Unit Reviews: These two to three-hour sessions involve Business Unit leadership, Function heads, and Program managers who examine execution progress, ensure cross-functional alignment, and address emerging risks. The reviews rely on program metrics, operational KPIs, and resource forecasts to maintain momentum between quarterly strategic sessions.
3. Bi-weekly Program/Initiative Reviews: These reviews enable rapid execution adjustments. Initiative owners, key stakeholders, and project managers meet for one to two hours to focus on detailed execution challenges, immediate adjustments, and dependency management. These sessions use project metrics, risk logs, and resource tracking data to ensure continuous progress toward strategic goals.

While the principles are clear, implementing them successfully in a large organization requires careful planning and execution. The following case study of DB Schenker indicates how a global leader successfully navigated this transformation.

How DB Schenker Successfully Transformed Their Business Reviews

As a global logistics leader with over 76,000 employees across 130 countries, DB Schenker exemplifies how large organizations can successfully transform their business review process. Their journey began in their Contract Logistics division, where they implemented a more dynamic approach to strategic planning and reviews using OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

The transformation focused on four key elements:

• Moving from annual to quarterly planning and review cycles,
• Creating clear connections between strategic goals and day-to-day work,
• Creating transparency across all organizational levels,
• Implementing real-time progress tracking.

The results were compelling:

• 20% increase in goal achievement, primarily due to clearer alignment between strategic objectives and day-to-day work.
• 36% improvement in teams' ability to focus on priorities, achieved through more frequent review cycles and clearer success metrics.
• 47% better detection of cross-functional dependencies, enabling teams to address potential roadblocks before they impact execution.
• Significant improvement in employee engagement, with team members reporting greater clarity about how their work contributes to company strategy.

These improvements weren't just metrics—they represented real operational gains. Teams could better align their daily work with strategic objectives, adjust course when needed, and identify potential roadblocks before they impact execution.

DB Schenker continues to expand this approach across their organization, aiming to standardize strategy implementation globally.

Starting Your Business Review Transformation

Transforming business reviews requires careful change management and a clear implementation plan. Based on successful transformations like DB Schenker's, here are the critical first steps:

1. Assess Your Current State
   • Map your existing review cycles and their effectiveness
   • Identify specific bottlenecks in decision-making
   • Calculate the cost of delayed strategic decisions
2. Design Your Review Cycle
   • Decide frequency and participants (Who + When?)
   • Set reporting standards (What?)
   • Create decision-making framework (How?)
3. Start Small, Learn Fast, Adapt Continuously
   • Begin with a single business unit or region
   • Experiment what works and what doesn't
   • Integrate with existing processes and routines

Remember: The goal isn't to add more meetings—it's to make better decisions faster. Start your transformation where the impact will be most visible and the resistance least strong.

For practical resources and templates to support your transformation, visit our Business Review Hub.