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June 22, 2021

RPA & Intelligent Automation Live - SPEAKER SPOTLIGHT: Intelligent Business Process Automation: How Great Enduring Organizations Scale People, Technology and Value

Courtesy of Innovation & Excellence's José Pires, below is a transcript of his speaking session on 'Intelligent Business Process Automation: How Great Enduring Organizations Scale People, Technology and Value' to Build a Thriving Enterprise that took place at RPA & Intelligent Automation Live.

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Session Information:

Intelligent Business Process Automation: How Great Enduring Organizations Scale People, Technology and Value

In a world disrupted by exponential technologies, how do you build systems and mechanisms where extraordinary performance becomes ordinary? How great enduring organizations consistently deliver exponential leaders, growth, and value creation?

We will explore how the best cross-industry organizations leverage "the right" culture, methods, technologies, and people as the ultimate engine for value creation and sustainable competitive advantage.

Session Transcript:

So, the first comment that I'll make here, is that everything that I'm going to talk about is not an idea that I wrote in the book. It's not advice that I got from someone.

Everything that I'm going to discuss with you here has been tested.

It hasn't been based on empirical evidence.

I am not a visionary leader.

I, like any of you watching this, am not able to predict the future.

There are only two types of people who predict the future, keep this less than mine, those who don't know. And those who don't know that they don't know.

What you see with great enduring leaders and organizations, is that they are experimenting constantly.

They are highly empirical, the fruit that empiricism and experimentation. They observes what doesn't work and they let go of there.

And they observe what works. And once they observe what works, they try to understand why it works, And once they understand why it works, they scale that. So from a distance, they look alike, visionary leaders and organizations.

From within and I have had the privilege to be within. Most of this great enduring organizations that I'm going to discuss with you here as a leader.

And in some cases, as an advisor from within what you see is that they have incredible levels of discipline through the experimentation process that they undergo.

And that is fundamentally, through that process, that they scale brilliance in their organizations. That they scale technology, when it's applicable, and they scale value.

So, I mean that add to this great, enduring organizations that I'm going to share with you here in this journey, and this is just a sample of them.

And illustrate the broad variety of industries and organizations, from which we gathered this lesson's. It doesn't mean that every one of these organizations has got to the pinnacle of excellence and innovation, by no means, they all have their own struggles. Some of them have reached the pinnacle, and some of them cannot stay at the pinnacle, and the others are trying to achieve it.

But, what I'm going to share with you are the observations: what worked?

This is over 30,000 excellence and innovation leaders in more than 120 organizations.

Several of which are not even portrayed here.

But it's their practical approach to excellence in innovation acceleration, that we're going to focus on.

So, the question is, to you, what do you think matters most on this journey?

Do you think that they got should be great, enduring organizations, or sometimes departments within great organizations, because of their ideas, because of their methods, because of their technologists, or because of their people?

So you don't have to tell me that, answer that question to yourself. What do you think matters most on this journey to scale individual brilliance, that knowledge, and value for organizations?

So make the mental note, choose one out of this four because we're going to talk about each one of them.

I'm going to talk about the importance of ideas and how we need to create a meritocracy of ideas. And we need to have ample ideation, the organization's different perspectives, new ways of thinking.

And then I'm going to tell you that ideas are everywhere.

What are in common?

Are people in your organizations who are willing to put the reputation behind ideas, Then I'm going to shift to methods.

And I'm going to talk about the fact that methods are critical, because they provide a discipline framework for the execution of what creates value for the organizations, for the professionals, for the customers.

Screenshot - 2021-06-22T192207.850But then I will also say that I have being a certified Lean six Sigma Master Black Belt for nearly three decades, and for most people, that sounds like a dangerous mental condition. It doesn't help with that.

Because great enduring organizations know the methods alone, do not transform businesses, people do.

So, we'll shift to technologists, joza I follow, or you do, across multiple industries, and the support that you have for exponential technologies. Look at this conference. We're talking about robotics process automation, with talking about intelligent automation, hyper automation, artificial intelligence.

So, technologists are great, right?

Yes, Because they can enable our processes to be better, faster, cheaper, higher quality. Wonderful.

But remember, this technologist can also make stupid happen at the speed of light.

Mark MacGregor in his previous presentation talked about this.

No, you can be highly efficient on things that don't matter.

Or, worse yet, you can very easy automate unnecessary complexity so as a matter of fact, I should rephrase that. You do not do that easily. It's actually quite hard, but you can accomplish the automation of unnecessary complexity which a lot of organizations are doing today by just throwing technology at problems that they don't even understand.

So it must be about people right there, because people are our most important asset.

Well, remember this is not a theoretical session. This is a practical session.

If I look at the last 12 months of the pandemic in a lot of the industries that I work with, people weren't let go.

And the assets on those organizations stayed mostly intact.

So why would sounds nice?

if people are the most important asset? Why do they go first and the asset's stay?

This is an empirical approach. Not a theoretical approach, or some ideological approach that will make us feel better about the world.

It is the world as it is, and as it is, people fundamentally are very important.

But the reality is, if you look at how organizations operate, especially in times of uncertainty, and rapid change, and distress, the reality is that there is special people in every organization. There are amplifiers of the culture. There are amplifiers of excellence. There are amplifiers of innovation. And those are the most important assets of the organization. And we all want to become that, by the way.

And they will discuss that. But it's not as simple as, Oh, it's just people.

It is about the right people in the organization. Those truly are the most important asset for every organization, and that's fundamentally who we all want to be indispensable for organizations indispensible for our customers, and indispensible for our societies as well.

So as you can probably gather, the world of greatness is filled with contradictions, forces that pull in very different directions.

I said one good thing about every one of those items and there was certainly a counterforce to everything that I said. And there are many more.

And this is one of the first concepts that are critical to understand great, enduring performance.

It's not an ore world.

The world of greatness is an and world and with with contradictions pulling very different directions in great enduring organizations and leaders, they master this contradictions. The mastery of contradictions is fundamental to achieve and sustain greatness. Keep in mind, but I shall say I don't see that very often.

Yes, you're absolutely right.

If he was that common, it would be mediocre.

It is great, because it is uncommon, and this is not a recipe, but it's a directional guidance to what it looks like when you get to see the thin slice of greatness.

So, the mastery of contradictions is critical on that journey. And there is no greater contradictions.

The contradiction that I'm going to discuss of excellence and innovation because the forces of excellence are pulling you in one direction. It is about setting high performance standards and consistently and in a disciplined fashion meeting and exceeding those performance standards.

That's what excellence is all about.

And very few organizations, whoever you, reach that.

But if you only do that, I guarantee you, you'll become obsolete over time.

So you must think, whoa, I understand. We live in a time of exponential change where adaptation is incredible, and change is incredibly important.

Partially true.

So, you must think that the world of innovation is the one that's ultimately dominant. Innovative organizations are the dominant organizations, right?

Wrong.

If you actually research innovative organizations, the most innovative organizations, they die, and you don't even get to hear about them.

What you see is what we call survival bias Are the ones who succeeded and you start thinking that ever innovative organization looks like that, but they don't.

Btog CTAOrganizations that are driven purely by innovation, they tend to scatter over time.

They are not consistent with their purpose, and they disappear. You never hear about them.

So, it's not about the organizations that are excellent, or the organizations there are: Innovative.

Greatness requires intelligent blending of excellence and innovation. In this two forces dislike each other. These two forces pull in very different directions, And we must be aware of that, because it's not the absence of conflict is actually a thriving on that, a diverse city, that's causing a culture by having a dual culture of excellence and innovation.

Because if you're in the horse business, you can squeeze efficiencies out of the business to have healthier horses.

Longer living horses, stronger horses, but you also know that you don't get to design cars by squeezing efficiencies out of horses.

The solution requires intelligent blending of this forces, the mastery of this and many other contradictions.

It is about achieving excellence as an S as a foundation, but also questioning the excellence and saying thinking about different ways you can do what the excellence has already achieved. And here's the catch.

When you come up with the new way, the great innovation, you don't become dominant by continuously innovating on that.

You become dominant by scaling that innovation better than anyone else can.

And do you know how great, Enduring organizations, scale innovation?

They scale innovation, by applying the principles of excellence, to the innovation they created.

You understand the interplay, very critical interplay here, that we're going to explore a bit further, because that's the beginning, but not enough. I'd like to shift from my advisory role to the role of actual leader of excellence and innovation in green in these organizations.

And I'll highlight five organizations where I spent my career on, become no fruit for the last few decades.

I'm originally from Brazil. I was educated in the United States, background in engineering and physics and investment banking, and my first job was working for electronics giant Sawhney.

I was super excited about that.

My first week at work, my boss, his name is ..., you are high ASHA son, had a task for me.

Identify 100 innovations in our ecosystem, Which was basically the technology development, and that time technology leader, soni, and advanced manufacturing, and a combination of innovations in those environments.

I look at High Ash the sun and said, Hi, Aisha son, I'm the new guy here. How can I possibly identify 100 innovations in this in this amazing place that was designed by the best scientists and engineers in the world?

He looks at me and says, Just the sun?

You must do.

Didn't know what that meant.

Know, did I wander in truck or into a Star Wars episode here? And Yoda was telling me to follow the force.

What is this about? How can I possibly do that? I was hoping for some training.

I was hoping for some, you know, guidance and mentorship, there was not much of that.

There was a test right there, so I'll summarize this for you, and each one of those organizations played a fundamental role, in my own empirical understanding of greatness that I will share with you.

And as showing you the lesson was simple by the end of the first week, I was completely demoralized, because I could not come up with 100 innovations in that place.

I worked basically all day long and nights. Try talking to people, learning about different ways that we did the work at the company.

And I came up with like 20 or so items and I had the 100 and even 100.

So, I'll short circuit the story by telling you that I sat down with hash a son on Friday and I had, like 20 good items to talk about. So I put the best stand in the beginning of my report. The next standard, the end of my report, and I had a bunch of fluff in the middle.

And what happened then, is that I expected that he would just look at my report, read the beginning, and send me to my next assignment.

He didn't do that.

He sat down with me for over four hours, going item by item on my report, got to the middle of my report, which was the crappy portion of my report, looks at me and says, Just a son.

How come you're so stupid?

Couldn't believe it. Something got lost in the translation from Japanese, to English here.

And the best answer I could come up with was, I don't know, just made me look dumber.

So he looks back at me and says, Your problem, you think too much like an engineer.

You must learn to listen to the process.

Wow, that didn't help me listen to the process. Am I now in The Karate Kid movie here?

Now, I was very distraught for the whole experience.

The next week I come back and then when I come back, I'm expecting now I get some sort of training. Now. I'm going to be assigned a mentor to start developing capabilities and skills.

Ayesha Sun comes back with a big smile stock into me and Japanese, Ohio, diameters us on. How are you? And, he says, I have a new assignment for you this week. Looks at me, and I, S, and I, and I, and I asked him, OK, what does the new assignment, he looks at me assess?

This week, You identify 200 innovations?

Ladies and gentlemen, I almost lost my mind at that point, because I was, I was already dao and I got kicked.

So, I thought I'm going to have to quit. I'm going to have to go do something else.

Does not going to work, but through a lot of self-awareness, a lot of inner strength, if you will.

I went on to identify 200 innovations a week to, the reason I send you share this with you, and there's a much longer version of this story that we have time for.

Is that, has your son is one of the greatest mentors, greatness, excellence, and innovation I've ever had to this day, wearing Con, where we have a relationship.

He still leads display design for Sony in Tokyo, and they're one of the greatest mentors of excellence and innovation. And the lessons are very simple.

Um, he could have sent me for training.

He could have, Yes, sign me, a mentor, done all the kind of nice things that you want to do maybe for a new hire, but somehow, for some reason he saw something potentially, Good, ME. That could be great but he wasn't sure.

So what he did, he tested me in a way that you test the people who have great potential.

Instead of telling me what to do, he created a meritocracy of ideas with clear execution mechanisms and told me, go do that.

Because what he knew is that specifically, when it comes to great innovators, great innovators are not revealed by your gender, your race, your ethnicity, how many certificates you have hanging on the I love myself wall.

Great innovators are revealed by the test of execution.

Remember that There's a lot of talk about innovation. There's a lot of talk about technology.

Great innovators are only revealed by the test of innovation execution.

Collaborative value creation leaders emerge from the tasks of innovation execution.

And it's not about expertise in the mind of an expert, there is only way in the mind of the novice. There are many ways it is about the intelligent blinding of these mindsets.

Another contradiction should be mastered, but remember, this the Test of innovation execution will reveal the right people in your organization when it comes to accelerating in a scaly leadership, technology, value, creation, innovation.

Email Graphic Virtual Conferences (4)-1And they are only reveal by this device, by the, by the Test of Innovation execution.

And the this lesson, will this process will reveal these individuals and their traits and what you are going to find out.

If you do this with more than 30,000 people over more than 25 years, where you're going to find out is that this select group of collaborative leadership value creation leaders.

What you're going to find is that they have four traits.

There are unique, and they are only, You only find those traits, they are only revealed by the tasks of innovation execution.

They have purpose, passion, discipline, and resilience.

Purpose, passion, discipline, or resilience are the common traits in this group.

And you're going to be looking for that.

Now, as I left Sony, I join a startup company in California that changed the world. Simer Today's Simer, SAML, Developer excimer laser systems that allow Moore's law in semiconductor manufacturing, still happen today. And for many years to come.

Argon fluoride's Krypton fluoride's lasers. That image circuits and very, very small scales.

It was an organization that went from nothing to over 90% market share in a, in a period of five years.

We had the most intelligent, brightest scientists in the world, but the challenge lied on scaling that excellence on this scaling, that innovation that we had and the individual brilliance that we had. And the lesson from there is the following.

When you get the greatest, the smartest people in the room, often, they don't make the best decisions. They spend too much time trying to outsmart each other.

It's very important that you have a clear purpose, a common purpose, and then you develop collaborative leadership skills throughout your organization.

Collaborative leadership skill development is another characteristic of great, Enduring organizations.

As I left this incredible startup that changed the world. I joined an organization with more than 350,000 employees. 585 business units around the world.

Nestle has multiple levels of culture and the lesson from nastily is simple. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Excellence and innovation are just side dishes that we'll get chewed up by the jaws of culture. So, no matter what you're doing in your organization, be empathetic to the culture and multiple levels and meet them where they're at. Not where you wish they would be.

Meet them where they're at. Show respect for, for who they are, and what they're doing, and bring them along.

In the next step, I was hired by the CEO of A Global Infrastructure Company with nearly 13,000 pure engineers doing more than 10000 infrastructure projects in over 110 countries.

This very smart people who are doing this for over 100 years successfully, and our stove should go in there, and let's she transform our business. Let's transform our culture.

And here's what that journey looks like, a journey of excellence, innovation, acceleration, that did not only take 1 or 2 ears because any mediocre organization can do an improvement here and innovation there and have some level of success.

The question here is, Enduring greatness requires you to be at that level and grow that level over a decade or more.

That's the standard.

Very few organizations will do that, because even this organization, what I'm showing you if you here on this graph, is the performance of the system when they just instituted like Lean and six Sigma and Business Process Management. And they're doing quite well. They're focusing on ideas. They're focusing on methods. By year 6, 0 developing, great, there, they had great, financially valid data results, and they had 500 people. That's what that green number on top there, represents, 500 people who are engaged on this.

But, there are 13,000 people in this organization.

Is it possible that we're missing on value here?

My hypothesis is yes, but I needed to experiment.

So, I, I approach the CEO of the organization, and I shared the following statistics with him, Listen, we are on E or six of this development deployment here, and we should be proud because we are creating value. We're getting people engage more and more.

And, another thing, if you look at the industry, 50% of organizations that have started a journey like this on discipline and methods for excellence and innovation, 50% of them died by year three. 99% of them died on by yard five.

We made it by year six, so we're part of the 1% Club here.

But we're not satisfied.

We gotta do better than this.

And we've flipped our assumptions and our assumptions is that if we focus on ideas and methods and we select the people to lead those ideas towards value creation will be in great shape.

And the reversing of those assumptions included, you know, what forget about ideas and methods and technologists. Let's find. who are the right people?

Well, we thought we knew it's the people who HR tell you are on the fast path for growth or the senior leadership members. They provide a list with the names and that we're training those people.

Are those the best people in the organization? Are those the right people?

They may be, they may not be, They're all revealed by the test of innovation execution.

So I asked the CEO of the company, we're going to open this up.

We're going to create a meritocracy of ideas with full access to anybody in this organization can be part of it.

And here's the catch, But nobody is obligated to do anything, 100% voluntary. We only want volunteers. Nobody will be assigned, will only be volunteers.

And what we did, and I remember is still this conversation with the CEO, I had built a reputation of the CEO for the results over the years.

He looks at me and says, man, that's quite a test. If it doesn't work, you've got to be ready to go back.

So, that was the pressure on us. So, we flip this assumptions, and we focus on the right people, people, purpose, passion, discipline, resilience. We open it up. We've taught them collaborative leadership skills, we've taught them innovation, acceleration, skills. We did talk them.

We did teach them methodology as well, but we emphasize to them that we're not interested in technocrats of methodology because methods alone do not transform businesses. Remember that people do.

And by doing that, what we saw was unprecedented in the industry.

Not only we maintain the level that we had, I miss tremendous change and making everything voluntary. Once the skepticism lower and people realize, this is for real, it's a true meritocracy of ideas with clear execution mechanisms. It doesn't matter what my title is, I kinda step up and become a collaborative leader.

By focusing on the right people, we increase value creation by over 800% and we increase voluntary engagement and leadership by 1000%. Globally, Winney, multiple global awards.

For excellence, for innovation, for business, digital, and cultural transformation.

And the, and creating a culture of excellence and innovation as our ultimate competitive advantage, that provides results to all stakeholders.

Screenshot (4)So, when I left that journey, as an Executive leader, I became an executive leader in the last company, my career, and that company had been in an amazing journey to become extraordinary. That is in Denver Corporation, a Fortune 100 energy company here in the United States, and globally. So the motto had become goal for extraordinary.

I would like to share it with you and have an appreciation for what they went for, what they have gone through.

In 2010, this company was valued as a $2 billion enterprise. This is a public company.

Value at $2 billion.

After the 2008 financial crisis, there really hit them very hard, and what they saw is that their market valuation was less than the book value of the assets of the company.

That's how poorly the market saw the potential of this organization.

We had a seal that came on, He came on, look at why we had brought a leadership team that realize that our ultimate competitive advantage is the building of our culture. We don't, this is logistics refining and marketing of oil and gas products.

There is nothing quite unique about what we do.

It's been done for a long time, the same way, our advantages to build a culture of entrepreneurship, of excellence, of innovation. And we and he did just that systematically creating a meritocracy of ideas with clear execution mechanisms, developing collaborative leadership widely in the organization.

And I have, and I was fortunate to join on this journey for excellence and innovation acceleration.

And by the eighth year of this journey, we're identifying, prioritizing, and executing to completion over 2000 innovation projects for value creation, More than one billion dollars in financially validated E, But the additional EBA for the organization. And this organization that was valued at $2 billion, eight years later, was a $35 billion enterprise.

Now, again, this is the formula A meritocracy of ideas with clear execution mechanisms.

Collaborative literate leadership development widely available in the organization innovation, execution skills widely developed. I'm going to guide you through, now, how we unleash the power of our people to go for extraordinary in. A very systematic way.

If you could zoom into this picture, you would see mean there, with thousands of our professionals, working with them, collaboratively, to identify, prioritize, and execute on what creates value for all in the organization, our customers, and stakeholders.

So, it starts with a foundation of discipline. It starts with the foundation of what I call: intelligent business process management. Understanding your critical processes, business processes that create value for your customers, and developing tremendous understanding. And to end with clear accountability and ownership for adults.

It's not new, it's just a discipline foundation, where you have a different maturity for the processes that you have in your organization, from the recognize level, all the way to the fully optimized processes.

But, by the way, you do this is many intelligent fashion. And the intelligence here does not come from technology. The intelligent here comes from the insights that you have in your organization about how it serves its customers.

And the intelligence here is about deciding that some of our processes, they need, should be at the optimized level.

Because they are that critical value creation for our process, for our customers, But most of our processes, they should not even exist.

Or, if they exist, they should be either the fine level, because it does not make sense to further develop them. They are not that critical.

So, you have to make tough choices. You have to know what really matters, and what matters some, or what doesn't matter at all.

Not try to just make everything better, because that's not going to work. Again, this sounds like common sense, but common sense is the least common of the senses. In large organizations, including yours.

You have to prioritize what creates the most value for the organization, customers stakeholders, and that includes these processes, and you'll have to decide what the maturity that you need on those processes if a process is needed at all.

Now, there is not one size fits all for this Intelligent Business Process Management.

And the innovation that you build on top of it, Specifically to the innovation that you'll build on top of it, there will be free categories: corr, Adjacent, and Disruptive.

The main message that I want to have here with you is that understand that when it comes to innovation, disruptive tends to be five to 10% of the total.

Although, you'll get 100% media coverage on that, especially when it comes to technology, great, enduring organizations, any innovation leaders, have 90% of their innovation, not even connected to disruptive.

So, keep this concept in mind, The Golden Ratio of Innovation for Value Creation. Now, what are the pillars of success For intelligent business, process management, value, creation.

There are three that I want to share with you.

It's governance, it's methods, and collaborative leadership.

Governance is, in summary, defined roles and structures for the, for the BPM value creation. The methods are the proven methodologies with clear execution mechanisms and common languages that you may use. It's not as important which method you use, It, is more important that you have a common language, and a clear understanding and consistent approach.

Screenshot - 2021-06-22T192207.850And collaborative leadership as disproportionately important.

You must have a skill development for all professionals, not just a selected field, on collaboratively innovation, for value creation.

So, quickly on each one of those, you, I would just lay the foundation here without going too deep, because we don't have time for that. For our governance standpoint, you need to develop clear ownership.

It's at the process level. It is at the business level. It could be at the product level. It could be at the technology level, The message here, clear ownership.

You need to develop collaborative leadership and entrepreneurial skills for leading improvements and innovations that create value for the organization.

You need to have serial entrepreneurs and serial collaborative leaders who become coaches for you in the organization. Notice, these are not coaches of methodology. This is our coaches of collaborative leadership and innovation execution for value creation.

And they are guided by a business champion or a project champion, be at whatever level that you're operating on, and certainly, always align with the strategy of the organization, and the hierarchy of the organization through a steering committee that oversees how this moves forward. So this very basic structure, if it's missing, you're not going to be able to sustain results towards greatness. So, remember, this basic structure with us with clear roles and responsibilities, is the bill are the building blocks, to achieve discipline, IBM value creation. So we talk about governance that are very high level. Let's talk about methods. What do we see from a practitioner's standpoint when it comes to the disciplined execution of improvements and innovations?

We see today innovation as a discipline to think different, to innovate, just simplify.

We also see business process management as core and chu.

And understanding of processes that create value for customers with clear process ownership and we certainly see lean as a, as a method to increase speed, eliminate, waste and flow on the flow of value creation to the customer and six Sigma as a very disciplined approach to reduce variation, satisfy customers.

Now, listen, every one of these methodologies separately, they are effective, combine their exceptional, and you can keep adding. You could can keep, you can keep adding, you know, Agile and Scrum as variants of Lean. You could keep adding, add, car and pro side.

Remember, this methods are important, but methods alone do not transform businesses, where you're really looking for our collaborative value creation leaders. Those are the ones that transform the businesses.

So with that, we move on to the maturity that you see in those organizations for innovation, value creation.

So what you see in these organizations is that multi-million dollar organizations forget about all this stuff that I just talked to you about, I just need a smart guy or girl to lead this thing. I need an individual brilliance. An individual entrepreneur can create multi-million dollar organizations, make no mistake, intelligence matters. I'm looking for people have intelligence, I'm looking for people with integrity and I'm looking for people with energy, as a matter of fact, in the order of integrity first, then intelligence, and then energy. because if you don't have the first one, as Warren Buffett likes to say, the next two will kill you.

So individual brilliance with integrity is an amazing thing. And you these people have passion, they have discipline, they have resilience. Those are the people who are naturally emerge in the marketplace.

Now this will create a multi-million dollar organization, but that's not enough. If you want to have a multi billion dollar organization, you need to learn to scale individual brilliance.

Entry scale. Innovate in the individual brilliance. Now you need this.

I BPM systems and mechanisms to translate the principles into action, to scale the individual brilliance that was created by an entrepreneur or maybe a small team of entrepreneurs. And this requires now governance. That I just discussed structures and roles that I just discussed and certainly high levels of experimentation with growth initiatives and technology accelerators done in a disciplined fashion, understanding that disruptive isn't is less than 10%. Not 100% of your bets, OK? 90% is, at your core, in the ..., and you need to have a portfolio of innovations across those multiple segments. This is the journey that most organizations are at today.

They are, they want to be and remain multi-billion dollar organizations.

Now, very few have got to the next level, and the next level is the level of the multi trillion dollar organization. That's going to become more and more common, because these principles now are being applied in a very disciplined fashion. So more and more organizations will get there, but it is still incredibly hard. Because you have to do all the previous steps correctly, and then move on to this next step.

And this next step requires, widely developed collaborative leadership, in the Novation, Acceleration Skills.

Innovation is not an escape from discipline thinking. It is an escape with discipline thinking.

And collaborative leadership skills is not about consensus building collaborative leadership skills, are specific methods, techniques, principles, that leverages the existing hierarchy.

two, lead collaborative value creation.

Notice, it's not the absence of hierarchy. As a matter of fact, if you don't have hierarchy, collaborative leadership skills will not work, and that's a whole different discussion we can have for another hour.

The collaborative leadership skills is about leveraging the current hierarchy and building for specific speed techniques, value creation, and innovation acceleration at scale.

Now, to do this, you need to be, an organization needs to be built on a clear purpose, which we already discussed on this conference, Culture that's aligned with that purpose, and core values, that a strong set of core values that is aligned with their culture, that's the foundation of that culture.

Now, if you tell by the way, this things are the third step to people who are in the first step, They'll just miss you right off the bat, because they cannot even conceptualize.

That sounds like fluff.

That sounds like high level, abstract stuff, OK? So, you need to meet people and organizations where they're at.

So, but I understand the full gamut of opportunities in front of us here.

So with that, remember, collaboration, innovation, and value creation are the ultimate measurements of this I BPM effectiveness I talked about above.

So I'll give you a concrete example to wrap up here.

With an energy infrastructure company we're trying to implement, you know, technology acceleration everywhere.

It's a complete fiasco because we have people who don't understand this very complex underlying processes respectfully.

Often coming from IT, very good understanding of the technology or IT, but they do not understand how the process is really run. And this, and the people who are supposed to translate. There are not that good. That's the reality, because the people who really know they are too busy in the guts of that process. And even them, they don't fully understand the process end to end.

So, this sounds like a simple step, but having, on the understanding of the process framework for your organization at a high level to start, end to end, is critical, is getting that common mental model of the critical business processes that align with, with, with, with what we do, that should be done, not just what we do, but the things that create value to our customers. So, you started that discussion, and this is not a simple discussion with a senior leadership team, Clearly understanding the actual value.

But the actual value, the end to end processes, and value creation in your organization, that matter most for your customer.

As a very first step, now, you need to meet the organizations where they're at.

And you need to understand the culture and the context. In the context of a large energy organization.

Processes kind of don't matter because what they're doing is they're doing this multi-billion dollar projects. Not processes.

And every one of these projects have very unique traits.

So, you need to adapt to the reality and the context of your business model, and what we see here, is that you have two areas.

We have this project teams that are executing, and they need to, we work with them, to define their needs, to help them execute the processes, to adapt, to process changes, and identify process issues.

But we do not want to get on the way, off this very fast lokomotiv, You're gonna get killed by it.

You'll have to meet them where they're at, tried to understand how they operate, and then bring the insights that we get from the field into a set of critical end to end processes and process owners. There are able to define the processes that I'm at, at a better level, to monitor the health, to import best practices. To, eat, to continuously improve, and innovate, and then provide that transfer of knowledge. should this project teams Over time, you have to have patience. And what you end up with is one side, which is about this, execution excellence, that you have to go get things done.

This other side, where you're developing, based on the observations of the execution excellence and also some best practices coming from outside. You're developing a process excellence that will get transfer into that execution excellence, and this is really what this intelligent business process management does as an interface between process excellence, and execution excellence.

So, I want to get a little bit more practical here with you. And I want to move into innovation for simplification as a way of implementing some of these things, and I'll give you a quick example.

Innovation for simplification is a very important concept when you are in this journey, because we are all surrounded by incredible complexity. It's really easy when someone comes up with technology and say, oh, if you just use RPA or process mine, your AI, your problems are going to go away.

Do they have any understanding of the complexity of this process and the politics that I deal with in this company?

I mean, that stuff can kill any good idea from a technological standpoint, very fast.

And worse yet, we have created mindsets that when we have complexity around us, we create solutions that wrap additional complexity around that.

And this concept of innovation for simplification is critical. You have to learn that when you're wondering, what needs to be added to the systems, on how are you going to build something else here. You have to remember that perfection is only attained when there's nothing left to take out. We have to get to the essence of problems and opportunities and do away with the noise. And all the exceptions and all diff, all the things that could go wrong and understand the true nature of the processes that we have, and the essence of what drives them.

And we have to remember that, when it comes to IBPM innovations, it is not about automation.

Email Graphic Virtual Conferences (4)-1It is. First about collaborations is then about elimination, then reduction and only, and only then we automate.

How is that for our conference on automation?

I'm saying that it's not the first, not the second, the fourth thing that you should consider.

But that's the reality. I'm not here to tell your salary or anything. I'm telling you to share with you how it works on great enduring organizations. Give you an example, valve control stations that are ... stations that are built on one billion dollars power plants.

We got a team together because we want to make improvements to valve control station design. There are 120 unique types that we use on a typical Project, 120.

And then the obvious question is, you know, can we just automate that? Yes, we can.

And what we did, for more than 18 months, nearly 2.5 years, really, what we did is to, not us, but our team came in and said, Oh, yeah, we're gonna automate this because, you know, it's a repetitive process should automate, but it was 25, 2.5 years. And we couldn't, and we, it wasn't automated yet. Why is that?

Because the devil is in the details, because there's incredible complexity in each one of these designs, and I'll just show you one here for you.

This is the high level, highest level steps on valve control station design. We have 120 different designs. We have been trying to automate this complexity for 2.5 years.

I'm not getting anywhere. There's nothing wrong with the technology. There's nothing wrong with what the IT folks are telling us, or what the technology providers are telling us. The issue is that the incredible level of complexity that we're dealing with.

So, all we did is, before we automate, remember, collaborate, eliminate, reduce, and then automate. So let's collaborate first. Let's get together. 2.5 years after going nowhere. We got together and say, Hey, let's collaborate. We have 120 different designs. Do you really need them all? And everybody quickly said, Yeah, yeah, Because every one of my designs does something unique.

So someone says, Well, we probably can have a standard approach. Oh, everybody says, Oh, that's wonderful. That's wonderful. And then six people, 20 people sit around a table, and they say, We're going to have a standard approach.

And it's going to be my way.

So now, we don't have a standard approach. So this is where collaborative leadership really matters. You have the skills to bring people together and say, OK, what if we use 80% design? We don't wanna automate everything, but just the essence of what happens most often, Can we do that?

Oh, that would be really difficult, and we would have to have multiple designs, but, OK, we didn't end up with 20 designs. We have six basic designs.

They can do about 80% of the functionality.

We agree on that. That took like 3 to 4 weeks to get to that, by the way, but now we have six designs. We have six designs that we know that do 80% of the of the functionality.

That's a step in the right direction. For that collaborative leadership. Skills, and the continuous innovation execution process. We figure that, you know what?

We can get the six designs now, because the six designs they eliminate, and they reduce all this all the steps, with the six designs, then if we eliminate it, reduce all the six that oldest steps. Because now, we have now a single design, which we wish you could have.

But we have six standard designs that we could agree on, and that's the key.

Now, the six standard designs can be simplified in this flow.

Now, we automated that, we automated that in three months, still still complex, because it is high level. In three months, we got this done.

And then we realized that once we have this done in three months, now, it's a block, a module that we can put on a software called plant vision.

And then the 20% other work is actually quite simple, because the base design is there, they just do some additional pipe routing around that type of mechanical design around that, and they're done. So this is now 20 times faster. But remember, we didn't get there by automating. We got there by collaborating, eliminating, reducing, and then automating.

Now, there are thousands and thousands of projects like that. And I want to wrap up by remind you this. What matters most ideas, methods, technologists, or people.

None of them matter.

And all of them matter.

Certainly, the contradiction that matters most is the contradiction of people that you have to master.

And you have to find the right people to drive that ideas matters and technologist through them. They are the amplifiers of what you want to do. This people, they have four traits, remember the straits, you're not gonna find them on their resume. You're not gonna find them on a psychological profile or any psychological tests that you have.

You have to create a meritocracy of ideas with clear execution mechanisms.

And innovation execution test will reveal that they have traits of purpose alignment between what they do and what the organization is about.

Passion, not just romanticize love, it's like an arranged marriage. You work your face off and you overcome challenges, and you become passionate about it.

Discipline, which is not just following a regimen is set of rules, Discipline is consistency with your purpose and resilience. It's not about being stubborn and saying that, I never give up. That's stupid.

Resilience is about being able to understand the challenges, be empathetic to the resistance, and overcoming their resistance through collaborative leadership.

And if unable to overcome, you can also pivot, and you may go the long road, but you go the long road. Because the purpose that you're striving for is worth it, and you have the passion to drive you in the discipline, to stay consistent with that purpose.

So, ladies and gentlemen, if I'm going to summarize for you, your amplifiers of excellence of innovation, of technology, of value creation. They work for you right now. You're not going to hire them for Google, Facebook, or Tesla.

You're going to develop them and you're going to create a meritocracy of ideas with clear execution mechanisms, where they can rise.

It requires courage. You requires courage from them. You requires courage from you as a leader, to take a chance on them.

Then, you have to teach them certain skills. You need to teach them how to take different perspectives at problems, because that's the essence of innovation. In each, you need to increase diversity, you need to increase inclusion. You need to increase different perspectives, the problems, and opportunities in your organization.

And those are disciplines that you can do develop with them, but one thing that you cannot give them, you can only encourage them, you cannot build courage for them. They still need to have courage in this system.

We'll work that out, those who have purpose, passion, discipline, or resilience, with the underlying courage, they will move, they will experiment.

By the way, the scourge here is not irrational courage.

This is very much based on sound risk management, yet, with the courage to act.

Not one or the other, but both and your job as a leader, the ultimate job, other than all this discipline approaches, Collaborative leadership skills, innovation, execution skills, meritocracy, of ideas with clear execution mechanisms, all of that needs to be there.

You must also create an environment in the organization where this great people, in this great ideas can connect.

Because that's the ultimate accelerator for excellence and innovation.

In any organization is an environment based on trust, because fear is pervasive in our organizations, and it's just getting worse with technology.

The antidote to fear is trust.

Your job is to create a trusting environment where great people, and great ideas, can connect, As I said, in the very beginning, none of us here can predict the future. We live in times of explanation, change, and uncertainty, and that's not going to change in the next 5 to 10 years, is going to continue.

If not, get, get further down on that on that direction.

But now, remember, none of us can predict the future.

What we can do is to build a culture of excellence and innovation as our ultimate competitive advantage. And this is not fluffy talk, this is about building the mechanisms that I share with you here, the underlying mechanisms to translate the principles of excellence and innovation into action. And that action demonstrates the behaviors that are associated with your core values and your culture.

And that is how you ultimately transform a culture in a period of 5 to 10 years, maybe more.

Purpose, passion, discipline. resinous is also required from you as a leader. So, with that, I'm going to wrap up the session.

As you know, you can follow the journey of Excellence innovation acceleration with myself, and for the conferences that we do, and this wonderful leaders and organizations will participate with us, Also, on LinkedIn, To the extent that our clients allow us to publicize the information, we're always sharing the publicly available components of, of this journey of excellence and innovation acceleration.

There's no retirement from this.

There are only two stages in life. Remember, you are either growing or you're dying, So choose growth over that and keep going.

Find your purpose.

And commit two, the ardor of pursuing it with excellence is the ultimate message that we all should consider.

And there's no end to that journey. There's no time that we stopped doing that.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I am going to stop showing my screen.

I'm going to change my hat back, should the conference proceedings.

And I want to set the stage for what's happening tomorrow for you.

It's fantastic to see all of you engaged in this.

In this full day, where we had amazing leaders of excellence, innovation, technology, sharing this concepts of change and value creation with us. So, what's coming up? Tomorrow, you can access the agenda, I put the link on the chat, several times, it's RPA, live agenda, you can access your agenda yourself.

Screenshot (4)But for those of you who don't have the agenda right in front of you, I will start tomorrow at the same time we started today, which is 8 50 AM, Eastern Time, United States. And I will start with a basic introduction, because some people kind of like with the one that I did today, showing people how to use the interface, because there are lots of new people who show up on day two.

And then I will pass it on to one, our first great leaders, The head of strategic development insurance for MBA at S S and C technologists, that's doctor ....

She's going to talk about digital transformation, disrupting the way businesses operate, and in Phi N impact, five key areas of any business model: process product platform, people and change management. She is a researcher, professor, and industrial practitioner of this. Fantastic session she's gonna share with us. Then we're gonna shift gears and we're going to have doctor ... with us and he's going to talk about: robotics, process automation.

Right onto the guts of what we're here for is not talk about it as B, is it a powerful solution Or is it a dangerous illusion? So it's a very intriguing title for his session, where he's going to show the perspectives on intelligent automation, the pros and the cons of it, which is, we always skip this. The, the, this perspective is very balanced, because life is in such way, like we just discussed, where you have multiple perspectives pull in different directions.

Then, we're going to have a global leader of robotics, process automation, of process, mining, of, of intelligent automation, hyper automation, and I'm talking about UI path.

UI path is going to be here to discuss in more detail about how to overcome obstacles to accelerate your automation program, and UI path is going to bring to clients. We're going to be the Director of Digital Supply Chain Transformation for SDI, and we're going to have the head of Process Automation of Mark with us, as well as part of that discussion. So this will be a panel with three tremendous minds when it comes to intelligent automation as it is happening today around the world. And we're going to wrap up tomorrow's session with a presentation from the Vice President of Engineering Presidio. And he's going to talk about RPA in customer service.

So it will talk about how RPA can answer, can provide answers on major challenges there, are facing the customer service industry today.

So forth, extraordinary sessions tomorrow. Thank you again for being with us here today, Tremendous engagement. Awesome questions keep asking questions that advantage you, because that enriches every one of our sessions and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow, and whatever you are in the world, have a great rest of your day. And that will connect back here at the same channel at 8 50 AM US Eastern Time.

Thank you, everybody.

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About the Author

more (1)-Jun-22-2021-03-12-33-54-PMJosé Pires,
CEO, Global Excellence & Innovation,
Innovation & Excellence.

José Pires serves as the Global Excellence & Innovation (E&I) Leader for Andeavor Corporation, where he oversees the global identification, prioritization and execution of mission critical business improvements and innovations that add value to the company, business partners and external clients in multiple markets.

Prior to his current role, Pires held Excellence and Innovation leadership positions in large, global companies in the electronics (Sony), semiconductor (Cymer-ASML), food (Nestlé) and infrastructure (Black & Veatch) industries. Throughout his career, Pires developed and refined E&I as an award winning program for innovation, leadership development, strategy execution and value creation globally.

Pires is an advisory board leader and keynote speaker for several global conferences on innovation, operational excellence, leadership development, strategy execution, business transformation, customer engagement and growth acceleration.

He holds a Bachelor in Engineering Physics from the University of Kansas and a Master in Business Administration focused in Investment Banking and Entrepreneurship from the University of San Diego.

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