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The only woman to summit Mount Everest from both sides, Cathy O'Dowd joins us with her history and some life lessons for us. She was a "stubborn and adventurous kid" who stumbled into mountaineering through a content. In retrospect, everything about that first effort was wrong from the make-up of the team to the raison d'etre. Cathy speaks of setting a rule set at the formation of every team. She discusses failures as successes- not just points for learning. And that  when you're climbing a mountain, summiting a mountain is just one of the goals.

Bridging a divide, which in the future must be seamless- Kristina, from the business side is making her way into IT and Pranav, from the business side is making his way into business. Each highlights hurdles and pitfalls along the way. But the consensus is what's stated above: Moving forward, there cannot be daylight between business and IT. The two groups- no matter the enterprise- must work seamlessly as one.

Turk Telecom’s Ahmed Gul joins us and shares his experience with the 200 year old company. Ahmed and the team are trying to expand into other markets. To do so, they’re developing products and services that they’re using at first- internally. Initial returns show 40% savings. That’s Visual IVR- the team also looking into big data, digital content and myriad other applications. He and is team work as entrepreneurs within the company- and as Ahmed sees it, his job is to convince and persuade digital initiatives into existence.

Six Sigma Black Belt, Vice President at Aetna, Diane Lopes joins us and shares that she and her team are pivoting from an initiatives-focused program to a holistic system of lean management. They're calling it a business system to ensure that up and down the organization, each aspect of the enterprise feels accountable. Diane and her team want for everyone, everyday to be engaged in problem solving. It represents a cultural change to each person feeling that they must deliver value to the customer.

Recorded at SSOW in Lisbon, Caroline Basyn joins us and shares her history in transformation which includes many years at P&G, three years at Bacardi as CIO and her current role as Chief Business Services at Mondelez. The stay at Bacardi was short as Caroline explains it- she was coming from an $80B company to a $5B company and so her transformation mission was straightforward. Moving to Mondelez Caroline outlined an aggressive timeline, size and scope for transformation- four services, three years, 3,500 people- which turned into eight services and 5,000 people delivered on the initial timeline. 

From RBS, Nick Muir joins us and shares that it’s not the data that matters, it’s how you use it. He notes that the organization must find customer data wherever it is in the enterprise as there’s no point in having the data if you can’t use it to understand and interact with your customers better. He notes that AI is certainly a solution at which he’s looking but that "when it comes to AI, the investment required is probably more than is being talked about.” As a progressive-thinking organization, Nick notes that RBS wants to spend on innovation. The business has a visualized a utopic state of how they support customers. And so, yes- automation will be implemented the right way as Nick strives to have an intuitive understanding of what the customer is looking for as they interact with the company. He’s on a search for a seamless crossover between automation and human service for the customer.

Ken Telfort joins us and shares that success and results open peoples eyes to the truth. He further shares that transformation is led by results and success of continuous improvement. Finding the problems and solutions to match and showcasing that problems are being solved through visual management is key. Involving front line employees in the transformation process is key. And understanding that all problems aren’t born equal is key. Those keys lead Ken to the Rule of Three which is- “let’s focus on only three key metrics and deliver."

The current Senior Director of HR Services & Solutions at Chewy joins us. At the moment, he’s only been with Chewy for a short while which is why he shares a fair amount of his experience at his former position- with Amazon. He shares that your amazing Amazon customer experience (which from their point of view is termed 'customer obsession') has obviously been the focus of the organization- but that CX coupled with acquisitions has left back office on the bottom of the list. That said, if you’ve ever seen an Amazon employee present at an event- it’s an entrepreneurial place- and if you want to fix something, they’ll let you focus on a solution if it makes sense. And when prompted he offered some solutions for you: 1. stop pretending that you understand your customer’s experience if you’ve not experienced it yourself. 2. Focus on your job at hand while breaking down the walls of communication. 3. Don’t measure customer experience with off-the-shelf solutions.