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Cindy Gallagher joins us and shares her decision-making around taking the position of CEO at Liberty Source. With "a shortage of woman leadership” Cindy feels that it’s important to train and show the importance and need for a blend of talent at the highest levels of all organizations. Regarding her organization, she’s focused on a highly educated and underemployed segment of the population. And considering that quality talent and a lack of understanding of how to implement the future of work is in short supply, Cindy and her team are happily finding placement for US veterans and their spouses. And Cindy gives us her thoughts on intelligent automation: as opposed to taking jobs away, it’s going to change the landscape of work. Over-communicate on your journey. Ensure leadership has a long-term vision regarding intelligent automation. Put your human workforce in a leadership and ownership position of your digital workforce. Focus that digital workforce on delivering tangible goods and your human workforce on delivering quality of service.

With a goal of leveraging the innovation that takes place in Silicon Valley by collaborating with them when a new product is taking shape, Nissan’s manager of data initiatives, Najam Baig joins us. He shares that company makes cars not AI so his job is to bring in experts. He’s an expert in understanding the tools that he has and employing the right tool at the right time for the job at hand. His intent is to be as pragmatic as possible. That said he’s focused on the internal data that he’s got at his finger tips like supply chain information and couples that with external data such as social listening to inform the enterprise.

The CEO of HomeServe Membership, Greg Reed joins us and shares that the key to his business is an engaged staff. He’s happy to hear when his organization goes above and beyond and does "a little more than they’re supposed to do.” Greg explains that such behavior showcases that the employee cares about the customer and the company- and that "they’re worried about both sides versus just caring about themselves.” As far as Greg is concerned, choice and voice have led to the current reality. So with Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple "creating value for customers and really seeing customer needs and fulfilling those needs,” Greg and the organization realized they could do the same thing very, very differently. They enhanced the product, changed the terms and conditions, gave field agents new tools and the opportunity to have a new attitude and they’re realizing that "customers will pay if they get better service."

An Lommers joins us and shares that the ASML business strategy is geometric in nature. “We set this pyramid as our strategy, and we divided our pyramid in three layers. And the lower layer is our highway, so we say we have to make an automated platform, being our highway, which can be complicated, but that highway is needed to go to the second layer. And the second layer is the layer of strong analytical people. And the third layer on top are their business partners, so basically the business partners are finance people that are business partners to the business. And that's how we drive the organization, so it doesn't matter where you were, you always have to adhere to the pyramid.” An notes that the organization is in the midst of a shift from a start-up culture which brought the enterprise to world leadership to a process organization, which is a culture shock. They have a lot of innovative engineers in that, so you need to move the organization. So we have them as integrated system and we also said, 'If you wanna do it, we have to make sure that we're on one platform, that every sector is basically using that platform.' So we are now changing that platform to an upgraded version to make sure that we have a full automated process, but also include continuous monitoring in that process.

Thomas Birr joins us and shares how innogy’s innovation hub came into existence. As the SVP of Innovation and Transformation, Thomas’ goal is to ensure that he’s on top of new technologies that are coming to market as well as whatever is “behind the horizon” as he says. His centers of operations are within geographies traditionally associated with technology innovation- Silicon Valley, Berlin, Tel Aviv and London. Along with energy and mobility Thomas and his team are focused on the "human machine interaction of the future.”

Global Head of Process Excellence at Uber, Martin Rowlson joins us from PEX Europe where he shares that the region comprises 20% of the volume for the organization but 70% of the complexity. Based on the pace of change within the industry and the rate of growth at his organization, Martin's goal is to identify best practice, align best practice and build on best practices. Defining processes can’t take two weeks because "that process may have gone…literally gone."

On a life history in luxury retail, Peter Garcia joins us and shares his initial attraction was actual interaction with the client. Following in-store and design successes, Peter experienced training which provided him "a ladder with rungs to go from Point A to Point B." After making his way up that ladder at Bloomingdale's, he helped open the Mansion on Madison for Ralph Lauren which in his mind solidified the fact that he had overcome his transition from Venezuela to New York City. He shares lessons learned along the way including how to treat every customer like royalty. Peter explains, it's not about selling, it's about creating a relationship of trust and guidance through a true understanding of that customers life.