Paul Cantwell is a Partner in Oliver Wyman’s Financial Services Practice in the Americas.
He co-leads our global Sustainable Cost Management platform which is helping our clients to bend their cost curve in a way that is aligned to their strategic growth objectives.
Cutting costs is not hard — what is hard is adjusting the organization, it’s metrics, alignment and incentives so that the costs don’t just re-emerge. Economists call this “bending the Cost Curve”. What is also tough is pulling off the simultaneous equation of both banking early saves and freeing up investment capacity to create the future. We are often called in to help our clients shape their initiatives to help solve these two problems.
After his early career as a technologist, Paul has spent the last 25 years working at the intersection of technology, strategy, and change, with a strong focus on managing the human and organizational change.
To quote one of my colleagues “any organization is perfectly optimized around the performance it is currently delivering”. Interventions like span of control, delayering, or simple cost reduction targets tend not to create “sustainable” cost management. Forward thinking management teams get this and are looking to deliver engineering rigor to “optimize the organization for the performance they want to deliver”.
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