Leaders Share Keys To Business Transformation

Michelangelo once said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Five centuries later Michelangelo’s insight on transformation holds true, as today’s business leaders seek to discover new creations from their blocks of human and digital assets.

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In seeking the wisdom of today’s leaders, on June 6, 2017 in San Francisco, I moderated a panel of five experts on transformation. They defined transformation, advised on best practices and shared insights from their company journey. The panelists were:

• Julie Bornstein, Chief Operating Officer, Stitch Fix

• Greg Bradley, Global Head of Transformation, North Highland

• Vanessa Colella, Head of Ventures and Chief Innovation Officer, Citi

• Enrique Lores, President, Imaging, Printing and Solutions Business, HP

• Terry Jones, Founding CEO, Travelocity & Co-founder and Chairman, Kayak

Robert Reiss: How do you define transformation?

Terry Jones: Redeploying the assets you have in a new market or industry.

Vanessa Colella: A change required to do something exponentially better.

Julie Bornstein: Creating a business opportunity that can draw in new customers to the business or is able bring back lost customers.

Enrique Lores: Transformation is about creating value for customers and shareholders. The best way to create value for customers is by figuring out how to offer them something they want before they know they want it.

Greg Bradley: The journey and process undertaken by an organization to reinvent some or multiple aspects of its business that will yield a measurably different future.

Reiss: What advice do you have to those who seek to transform enterprise?

Bradley: Don't mistake activity for progress. Reorganizing and doing lot of “transformation” initiatives will only create the ‘illusion of progress’ and produce ‘confusion’ if there’s not a clear and compelling case for change with a strategy that has defined measurable results.

Colella: Rather than tackling everything at once, do a little at a time and pay attention to what is already working in your business that should stay. It can be hard to get passionate about something that’s challenging to solve. Start your transformation with something that excites you and your team and make sure you know whether you’re disrupting or being disrupted.

Lores: Transformation requires you to give people the opportunity to contribute, to add personal value and to feel invested in the change. You need to prove that transformation is not about changing from the top down, but instead that it will benefit everyone — and to accomplish this you must enable every voice to be heard. As part of what I call a “Print Renaissance” at HP, we embraced the transformation of our business as a personal belief, which encourages everyone to consider it personal and something they are passionate about. Keep in mind, transformation is not a substitute for leadership — they go hand in hand, and without strong and steady leadership, any transformation is at risk of failure.

Jones: Companies need to act more like organisms than machines, take everything in and adapt. In order to succeed in transformation, you need to turn the org structure on its side and pour the Internet in. And be accepting of failure. If there's no failure there's no change.

Bornstein: It starts with talent and leadership. Those who will drive transformation have to have a seat at the top leadership table. The CEO needs to believe, and make the tough choices, trade-offs and changes. And the incentives need to align to create change.

Reiss: How does transformation relate to your business?

Lores: Transformation might not look exciting initially, so you have to find something that supports the idea of transformation and connects it back to customer emotions. For example, HP leads the industry in printers, so how do you reinvent the old idea of what a printer should be? The answer: Focus on the output instead of the device, shifting the concept from printers, paper and ink to the creation of memories and experiences.

Colella: At Citi we believe there are four characteristics to focus people on during a transformation: be curious, be empathetic, do your best to bring in diverse perspectives, be brave.

Jones: Travel distribution has been completely transformed by digital and travel is now the largest sector in ecommerce. Mobile is transforming it again, with almost 50% of bookings coming via mobile. The next frontier is AI and it looks like that will reshape the buying process once again.

Bornstein: At Stitch Fix, we believe that the combination of machine learning and human stylists will transform the way people shop. By learning the taste, budget, size and fit preferences of our clients, we are able to shop for them. 100% of our products are hand selected for each client. We've created personal styling at scale, so women and men everywhere can have a personal shopper.

Bradley: The management consulting industry has seen significant change in the last 10-15 years. At North Highland, we have been applying the advice we give our clients and transforming our business, particularly as it relates to our operating model, our human capital, and our technology.

… In summary, like Michelangelo, the CEO’s job is still uncovering the statue inside the stone. The secret of today’s Transformative CEO is first predicting how the dramatic digital advances will change the physical properties of the stone itself; then, the CEO can determine the correct business models to build the business statues of the future that will positively impact, business, the economy and society.

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