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Bobby Abraham joins us and gives us a sense of his transformation remit, “be ready for the future, be agile, be ready for it.” He notes that "it's down to individuals and organizations.” With the pace of change in technology intensifying investing in accelerator programs "helps leapfrog the traditional innovation that happens within larger corporations.” As far as geographic growth, using India as an example where they skipped 3G, he asks what countries can skip 3G and 4G and go right to 5G. Bobby is also a decent human, "I'm absolutely humbled by my journey and I'm always, always just glad, delighted, lots of gratitude for the wonderful bosses, the line managers I’ve had. And I think I've made most of every opportunity just out of sheer hard work and perseverance and purposefully curious."

On generational divides and similarities, Stephen Caulfield returns and shares thoughts on how each generation is starting to gain aspects of their respective colleagues from boomers to millennials, vice versa, and everything in between. And whether it's employees or customers, Stephen shares "it doesn't matter what you tell people about your company in a room at an interview, because they have already researched you online. They have gone to their source of truth to find out what the online world thinks of you. One of the things we've done within Dell EMC or Dell technology is we have a number of social media listening centers that we've put together."

Ricoh’s VP EMEA Shared Service Centres, Andrea Schaffel join us and discusses the importance of consistency, being customer-centric. She discusses how she’s shifting global centers and global center talent around her regions. Andrea shares how she’s taken in sales order processing work, planning and supply chain, administration and controlling finance activity. She shares that “in addition to the transactional work we were already doing for them, we've now taken on a higher level work.” And how no matter what she’s doing, everything comes down to "trust, emotion, relationship and control."

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Global Corporate Controller for American Express Global Business Travel joins us and updates us on his transition to that role with an overview of that business. Myriad transactions occur and "matching those transactions is no easy task.” With the volume of those transactions being so high, Manny admits that "automating the entire suite would be nirvana.” He shares that he and the team must understand what data is being captured through what technology before jumping ahead. He’s automating what can certainly be automated now, waiting on certain processes that need to be optimized and keeping his ey on cognitive machine learning solutions where he know’s he’ll eventually get “the biggest bang for the buck."

Paul Bartley joins us and gives us three things GBS executives should be doing right now. Number one is to access complete data to ensure you can accurately measure progress from your control. Number two is to remember that no matter the technology, change management is more important than the technology. And three is to keep innovating. And on innovation, branding your group goes a long way.