Courtesy of Christopher Hodges' below is a transcript of his speaking session on 'How to use Noble Automation to improve your business and stop the great resignation' to Build a Thriving Enterprise that took place at the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Summit in Financial Services Live.

Session Information:

How to use Noble Automation to improve your business and stop the great resignation

Noble Automation Now is both a call to action and a holistic approach to achieving more success by combining Intelligent Automation with inspired leadership. Employing Noble Automation leads to more financial services product and service innovation, higher employee engagement and successful business transformation. Automation and AI are essential now and will be even more so in the future. Market risks are real and ubiquitous. Helping humans be heroes in this age of automation is the key to serving all stakeholders, improving the bottom line and stopping the great resignation. Fear and struggles give way to excitement and success. 

Leadership takeaways: 

• How to improve your business with Noble Automation 
• Where to start with Intelligent Automation projects
• What can go wrong, ruining the project and your career
• How Noble Automation can stop the great resignation
• How to help humans be heroes - including you!

Session Transcript:

The presentation started with Jack Welch.

Jack Welch was the number-one CEO of the 20th century, and he had a problem.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, because this is a presentation about succeeding with technology and inspiring, innovating, motivating the people you work with while becoming more profitable.

This presentation is made up in three parts.

The first part is a challenge, or a roadblock.

The second part is a solution or an inspiration.

And the third part is a success, and an example of how we can all benefit from these ideas and implement them in a way that will help our business.

So let me go back to the roadblock.

And if I could, I'd like to ask everyone on the call, you don't have to say it, or type it into the chat or type of question, but if you can just think to yourself these three big things.

So I'd like you to think about what your first big job was, this one, What's your first big success was?

That's two.

And what your first big disappointment was.

That's three.

And guess what? We'll come back to those things. So it's 996, and I'm an active duty, US. Naval officer serving in London.

I'm about to stop working for an admiral and start working for a general.

Well, you might have this romantic view of what the Navy looks like.

Truth was I was on shore duty, and I was finishing a graduate degree.

Most importantly, I was about to join Jack Welch in the period of six sigma.

six Sigma in 19 96 was what AI, intelligent automation. Blockchain distributed. Fine.

That's that's how much excitement there was about six Sigma at that time especially because Jack Welch supported it, so I was pretty excited to be making that transition.

So there I was, I had graduate school loans that were enormous.

I had two kids and a wife and I still went out and extended myself to buy a brand-new Volvo.

You might ask yourself, why would you do something that wreckless when you don't have the money to do it?

Well, the answer is, I had grown up valuing three primary things when I think about my future career quality stability and Fatherly preys.

Well, quality was going to be six Sigma, Fatherly Praise, Hopefully, it was going to be Jack Welch. And six in working in GE and six Sigma. And stability. You got it was going to be this mobile.

So I moved my family from Europe to Silicon Valley.

No, this building wasn't there at the time.

Perfect fit for an Asian Anglo family, which is what my family is.

Unfortunately, we couldn't afford to rent or we couldn't afford to buy but can only afford to rent the house while you were there. And when you rent, you can't usually have a dog. So, we're gonna have a dog.

The goal, though, became the family pet, and that was fine. So for three years, two states, and four houses later in this period and GE. I finally landed my first big executive job with GE.

And it was going to be to run a business and six Sigma, and a newly acquired GE financial services business in Tokyo.

So this conference was all about financial services. This is a financial services story.

So my Japanese wife was thrilled, she was delighted to be back in a place that she'd gone to college and lived.

And so as I, frankly, there's gonna be big adventure until I met my boss at the welcoming reception at the restaurant.

Maybe you've been to the top of the ANA hotel in Tokyo.

It's tough and yaki restaurants.

So think of like benihana, but instead of flying things and burning onions and that kind of thing, the most drama the Japanese do is they put live shrimp on a grill and cover them with it.

Chrome dish. You can hear this shrimp screaming. It's really, really difficult.

But it's live freshmen fresh fish for shellfish.

So I got up yellow, extended my hand on the on the top of the building and said, I'm here to help you run six Sigma and e-business.

I thought that was exciting, I'd never met my boss report.

And then my boss kind of a big guy looked at me and he said, well, that's too bad because the only thing I don't care about, it's six Sigma.

Any business.

Now, I don't know about you, but all that enthusiasm evaporated pretty darn fast as I suddenly realized this was going to be a rough time.

And instead of feeling enthusiastic and a young guy who had just gotten a big job, I felt like one of the shrimp on the grill.

So when the dinner was over and I went back to the hotel room, I thought of saying, to my wife, we really need to reconsider this job. This isn't going to go well.

But when I walked in the door, she was so delighted to be in Tokyo, that I I just said, well, I'm gonna make this work, somehow, I'm gonna make this work.

But that left me with a dark moment and a dark problem.

And that problem was, I had a Volvo back in the United States with no place to store it. And it was going to be insanely expensive if I shifted from the United States to Japan. And as I told you, I was already in debt at this point, right?

But I ask, ask yourself, would you abandon the family pet or sell the family pet in another country because you took another job?

Well, no, you simply don't do that. So I spent money, I didn't have, And I ship the Volvo to Japan.

And during the day, I think Leslie worked on E business and six Sigma.

And though I loved those jobs, I didn't seem to get much appreciation for it.

But on the weekends, thankfully I had them all up. So I could drive all around Japan and see all these places. My wife could show me all these places in her home country.

It was super exciting.

12 months later, Jack Welch decides to come to Japan and hold court on all of the GE businesses. So, that's aircraft engines and all the finance businesses, everybody, right in Japan.

We were a financial services business, and he did it at the four Seasons Hotel, which is a beautiful place in Japan, this beautiful garden in the middle of the city.

So my boss realizing that Jack Welch was coming, and we had to talk about each function.

He said to me, OK, Chris, you get two slides and five minutes to talk about E business and six Sigma.

That's two functions in two slides in five minutes.

I don't know about you, but when your whole career is on the line and all you get is a very limited window of time, you work on it. So I worked very hard to make that presentation as good as I could make it.

And as tightly as I could focus on what needed to be said, you know, think to yourself, anytime you've had that limited amount of time and kind of a make or break situation, right? Well, that's the situation I was in.

So, the day finally arrived, and Jack said in the center of this table at the top of the hotel, and we all wait, our turn to speak. We would all sit at the table and then he was excuse everybody. The new group would come back in.

So, finally, somewhere Mid-morning, he flips over a page and he says, OK, Chris, what have you got?

Not Showtime. Right?

Well, this is what it looked like.

Vision. My pulse. Quick and my focus was absolutely dead in front of me. I'm still a really young guy. This guy is the business, God of the world, at the time. I guess it's not the first time I've met him, but I get through the presentation.

He asks really, two difficult questions.

We had just implemented the first document approval process, electronic document approval process ever done in Japan, which I thought was a big deal at the time.

Now, it seems trivial, but at the time, it seemed like a big deal.

He asked these two questions. I got the right answers.

He writes best page across the top of my PowerPoint slides.

Now, I don't know about you.

I would have climbed across the desk to get hold of that.

In fact, because of that, I would have crawled through broken glass for Jack Welch, was working, come with saint ... later some degree.

And he writes, best page on my slide.

It was an amazing moment, I resisted the temptation.

I didn't jump across the table. Grabbed this slide in my career, in one fell swoop.

Then as the meeting came to an end, we all stood up from our chairs. It was a very full room, at the time. And I kind of walked past my boss, like Whisper, Close. He was up against the wall at that point.

He didn't even make eye contact with me, I mean, not attaboy Nothing didn't even make eye contact with me.

I was crushed.

I thought, you know, what, can I do here? Always glamorous International Hotel stuff. It's pretty meaningless if nobody gives a **** about what you're doing.

And that's exactly what happened.

So, ask you fear in that situation, how do you feel if you're trying to do something like that, so, the level of appreciation you get?

It's pretty de motivating, and it was pretty demotivating, then.

That's when I realized that Jack had a problem.

It was a small problem for him, but it was a big problem for me.

Is that his two top priorities in the business, six Sigma in any business?

He had some leaders who didn't agree with, and behind their back, they say all kinds of things, right? But either they didn't bring: I had to pay that price.

Well, Jack left a few years after that. let's left the company inserted.

I, not specifically for that reason, but I have to admit it was motivating.

But when I left, what I took with me was a passion for quality transformation and leadership to get people motivated and excited.

Well, this story story I just told you as many years ago, so many things are different today.

So let's talk about some of those things that are different today.

Well, one thing that's different is this was just the ending of the Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie. And, of course, it was a myth. They couldn't find anything in this giant mess of a warehouse, that is now the entire global supply chain.

So I used to be a movie, and a myth is Now reality.

I think it's different, is, the entire workforce has changed, either in the, in the categories, on the right-hand side of this page.

And the people who are the up and coming leading executives, people on this phone call, are of the categories in the red circle.

And guess what?

Those people, you, if you're one of them, you don't put up with that kind of garbage from a leader that I got.

You just walk out the door, something else.

The technology we did for electronic document approval.

Those sophisticated at the time, is nothing compared to what automation, electronics, robots. All of the data we have the artificial intelligence can do today. It pales in comparison.

And unfortunately, it scares the **** out of people.

That's a big difference.

But there are some things that are still the same. And we can talk a little bit about what some of those are.

According to McKinsey, 70% of all business transformations fail.

And we are doing those transformations faster than we've ever done them before.

So what that means is, we're destroying value faster and faster, all the time.

I think, how long can that be perpetuated? That's a big problem. What are we talking about over the next three days? Business transformation.

Another thing that hasn't changed, there are millions and millions of young, motivated people in businesses all over the world, especially in financial services, business businesses, who are feeling completely de motivated they long for adventure.

But they are living lives of quiet desperation, as Henry David Thoreau would say.

And why is that?

Well, the answer is, there are still too many bosses like the one I had in Tokyo who simply don't care enough about what these people are doing.

So that gives us a really big question.

What does it all mean?

Here we are. We have three days in front of us. And I think the answer is very clear. I think the answer is that business transformations are more important than they've ever been. Technology is driving disruption everywhere.

Well, if they're more important than they've ever been, what's it going to take to get support behind them?

And I think the answer to that is that humans long, to be heroes.

And that takes us to the second part of this presentation.

The second part, it's about making heroes.

And why do we want to make heroes?

Because if we don't, we're going to return the offices This isn't just because they're working virtually, we're going to return to offices with nobody there.

The Millennials will walk out the door and say I'm not doing this. Look at the great resignation. That's exactly what it's about.

People are saying, This is not rewarding to me.

However, what is rewarding is, if they can be heroic at work, then life.

What do I mean by heroic? So, they have to have a K fly through the sky. The x-ray vision?

No, Of course, not. That's not the point. It's a great picture, but that's not the point.

The point is that a hero is a person who realizes more of their potential than the average person and achieves some inspirational goal, including conquering their lesser selves.

So, let me pause, think about that for yourself.

If you thought every day you are on the path to becoming better than you were before and conquering you're less yourself.

How motivated would you be?

Let me take you to Joseph Campbell.

The fourth Joseph Campbell died, he was the leading authority in the world on world myths.

He had studied myths all over the world, not every myth, but he studied hundreds of different locations and different myths. And what he found was a pattern, a consistent pattern in all of these different countries over all these periods of time. And he wrote a book called The Hero With a Thousand Faces thousand Faces because every different place a different name for their hero.

And then what he found was what he called the hero's journey.

The hero's journey is this repeatable pattern and I promise I'm going to tie this right back to your financial services business. So it's the hero's journey.

You know the hero's journey already and you know one for movies and books. So here's just four examples of thousands I could come up with.

Well I'd have to work pretty hard for thousands the hub. The **** identity, the matrix series, Harry Potter.

Uh, I guess I could go on and on of all the different stories. Every one of those stories, those four stories.

All follows the hero's journey.

Well, what about real people, right?

You say, well, these are all movies and make believe, Well, look at these people on the screen and you probably know everybody but one person on the screen, right, you know, Amelia Earhart, you know Martin Luther King, Madame Curie you know these people on the screen. You don't know, however, what you don't know is the people on the screen, men, women, black, white, Indian, gay, or straight.

Every one of these people followed a hero's journey.

Here's one you don't know.

Her name is Sunita Williams. Sunita Williams happens to be a female astronaut.

Who has spent more time on the International Space Station?

Then I spent on an aircraft carrier.

Why does that matter? Because she's the only member of my class from the Naval Academy who became an astronaut. And I know personally what the hero's journey she took in a male dominated world to succeed on the International Space Station and in NASA.

So the hero's journey is real. It's not just books. It's not just make believe and famous people like Winston Churchill.

Well, what do I mean by the hero's journey? Well, the hero's journey is this basic circle, but rather than get lost in the details, let me just start with the first thing.

The hero's journey begins with a call to adventure.

Watch a call to adventure.

It's that thing.

Then in the middle of the night, wakes you up, or you think about, in your subconscious, or you're out running, or doing yoga, or whatever you're doing, walking and you think, I really should do this thing. Whatever that thing is.

And what that thing does is, it separates you from the known to the unknown. It begins the adventure.

It begins the her hero's journey and if you don't answer that phone, that ringing call that vibrating in your pocket, that is the call to adventure, it won't go away.

He'll just keep reading, and you can come up with all kinds of reasons, but it'll keep going.

What does it look like when you make that separation? When you grab hold of that new thing, that new adventure? Well, you know, examples, it's Neo in the matrix when he takes the red pill.

Once he takes the red pill, the world is never the same.

Again, it's Harry Potter when he suddenly realizes, Whoa, I have magic, And suddenly things start happening in this world.

It's also Luke Skywalker when he comes back to the farm, and he realizes things will never be the same again.

That is going from the known to the Unknown and its separation in the hero's journey. The next phase is called Initiation.

Initiation is where that person is suddenly learning, the new ways of the place they become. They do now adapt, there are no longer in the known, what does the initiation look like?

It looks like, look, when he gets the lightsaber and says, I had no idea, I could do this for Harry Potter when he says, I had no idea I could do that.

But how much a real company, and your real job?

Well, this is what it looks like at work.

It's when this young woman, or the man on the right, first leads the team meeting, or first speaks out in a subject, it's difficult and complicated. Maybe it's intelligent automation that are embracing. Maybe it's some new technology, some new idea that is a hero's journey for that individual person that morning. That person had never done that before.

That evening they had they were a transcendent person. Maybe it's a CEO buying a new company and doing an M&A.

Maybe it's a person taking on their first executive job that is a hero's journey.

But on every hero's journey and at every initiation to get through that that initiation phase, you have to face the dragon.

What Joseph Campbell realized, is the dragon, though different in some cultures, in the in the image, the dragon represents the thing you are the most afraid of.

So in the myth, it's fire, breathing and huge, a dangerous, and it scares the **** out of you, right? Well, of course, it's going to be that way. In real life, it's only fear.

But if you just said, I'm afraid, you'd feel perfect.

So instead, you say, it's a fire, breathing, horrible thing that can blow up my entire life and make it up to be something bigger than it actually is.

But in reality, every hero's journey must pass through facing the dragon.

And once you face the dragon, maybe it's the fear of standing up and speaking in a team meeting. Maybe it's the fear of saying to an employee, I have some difficult feedback I need to give you on your job performance or whatever.

It happens to be just has to be difficult miscarry that is the Dragon and the hero's journey and initiation.

So in order, once you finish the initiation, the last phase is the return.

You've now conquered and faced your dragon and you come back to your tribe with a treasure, or an accomplishment, or just to transcend itself, you're better than you were before.

And you know what that looks like in movies? It looks like this. You come back and you get awards hung on your neck.

Or you win a prize or you get promoted or whatever it happens to be or you're just a better person than you were before.

That's the end of one hero's journey and now, you can all be like Bilbo Baggins and you can go back to the Shire and sit in the Shire.

Drink a lot of wine. Eat a lot of food and be, you know, full time and happy. You might have been. But what Joseph Campbell has told us, is that, of course, that is not what human beings are meant to be.

until time runs out.

You get more hero's journey is offered to you by the call to adventure.

It may be the next day, maybe the next month, but that call to adventure is waiting for you. If it's not.

You're likely on the way down, right.

So I told you this is a three part story.

Here's the third, this is now the three parts I've said.

Here's a success story.

So that success story happens to start Stockholm Sweden in 20 17 in a financial services business, Multiple product, financial services, business.

And it starts with two potential heroes facing the same bad thing: the call to adventure, in the case of a young man named ..., who is the head of Operations, and a CEO and his first CEO, job name, gustaf, They were both facing these numbers, very different levels of the organization, But facing the same big challenge, the company's performance, was not good, and they need to do something about it.

Their call to adventure was, what do you can do about this red line?

Well, the dragons that these two men happened to face were different because they were in different levels. The CEO, even though he's in Stockholm, Sweden and Suis generally congenial people to work with.

There are also some very competitive executives at that leadership team who all have their own agendas. And Gustaf has to figure out how to overcome all those competing agendas, to get things to move forward.

And if you haven't read the Prince from Niccolo Machiavelli you, I'm sure certainly, you know the name Machiavelli.

Yes. Completely different set of dragons.

Yeah, it's just now in operations. Which is complex. There's all kinds of stuff going on, and the minute somebody mentions introducing new technology or automation, everybody's terrified about job loss.

So, the drag in the space is fear and concern about what he's actually going to face going forward.

two different men. two different dragons.

And on top of that, Swedish businesses are not particularly aggressive.

Sometimes they can be very risk averse, kind of like a Volvo.

Anyway, the way ...

tells me this story, they get on the bottom of an elevator, didn't have this many floors, but I couldn't find a picture with your floors. They happen to get on the bottom of the elevator to go to the top of the building together, and in a very short conversation, the CEO of being polite says, Morgan.

Yes, and how is operations?

Well, as they stepped off the elevator, they shouldn't talk for several minutes.

And when that ended up happening, the CEO found a potential young hero and yes, found the opportunity of a lifetime.

So what was that?

Well, right as the two men, parted, Gustaf says to yes, I like the idea of implementing technology and some of the ways you're thinking, you have a month to come up with a good plan, A concrete plan and if you don't do it, we're going to have to take dramatic action.

Everybody knows what dramatic action means, means you couldn't make it work and you've got to fire people. It's ugly.

So, as yens walks away, he sees two things in his mind.

He says I have an incredible opportunity and I have an incredible amount of danger.

What am I going to do?

Well, this is where timing can be magic.

I had recently moved to Scandinavia. I'd become the Intelligent Automation Leader for Accenture and then Deloitte. I was completely up to speed on what all these intelligent automation tools were. And I didn't know anything about yann's and Gustav's particular business there for their individual company.

The two of us met, Yes, and I sat together and had a conversation.

And there's something about luck.

What I mean by that is, I think of luck is somewhat like surfing and and I'm not a big surfer or anything, but.

So think of luck this way. If you put yourself in the right place, at the right time, amazing things can happen. You go out on a surfboard. And you go out too far in the ocean, and you wait for the big wave.

It just passes underneath you.

There's no right, There's no excitement. There's no exhilaration.

On the other hand, if you're too close to the shore and put yourself in the wrong place, in other words, your timing is bad.

The wave will crush you and maybe drown you for that matter, but if you get the timing just right.

It can look like this.

You paddle and kick, you jump on that board, and that is the experience you get.

That's exciting if your timing is right. Well, the timing was really ripe for events. And for me to sit down and talk. And what we did is we shape the plan over the month so that he could go back to Gustav and say, here's how I can address all the stakeholders that are critical that you need me to address your senior leadership team, the customers, the colleagues, the people in the community.

Hey, those are all seas.

All of those things together, a plan that will do that. So we don't have to take drastic action, right?

Well, that's fantastic, because then, when he was ready, he went back to gustaf.

And he said, CEL, boss, they're pretty informal in Sweden, but I'm still re-assuring, still call him, sir, something. He puts the band down and says, here it is, and he walks through the whole plan.

And gustaf is delighted.

Because you can see the plan hits all the stakeholders he needs to meet.

And it's going to be introducing new technology, They will take the business forward.

So, there's a lot more to that than what happened.

They got more innovation, in the sense that they were doing things differently and introducing new products and services. They got more motivation because the people in the business saw a bright potential future of introducing these tools and technologies, so people were pumped up about that, that was exciting.

And, of course, they made more profit, which was the whole point to avoid.

Extreme actions, right?

So, more profit, in this case, it happened to be a 300% ROI on the project investment, but the most important thing, that's one project or the most important thing, it's a shared purpose.

So now, the people in the business, the team members, the senior leaders, all said: Hey, we can do that once, We can do that multiple times.

That's shared purposes. What drives people forward? It's the next year is adventure, it's the next, pushing the boundaries. So for the sake of this call, because I think people want to know some, to some degree, what level of detail was involved in this? Let me walk you through some of this brief brief steps.

Every one, of course, on this three day session, we will talk about inspired and informed leadership, well, in terms of Marcus Aurelius.

There were five key points that were relevant specifically for this project.

one is to think holistically across the business. Not just vertically, right? Ratio. You don't have to raise your hand to raise, raise your hand. How many times you've seen projects only work in one function, and then people are arguing with each other.

Right. The next one was to act with the knowledge of the technology. You can't do this stuff. If you don't know what the technology is, you don't know what the art of the possible could be, so it's very important to do that.

The third is to send consistent messages.

Does anyone on the call ever been in a project where the CEO or senior leader says something at a big meeting?

Then like a week later, kinda says a watered down version of the same message and then all the doubters come out and they say, Ah, he or she wasn't really serious, Right, And they start to tear down what was going on.

Consistent messages, critical, engage employees, could be the only thing on this page, that matters the most.

What you did to engage the employees, and we'll talk about how you do that in a minute, and reflect glory.

No great leader, thinks it's all about them.

Any great leader realizes when the team succeeds the leader looks fantastic, and so does the team, right?

And to bring that up, and to mentioned that, there are some people who don't quite get that, that was an important part.

There were multiple other dimensions of leadership that we did on the side to assess how is the business doing on these. And these are the 14 key areas from the 11 key things from the Baldrige National Quality of Work. The second major, Fete focus was understanding the technology.

Well, so if you say to your team, Hey, I want you to go, you know, make something here, I'm going to give you a pencil and you can only use straight lines.

If that's all they know is a pencil of straight lines and you tell them to build a house, that's what you're gonna get with a fence post transplant.

It's limited tools, limited scope, but if you explain to them, hey, you've got a lot of other things, there's this brick and a whole bunch of different other shaped bricks that you can do. some pretty cool things with. We want to make sure you know what those are.

So you're in a fantastic creativity can come out and you can produce something that looks like this, which we'll talk a little bit later about that, that's falling water by Frank Lloyd Wright.

So what do I mean, in this case? What does that's, that's a metaphor, when I'm out, is the tools that they needed to understand robotic process automation, Natural language processing, chatbots, virtual assistants, machine learning and a bit of AI and then to have an eye to the future.

It's to think about what are the new things they can do?

Right? But focused on what can be done now, they didn't use every one of these tools and all of the transformation, but they needed to understand them in order to move forward.

The third point was a focus on value creation.

Stop and ask yourself, have you seen projects done that are done because they're cool or they're technologically needed or someone's in love with some things, some way to do things, but they weren't directly connected with driving value.

That's a disaster. This project focused on driving value and what it didn't focus on is distractions like this. I'm sure this is going to be super cool for solving some kind of problem other than keeping teenagers and 20 year olds distracted in their basements forever, but in this particular project it wasn't relevant. one day. It will be for various places, but not in this project.

Instead, they focused on what drives revenue and profit, and that profit can feed the innovation and drive the business going forward.

Huge, Mean, it sounds obvious, right?

But a lot of people doing weird things with technology that are wasting time for a major step, empowered, and excited teams.

How do you empower and how do you excite a team?

Well, the big phrase is employee engagement.

That's a, that's a catch all, and you hear it all the time.

But what it really breaks down to is helping people feel genuinely important, because if they don't feel genuinely important, by the way, you can't be asked that.

They really either are genuinely important, or they're not.

And when they feel it, that's what you'll get. There are seven major areas that, that define employee engagement, and if you hit all seven, it's pretty amazing. one of them is believing your job is important, the potential to grow and be promoted is another one. Availability of constructive feedback came with the magic seven, and that's what they focused on.

Number five is why I told you about heroes.

Number five is helping humans be heroes.

Because on every project, and everyone does, they are faced with this question left.

Let's say it's going to be, I'm going to leave the company as a result of this project.

Straight ahead is, my job is going to be pretty much the same when this is over with, and right is my job is going to be different, in some way, shape, or form.

And every person in every project is faced with that question, and if you don't answer that question as soon as possible, what do you think you get?

My experience is you get the fear, people are nervous about what's going to happen, right?

So, What was incredibly important is to help these people understand, is your future yen out or different?

That's how I would say it. Out are different.

And it's OK. How is what the answer is going to be? There's a way to help people transition out of a company that has everyone around them feeling good about the way it took place, including the person who left.

And in some cases, they had to do that.

But in most cases, they freed up time and could innovate and use those people doing other things.

So I'd like to leave a memory on that simple point to say, OK, maybe a lesson from long, long ago, and far, far away is helpful, So what do we have here in this picture?

We have uh, three different age people.

We have a princess the pirate and a guy who's just figured out what does identity is. They're fighting their way through the world through this giant deathstar being heroic.

There are bluffing, they're shooting their blustering. They're doing all the things they have to do.

And even so they're trying to save the world or the process, but even start was there doing it.

This aspirational life that they're leaving, that they're leading.

They're dying to succeed just like the employees in your company are on this call. They still find themselves in a trashcan factory.

Despite all that wonderful heroic stuff, they find themselves in the trash.

What do they do?

Well, they're not going to be here us in the trash compactor, are they, right?

So instead of outsourcing or your job being replaced by technology, which happens in the real world, they're finding a slithering monster underneath their feet, right? Who's going to kill it? That's a pretty existential threat. So then what happens?

Well, guess what, Without a plan, they all there for people you can all see to each slightly in the backyard.

All four people have their own ideas. For instance, starts barking orders the pirates, start shooting the walkies howling, and the millennial go swimming.

None of which gets to the solution.

The only thing that finally solves this and takes us back to being heroic.

It's when they reach out to a robot.

The robot does, when only a robot can do, searches a huge database, and finds exactly what they needed to do to open the doors and let these people have to go back to being heroic. That is the image that we projected in Sweden and in subsequent several projects after that.

That's the image you want people to be thinking about, is that this automation can help them get rid of the horrible drudgery, the stuff they don't want to do anymore.

Because, what you're trying to do with intelligent automation, you're trying to kill, you're trying to kill border, you're trying to kill drudgery. You're trying to kill the things that prevent us from being heroes.

The sixth step was having a, having an operating model, go for purpose.

What that means is when the project is over with, you don't go, Hey, look at the future, Look, This is what it's gonna look like. There's nothing wrong with this! And this happened to be a successful project, but this isn't where you end.

If you ended this point, then you don't know if it's ever going to work. Or the people who are going to live and work in this thing isn't going to function. Or is it just going to be a paper plan on the wall or flowchart or on your computer? Right.

Again, let me give you another example.

In San Jose, California, this is an example of what happens, when people just build stuff and keep putting on it, don't have a visionary plan. It's called the Winchester Mystery House.

It was built by the heir to the Winchester Wright rifle.

Fun: All the people have made the money money made from the sale of rifles, because I'm mystic.

Convinced the owner, CERA Winchester.

But if she kept building, she wouldn't go to ****.

So, she had to keep building.

She built 161 rooms, 47 fireplaces, 10000 panes of glass into Ballrooms all because of that mystic.

That's what companies can do when they try to just grow randomly. Maybe they listen to an unethical consultant.

An alternate example is Frank Lloyd Wright.

It took him two years before he put pencil to paper to design this house for the Kauffman family owners of a department store.

He studied the land, study, them, understood. He knew this was important, was late stage in his career, and it was make or break.

It took him two years to figure out what he was going to do with this house, and the reason it took so long and then he had drafted the whole thing in like three hours that, this because it took him to your study it.

Frank Lloyd Wright said, I never designed that building, before I've seen the site and met the people, who are going to live in that building.

That is what an Operating Model for Intelligent Automation Solution, or technology, looks like.

How are the people going to use this thing?

My favorite examples from this, people see this picture. And they said, oh, the beautiful house, all over those really **** stairs in the bottom. That's really nice. A nice design looks like it's Denmark or something, right?

Well, the reason those stairs exist is because Frank Lloyd Wright, during that two year period of time, found out that Mrs.

Coffman likes to skidding did.

And he put those stairs straight into the river. So Mrs.

Kaufman could go skinny dipping at the bottom of the house, That is an operating model built for success.

The seventh step was to align the incentives and the culture.

Think to yourself, have you ever been told to do one thing and rewarded for something else?

And how does that work for you?

Hey, I really want you to be super efficient and cut all the blah, blah, blah, blah, but we're only going to reward you if you have a huge team. Those, those things don't make sense. You know, we're going to your, you have to reward and ask for the same behavior. Which this project and subsequent projects I worked on, we were Relentless to make sure that was aligned because Charlie Munger was, right.

Charlie Munger is the deputy at Berkshire Hathaway and a multi-billionaire.

show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.

So that's exactly what they focused on.

So.

Here are the seven steps. I now call that the noble automation now method. It took me a couple of years to put all that together, having demonstrated and done it with all these projects.

And a successful project with intelligent automation in financial services is almost assured, if you do these seven steps, but you might be asking, Oh, man, seven steps. That's a lot of work. Do I have to do everything perfect and do all that stuff. Man, you're kidding me is is real-world, right?

Let me ask you a question.

If you had a choice between the two steps on this picture, the steps on the left, beautiful stone, for the steps in the right, cheap wood, which steps would you take?

But depends on what you're going to do, this steps, right?

The answer I would suggest is: if the goal is to get to the first floor, taken wouldn't steps, because they already go to the first floor. If the goal is, that, is just to have beautiful steps that are not installed, take towards the left.

So, I said, I call that noble automation.

Where does it come from?

Noblesse publish.

It means the responsibility of privileged people to act with generosity and mobility toward the people who have less privilege.

So, if you could turn it into our words, it means intelligent automation, and inspired leadership to maximize outcome for all Steric stakeholders.

So I would have gone to Q and A I'm going to check if I've got to do anything from Brian. I'm going to skip Q and A and go to the end if anyone has any questions and I'd like to talk to me about that. My e-mail's on the last slide.

I'd like to finish this story now quickly.

So, the last time I saw yes, he was on a stage, speaking to a multinational audience about the positive impact of intelligent automation.

one is business.

His career is company and he was excited. And Harmony Swedes, you know, the Swedes can be more subdued.

He was glowing he was absolutely delighted and when he left the stage to near Likening level applause, I couldn't have been happier for, All I could think was, wow, this is a pretty successful thing, at the end of the day, or the event, he offered to take me back to the hotel.

And he took me back to the hotel in the Volvo that he paid for by his successful year. I marvel of, I've long been sold and I move to Europe.

So, there, I wasn't sweet. Is kind of a nice, you know, data on the story.

So, now, I've thought to myself, How can we have more young professionals, like, people on this call, are watching this later, And visionary leaders come together and have the same type of success?

How can they have more motivation, more innovation, more motivation, more profit?

Most importantly, half of this transformation, they do be successful, which is this whole three days, all about that.

And I think the most important thing we can think about, is, how do we help the people we work with, become heroes? How do we get them on those journeys that will make them feel great?

So, this is now, the wave of intelligent automation is shaped just about like this. And there'll be waves behind, and you can jump on.

And now is the time to do, what keke like ****, because this is the ride you're looking for.

And the timing couldn't be better.

Right?

And then the last for awhile, jump on that way and it'll be a fantastic ride, and the way I suggest you get there, it's three words.

No, automation.

Yeah.

Thank you very much for your time, I hope you enjoyed this talk. We're gonna start at the top of the hour, with the next talk. If you want to contact me and ask me any questions, or follow up on anything that we've done on this talk by e-mail, is there Chris, it noble automation now dot com.

That's having to have a great rest of the morning, starting at about 13, 13 minutes or so, OK, Thank you very much, Susan.

About the Author

Christopher Hodges,
Intelligent Automation Leader, Speaker, Consultant, Author

My name is Christopher, most call me Chris. I am the author of the upcoming "Noble Automation Now".

I am a former Intelligent Automation Leader for Accenture and Deloite and now an independent consultant and speaker. I work with business leaders who want to increase their profits while calming and motivating their people.

As a professional speaker and consultant, I train leaders how to profitably embrace Intelligent Automation and inspire their teams. In fact, For 25 years I have helped Global Fortune 500 companies to understand, apply and succeed with technology. I now speak and consult globally on successfully leading with automation.

As a result of my work, leaders achieve more innovation and motivate their teams all while profiting from intelligent automation.On a personal note, my Japanese wife has had me traipsing around the world looking for the next great soak for 30 years.

If your business needs automation and artificial intelligence and you are not sure how to implement without damaging your team, maybe we should work together - Now.