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I'd like to welcome Ganesh AER who is the CEO of emphasis which is a IT services company and also Mike Yim who's
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A Wharton management Professor uh and he's also the director of Wharton Center
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for leadership and change management thanks uh both of you for coming in today to talk about the personal
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transformation that has to take place uh for Business Leaders especially CEOs the
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top leaders the top team uh when they're companies trying to undergo companywide digital
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transformation so we hear a lot about the need for companies to transform themselves digitally uh because they're
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not going to stay competitive if they don't do that what we don't hear very
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much about is this idea that before a company can change that the leader has to have a personal
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transformation um to understand what digital means to the world and to his company in particular and I think what's
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interesting about that is why is that transformation often difficult for the CEO and some of the things that come up
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are things like ego reluctant uh to look foolish in front of subordinates these are things behind the scenes that we
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don't often hear about um there's denial there's fear of failure all of these
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things can hamper see CEO's performance when it comes to digital transformation
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so I'd like to hear your views about those challenges and how the the CEO and other top leaders uh
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can work to overcome them uh Ganesh let's start with you so probably I'll
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give you some my own personal journey and um I wanted to get onto the Facebook and uh I approached my teenage
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daughter and she said I'll help you to set up the account and um then I asked her a
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question is what's the difference between email and Facebook so at that stage I realized how
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ignorant I was and then suddenly in the last 2 three years the buzzword is digital you're seeing 3D printing you're
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seeing robotics artificial intelligence now people are talking about driverless cars tools and automation exp in every
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industry and sphere of work so I actually did an introspection and said am I the right person to lead this
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great company called emphasis to its success in the new digital world because I had to be authentic and honest if I'm
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not the right person to allow somebody else to lead the company rather than pretending I'm the right
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person 30 years of working in the industry was a baggage because you build your muscle memory so I would say the
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first thing is realization whether you need to change is the first point that I had to confront and once I came to that
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realization then I started I put up a mind map to figure out why what would prevent me from learning I'll come to
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that later but I would say the starting point for the CEO is recognition that they have to change
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it requires fundamentally change in their learning new skills to be acquired and after that the Journey Begins there
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are lots of hurdles in that Journey but I'll let you get to mik rather than going on forever on this question so
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this is a a personal transformation yeah well to pick up what Ganesha has said uh
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I think the underlying challenge that everybody including Ganesha faces is that the pace of change is simply put
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accelerated so the technolog is out there what customers want more rapidly turning over or changing now than say 15
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or 20 years ago historically thus companies did have the privilege if you take the clock back 10 or 15 years of
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changing CEOs as the market changed and in at least the US to some degree in India as well Chief Executives
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historically have usually served somewhere between 5 and 10 years and that was sort of the pace of ch change
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so New Era new CEO is replaced in the old one you got a different kind of person now in that new era the problem
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now though is that the pace of change is not let's say five or 10 years the waves
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are not that that long they're more like 18 months and thus uh Ganesh and people
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uh with comparable positions are really having to reinvent themselves otherwise they're going to get reinvented uh by
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the market they're facing and the digital transformation that we're thinking about we all know about uh if
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anything has an even shorter time cycle than just about anything else that we know out there thus uh back to ganesha's
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reference to Facebook and acquiring what you you need to know to navigate that I
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think it's incumbent on all of us top Executives and Frontline managers to get
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up to speed on the digital transformation that is literally turning a five or 10 year cycle in in the way
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markets work into a five or 10 months ccle these days you you made reference Ganesh to
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mind mapping or sort of sort of you know a shift in thinking uh uh when it comes
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to this so what did you mean by that and and how did you accomplish that for yourself so you know I started
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identifying what are the inhibitors for me to change and uh uh I identified ego ignorance fear of failure these these
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are uh the three factors which I felt would prevent me from changing because uh for me to go and
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admit that I don't know please teach me and going and to a teenager or to a fresher within the company sitting next
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to him or her saying please take me through what are you doing for the customer what are the demands of the
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customer I had to shed those elements first I mean give up my ego and reach deep down within the
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organization basically let learning and Innovation come from all across the organization that was the starting point
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uh in my mind map which led me to various activities that I undertook over the last 18 months to say that I have
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become a digital expert is definitely not true but in the last 18 months I have fully realized the power that
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digital Wheels the opportunity it offers to a company like emphasis and it is an opportunity
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for us to Surge ahead and I need to take the ownership of transformation of this
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company and that Journey started 18 months ago as I mentioned and you know picking up on that I I like the the
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underlying notion that this is something you just have to do getting it done is something else but without that
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commitment to master this new digital terrain uh none of us are going anywhere where with that commitment though uh
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turning to your children or for example and my guess is Ganesh has this in his own company uh ge has long had a
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practice of what they call reverse mentoring normally we think of mentoring of somebody 15 20 years ahead of us kind
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of sharing their wisdom and helping us as the new generation learn uh what they've already long known reverse
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mentoring means nothing more than taking people who are 20 years younger who have
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been raised on the the digital platform and being willing without the ego getting in the way to listen you have to
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be willing to listen and learn from people who are much younger in much lower positions of authority uh because
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they are just a great uh source of thinking about uh what the company needs what you can learn and uh to be able to
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work with reverse mentoring I think is maybe one of the most um most fruitful uh directions to go just add though uh
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from a lot of research that's out there on digital transformation and and how we
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need to navigate our way through it uh we have to become I think an extremely good
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listener uh again we know a lot if we're in a position of of um uh great Authority but the world is changing so
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fast that if we're not actively listening through social media if we're not digesting if we're not analyzing
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what's out there uh we're going to be at a disadvantage as well so to get back to
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the main point taking charge of your own transformation is the first step and then the second step with that as a
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commitment is turning to your children to reverse mentors and just getting your intent out there to hear what's going
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on uh Mike you wrote a seminal book um which was on leadership called the leaders checklist and it put forth 15
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Mission critical principles uh for managing a company is is there a a digital checklist for leaders that uh
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that you could draw on uh through your book that would help CEOs and and let's
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say the top team to think about this this whole idea of transformation yes and let me briefly
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reference the idea of a checklist and then we'll get into the substance the idea of a checklist is um you've got a
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uh a list of mission critical steps you just have to be Savvy about you have to take and the traditional leaders
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checklist would include just to pick out three items to illustrate the point the
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ability to think strategically to communicate persuasively and to decide decisively if
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you haven't got all three of those you're probably not going to lead very
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well and there probably another dozen I would add on to that having said that again when it comes to the digital
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terrain that we all are on it's treacherous I'm going to briefly reference two such lists that are out
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there and I love to hear Ganesh pick up on this and maybe add to what I'm about
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to very Briefly summarize our school published a book this year it's got a great subtitle the main title the
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engaged leader subtitle a strategy for your digital transformation and Charlene Lee the author there really has three
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checklist items here they are number one you have to become an extremely Adept listener
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through through all the traditional means and now through digital media as well number two you have to become
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extremely good at using those sources of information coming in to get information
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out so listening in and in Sharing out and then number three and this really is something that I would not have
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anticipated five or 10 years ago there is so much competition for attention that you also have to become extremely
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good at engaging those that are hearing where you want to take the company so in
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five or 10 years back maybe 20 years back a memo comes out from the corner office everybody reads that and they
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kind of got their marching orders uh doesn't work that way anymore to say the
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the obvious so listening uh communicating out and then especially on that latter Point number
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three learning how to engage people in ways that are much more more challenging now a second checklist uh this comes
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from a nano tool we do Nano tools here and a couple people have put together a nano tool on this very topic and I'm
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going to pick out three items that they offer a checklist for a top executive or
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anybody really in management to be concerned with number one you have to have compelling content again because
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the information world is so cluttered with competing messages number two you have to find ways of what the author of
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this n authors of the Nano tool refer to as distributional leverage so how do you
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actually get the information out to all 15,000 people who are working for you uh
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number three you have to become very good at filtering and analyzing data coming in again so much megabytes of
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data coming uh hourly into our office we need to master the art of digital filtering and
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analyzing and I think number four this is pretty much a summary for why we're
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even talking about this topic without quite realizing how the Advent of digital technology and
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information has affecting the world it has become a genuinely disruptive force in the best sense of
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disruptive Innovations for every market and so the fourth digital leaders checklist here is
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even if you are secure let's say in the Halls The Groves of academ here it's
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coming here it's come to the New York Times it's coming to GE it's coming
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everywhere I'll stop on that Ganesha you probably have a item or two to add to a
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leaders checklist on digital everything so you know um promoting a culture of experimentation because uh compressed
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cycle Innovation newer ways of doing things so promoting a culture of experimentation second thing
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is the guts to cannibalize your own business totally and the last one which uh I heard from other people and which
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we have which was very well articulated world of co-opting or co-creating so you can do a lot more by
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co-opting other players to join hands with you so that you can succeed together it could
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be your customer it could be your partner so these are the three attributes which probably in the analog
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world we didn't need to conf we didn't need to confront or inject as much but
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uh I certainly hope that you know every employee within emphasis is is repurposed or is excited about the
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experimentation coop co-opting and co-creation and last but not least we as Leaders within the company shouldn't be
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afraid to cannibalize our analog business to make progress in digital totally thanks very much for joining us
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gentlemen thank you [Music]