Strategy in Action — Close the Mandate Gap at Hibernia Climate Systems

A four-round, advanced general-management strategy simulation set inside Hibernia Climate Systems, the €480M Building & Energy Systems division of Dublin-listed Boyne Industrial Group. A new group CEO has issued a binding three-year mandate: lift return on invested capital (ROIC) from 11% to 16% and grow revenue from 2% to 8% per year — while cutting Hibernia's capital envelope 20% to €48M and reweighting bonuses toward growth. As the business-unit Managing Director you have one strategic-planning cycle, modelled as four rounds, to (1) diagnose the strategy gap — decompose ROIC into margin and capital-turn drivers, rank the equipment, installation and service segments, and quantify the ~€95M revenue / ~5 ROIC-point Year-3 gap; (2) commit to ONE coherent strategic direction among Volume/scale (heat-pump capacity), Servitization (recurring service revenue, higher margin, lower capital intensity) or Premium/differentiation (integrated low-carbon systems) — and state what Hibernia will stop doing; (3) design the planning and control system that actually delivers it — a focused KPI set, incentive reweighting across the conflicting commercial, finance and operations functions, planning cadence (annual budget vs rolling forecast vs milestone), and a parent control style (financial / strategic control / strategic planning à la Goold & Campbell) the financial-control parent will actually use; and (4) allocate the constrained €48M against €78M of investment demand across the three live cases plus working capital, then defend a Year-1/2/3 ROIC-and-growth path to the group board. Operationalising Pat Gibbons' thesis that strategy becomes real only through the planning and control system, the math rewards a committed direction whose control system and capital pattern are mutually consistent, and punishes the five classic errors — strategy-without-system, hedging across all three archetypes, ignoring the capital cut, scorecard inflation a financial-control parent overrides, and treating the three functions as one team. Final KPIs track ROIC, Revenue Growth, Strategic Fit and Capital committed against the hard €48M cap.