Carrier, a legacy waterfall manufacturing company, has embarked on a journey to reinvent itself by leveraging digital. From educating the leadership and board about the value of digital, partnering with business unit leaders, and embracing the power of analytics, automation, and other emerging technologies, it is no small feat to pull it all together with challenges galore. So how has the journey been thus far? What shift in mindset, culture, talent, processes, and tools has allowed Carrier to continue to transform into a modern, customer-centric lifecycle solutions provider?

Contributor

• • Bobby George, Sr. Vice President & Chief Digital Officer, Carrier
  • John Souther, Executive Director, Digital Growth & Strategy, Carrier
  • Ellen Trager, Executive Director of Digital Commercial HVAC, Carrier

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Hello everyone. Welcome to CTN. To learn more about the show, please visit ciotalknetwork.com and today’s topic is Reinventing Carrier 100 Year Old Startup Journey. So Carrier, it’s actually a legacy waterfall manufacturing company which has started its journey to reinvent itself and they want to use digital for that. So whether they’re trying to educate the leadership and the board about the value of digital, they’re trying to partner with the business unit leaders want to leverage and harness and exploit the power of analytics or automation and any other emerging technologies. It is still a huge task to pull it all together and there are a ton of challenges like in any other transformation effort we have all undergone. So how has this journey been thus far? What kind of shifts in the mindset, the culture, talent, process and tools has actually allowed Carrier to continue to transform into a modern customer centric lifecycle solution provider. So to discuss this I have with me Bobby George, who is the senior vice president and chief digital officer with Carrier.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:18]:
Hey Bobby, how are you?

Bobby George [00:01:21]:
I’m good, thank you. Sanjog, how are you doing?

Sanjog Aul [00:01:23]:
Great and glad to have you on the show here and we have John Souther, who’s the Executive Director Digital Growth and Strategy with Carrier. Hey John, how’s life?

John Souther [00:01:34]:
It’s great and thanks for having me.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:36]:
Absolutely. A pleasure and we have Ellen Trager who’s the Executive Director of Digital commercial HVAC at Carrier. Hey Ellen, how are things treating you?

Ellen Trager [00:01:47]:
Fabulous, thanks so much.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:49]:
Absolutely. Got such an amazing panel here and this is your journey so to just set the stage. So Bobby, let’s start with you. So how did you go about making the business case for reinventing Carrier and while we all pitch not every time it has received the best what you expected. How was it in your case? How well was it received?

Bobby George [00:02:13]:
Yeah, this all started when we decided to spin off as an independent company way back and now I feel ages ago, March of 2020, just before we all shut down from Covid right. We were spinning off from United Technologies Corporation as an independent company and as Carrier spins and any new company spins, you gotta have a story and you gotta have a growth story for the investors who are investing in the company, for the employees in terms of creating that motivation and excitement of being part of this new thing that we are embarking on and for our customers as to what should they expect from the new carrier. So that was kind of the task in front of us and we typically went through this process internally ourselves and one of the biggest things for our leadership team at that time, starting with our CEO Dave Gitlin, was how do we transform our company to be more customer centric? How do we engage differently with our customers? How do we build products and solutions that are critical for sort of the secular trends that we see in our environment today, whether it is sustainability, whether it is healthy air and we as carrier have an opportunity to influence all of that and when we peel the layers and we said, okay, now what is going to power this transformation and this new carrier, it was, amongst everything else, it was the ability to transform ourselves digitally. So that meant, how do we change our systems, how do we change the way we engage with our customers, how do we digitize our processes, all the IT stuff, and then how do we create agility in our business processes as we think about it? So that’s sort of what became our fundamental rallying cry

Bobby George [00:04:00]:
and for us, it then became, all right, how do we now create the impedance in the organization for coming on this journey with us and it had to start at the top.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:08]:
And it had to start at the top.

Bobby George [00:04:10]:
It had to start with our CEO setting the agenda, our leadership team getting on board with that agenda, and then subsequently engaging with our board and talking about how this is going to transform the next five years journey for carrier. So it started at the top. It was honestly for me, a very easy job because I had an ally and a partner and my CEO and chairman of our board who was leading the way to make this happen.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:41]:
So you just went in, pitched, got the approval, and it came out. It was that smooth, or was there anything besides that initial activity that was required?

Bobby George [00:04:52]:
I think that is step number one. So getting alignment, getting this digital transformation and our internal transformation as a priority was step number one and that’s when the hard work begins. Now we’ve got to figure out, how are you going to allocate resources, how are you going to allocate capital amongst all of the other priorities in the organization? Then we look inside our organizations and we find that we have a talent deficit. So we have an organization that was geared to do a certain set of things, and now we want the same organization to step up and do a whole bunch of other things, whether it is embracing new technologies, whether it is engaging with our businesses, etcetera and then we needed to culturally transform ourselves to bring agility and speed, because it is not a static environment, it is a dynamic environment that changes constantly. So how do we bring about that cultural transformation, both within digital and through the rest of the carrier organization, to be able to realize some of the promises that we had as we made.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:59]:
John that’s a great segue for a question for you. So it’s a 100 year old company, talk about the deep rooted legacy culture and processes and the fact that Carrier is a super successful organization. The executive leadership and the board would say, why would I want to change anything when I’m already enjoying so much success? So what did you see as the kind of changes were necessary to start turning this. I don’t know how many tons worth of weight of the ship, right. With such a big ship, what was needed?

John Souther [00:06:36]:
And I think that’s a great question because as Bobby mentioned, we were a new company in 2020, right at the beginning of Covid and this is an area that’s really critical to understand. We were separate, we were multiple BU’s. We have four primary CIOs today that represent each of our four business units. Those four CIOs had never been in the room together prior to the transformation. We had multiple people in IT reporting into supply chain leads, finance leads. We had multiple people that were just single person IT shops within a larger company. And I think we knew we were a successful company. We’re an amazing manufacturer, we build great products

John Souther [00:07:20]:
but the one thing we hadn’t done yet is come together as one team in IT and digital and that’s the first thing we did. We got everybody in a room together. That’s how this all started. It was getting everybody in a room together with one sheet of paper. As Bobby said earlier, he had an ally in the CEO, an ally in the board, and he laid down his principles of what you wanted to deliver. It was one digital team. We were going to reshape the talent.

John Souther [00:07:47]:
We were going to move away from just managing third parties to actually building solutions ourselves. We were going to introduce new capabilities in cyber, new capabilities in analytics and automation, new capabilities in how we go to market and that’s something we couldn’t do with the old model. We weren’t at global scale, we were at the scale of multiple companies and so I think that was really the first objective. And then after we brought everybody together and just started the conversation, it was really about becoming one team and that doesn’t happen overnight. You can’t just shuffle a bunch of people on an org chart and say, okay, you used to have 20 people in IT at a corporate level, now you have 700.

John Souther [00:08:30]:
You’re a team now it’s not that simple and I think that’s really an area where we really focus on culture first. I was always a big believer in Culture but I would say the transformation we did here really opened my eyes into how important it was because it’s not just all saying one thing and having the same printouts on the wall of what culture is. It’s believing it in it and living it day to day and this goes into a few areas. We take feedback very seriously.

John Souther [00:08:59]:
We have pulse surveys that tell us how we’re doing, what our employees like and what they don’t like about what we’re doing and every time that comes out, we parse through it as a team. We read every comment, we make sure that if we see things where the digital operating model isn’t working or we’re not delivering value to our customers, that we address those and we change those with specific programs and initiatives. Also, culture is about believing in a common set of principles and tools. We’ve invested heavily into our teams. We’re almost going to be 100,000 hours this year and training that we’re giving to our digital teams and the partners of our digital business, that training is not just about learning new skills, but it’s inspiring people to think differently and inspiring people to work together and that’s an area where, just as we continue to press and continue to advance, we’ve put such an emphasis on this one team mentality to really bring it to life

John Souther [00:09:52]:
and it’s not easy and the journey is not complete and I think that’s one of the biggest benefits and the biggest things about this leadership team that’s allows to be the startup that we are, is that we realize the journey is never complete. We have to continue focusing, we have to continue improving every day and that’s something that we take very seriously in what we do. And that’s really what drives that culture, that team and this operating model to bring what were legacy processes, legacy ideas in a company that has been encrypted, performing incredibly well and to make sure that we do so and still enable the business, but enable us to bring step change value to our business partners.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:31]:
So, John, when this actually happened, as you rightly said, that it’s never a smooth sailing boat, right? When you’re trying to do transformation, people come from totally different walks of life and or different divisions trying to come together. So there must be friction, there must be passive resistance, there could be active resistance. So in your view, if you build that vision, do they just start following as if you were a Pied Piper or you had to do some shepherding, some cajoling, or use some interesting strategies to get to where you want? I don’t want you to open up any dirty laundries or horror stories but what would be some of the learnings you could impart because you reached not an ideal state since you said it’s still a journey, but I’m sure there is a ton of learning with any examples you could give without revealing too much. What kind of learning can the listeners take away?

John Souther [00:11:28]:
I think the concept of resistance, it really doesn’t exist. Resistance is just two points of view trying to come to a common solution and I think realizing that there were legacy ways of doing this, there are now new ways of doing it, that’s not resistance. There’s not one better than the other. We all want what’s best for carrier and I think the key is to keep the conversation going and to realize that it is a conversation, it is an evolution, and that if you just have this single vision of what we laid out initially is the only way it’ll work. You actually wouldn’t get to where we went to. It’s really about being open, being able to pivot and then aligning on what I would say are our core KPIs and align on critical key measures that we can all rally around and creating a common vision about how we achieve those

John Souther [00:12:17]:
because regardless, in any transformation, you actually have way more in common than you ever have differences and I think it’s just not allowing those differences to sit there too long and appreciate them, recognize them and figure out when they’re blocking achievement of key objectives but otherwise just focus on what we all agreed to and that’s building a better carrier and supporting our business partners better and building new capabilities so that we can enable the growth of carrier.

Ellen Trager [00:12:46]:
You know what?

Bobby George [00:12:46]:
I. I’m sorry, Ellen, I was just gonna say we had. We have. I’m fortunate to have such an amazing leadership team within digital. We have a policy in our group that shares strong opinions weekly have. So we walk away after debating all points of view with a common point of view as a team to execute

Bobby George [00:13:11]:
and I think that has been fundamental in how we’ve been able to shape the transformation effectively. Go ahead, Ellen. Sorry.

Ellen Trager [00:13:20]:
No, that’s all right. One of the things I was going to add as far as lessons learned go, I think there was so much going on and the team were moving so quickly to reorganize digital as a function set out the vision for winner center of Excellence teams were going to do versus what the business units and the shared services team would do. Get a different way of operating, different expectations for the refusers they weren’t used to people telling them to open a ticket for themselves. They relied sometimes on our people to do things like that for them. So we have a lot of culture change to do with them as well and what I was thinking about from a lessons learned perspective is how we’ve kind of peeled the onion back. We lay out a lot of things at top level and then if we got employee feedback that said we don’t really understand this piece or that piece, we knew we had to peel back and get more detailed in certain areas so the teams could work effectively together and in a relatively consistent way across the different business areas.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:17]:
So building on that so Ellen, while of course you the very important is get the business buy in and then you set up the culture, the process, at least start that process but then there are some business processes, there are technological changes that you have to bring about, a fundamental architecture that needs to align with everything. All of that must have started and devil is usually in the execution of that, right? I mean, so what do you think were the right things done at the very onset of this journey besides, once you’ve kind of had the culture and the overarching processes relooked at, rethought and reimagined, but also the technology stack and everything else in between, which product positioned you?

Ellen Trager [00:15:03]:
Well, I think the focus on a few critical new capabilities for the digital function was really important. IOT type capabilities for digital product is one. Analytics and automation, which was mentioned earlier, is another and cyber, I would say there’s just three. There are more, but for my area those are three of the really critical ones that we invested in building capabilities in house for the business and then for my role as a CIO for one of the business units, I was able to take advantage of those capabilities of course to deliver value. For example, one of the key strategies for the company is growing our services business at 2-3x what our historical growth rate has been for services and when I came into the role and I looked at what we were doing in services, it was clear to me that we could take advantage of all of these different capabilities that we were building as a digital function.

Ellen Trager [00:16:00]:
For example, recently we used some automation technology to help us renew our service agreements more quickly. We saw a four point increase in renewal rate year over year. We saw price increases, reduction in admin time. All the things that you would expect if you do very targeted specific automation programs in the right places in your company and because our COE had built themselves a capability and done various projects by that stage my team could go and quickly partner and get value with kind of a one month payback, which was just fabulous. A great way that we can support the business growth around our services capability.

Sanjog Aul [00:16:44]:
So are you looking at these as micro investments more playing like a VC versus a bean counter? I’m sure you’re not looking at the bean counter where you will always look at how less can I spend for me to get the most rewards versus you know what digital itself is new. You still have to explore how far you can stretch it. So you would take some calculated bets. Is that how you invested and if you did that way or in any other way, could you define what you did in terms of investments and how did that portfolio of investments that you did pay off?

Ellen Trager [00:17:19]:
So in my part of the business, we’ve got both the biggest maybe and some of the smallest programs that the company’s doing and it has to be fit for purpose. For example, in our European business, we had a real need to rethink the way that we transact business. We had a very country centric model. We wanted to move to a regionally oriented model for transactional processing and also give some core capabilities to our service team and that is one of the largest programs that our board has proved to move on. It’s about, I would say halfway through or so and we see significant opportunity to keep transforming the business as a result of that

Ellen Trager [00:18:00]:
but it’s foundational. You can’t do those large ERP ripping out the guts of 100-year-old company with two pennies that you rub together. So we have programs like that, we have programs like the automation one and I think it’s a matter of really looking at what the business value is that we have an opportunity to deliver and mapping the investment and the technology with that value opportunity.

Bobby George [00:18:23]:
And if I may add, Ellen, a couple of other things that we have inside the organization is, for example, IOT we have millions of products and service and in order to enable services, we need to connect this equipment up, we need to be able to access the data, we need to be able to provide remote over the air updates on these equipments. We need to be able to bend the cost of being able to service these equipments and how can you do that? You can do that through IOT enabled capabilities. Now each one of our businesses have products across the board and we could engage in a edge based analytic IOT program in each one of our business and instead we said every one of these patterns are so consistent whether it’s edge analytics, whether it is telematics, whether it’s edge units, whatever they are, it is a requirement across our businesses now connectivity and access to the data, that’s a requirement across all of our businesses and then once we have the data to be able to do AI and ML and advanced analytics to be able to drive predictive prognostics outcomes on the data itself. That’s another pattern that is consistent across the businesses. So rather than trying to do it in a siloed way, we said we’ve got to now create these bash layer services in the form of a platform for innovation inside the company and we call it Carrier IO.

Bobby George [00:19:54]:
So we build that, we’ve invested in that capability as an organization and now all the businesses can then accelerate the rate of innovation now that we have these core platform capabilities. The other example that I would say is very relevant to us is usually businesses have a burning platform situation. So we had one which we took full advantage of when we were spinning out of UTC. We had 12 months where we had a significant amount of services for us was performed by UTC. These were called transitional services agreements and we had about 12 months to get off of these transitional services agreements. So the options in front of us were using the investments that we were going to make to get off of these transitional services agreements to really leapfrog from a technology perspective. That’s one option or we could copy paste whatever we had prior

Bobby George [00:20:55]:
and we chose to use this opportunity to leapfrog and that requires courage, that requires conviction, that requires the ability to stand by and face because it’s not going to be easy. There is so much change that we implemented within that 12 month period that it was going to be chaotic and we needed to have the courage as a team to be able to rely on each other to ensure that we had our backs as we executed through those transitions. So that was another example where I would say we had a burning platform in our business 12 months and we needed to exit these transitional services agreements and we took the opportunity to leapfrog fully and completely and what I would mean is from that transformation I’d say we moved about a 3/4th of our workloads into the cloud and we exited about 14 data centers that we had across the board and that’s kind of one example.

Bobby George [00:21:54]:
We adopted most modern SaaS based tools, whether it is enterprise solutions, whether it is the implementation of workday for all of our employees, whether it’s the payroll systems, whether it’s the finance systems, we adopted modern agile nimble SaaS based tools in our organization so that we’re not held back by what I would call traditional IT capabilities. My recommendation is take the opportunities you are given and each time as you are thinking about what your North Star is and how further each one of these opportunities get you to your North Star, take them, don’t be shy have the courage and the conviction to lead change and the organization finally follows. I’ll tell you it was not ready. We did our service desk transformation in 90 days and we transitioned from an existing incumbent provider who was in the business for 22 years to a new provider. We had 60 days to do the transition and it was chaotic. I mean all of our SLAs, all of our metrics, everything was very poor once we went live with the new service desk but this team really stood up and said we’re going to fix it.

Bobby George [00:23:13]:
We looked at the right metrics, we looked at the right measures and we did all of the things that we needed to do to ensure that we got hit our SMAs and our service level goals and our customer satisfaction goals. So I’d say take a shot, make sure you put the right bets in the right place and then follow that through with clear KPIs and metrics to measure your progress.

John Souther [00:23:39]:
And one thing that in what Bobby highlighted is we used to spend 90 to 95% of our entire budget on run. We were talking about the new capabilities that we’ve built. Those came out with a significantly better cost profile which allowed us to then have analytics and automation, advanced cyber and new capabilities and so I think that’s really key is as you have these burning platforms and you take these shots on new opportunities, make sure that they are coming out at the future state cost profile that you want to. So you have that money to invest in these new game changing capabilities like Carrier IO that set us up for the future as a digital company.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:19]:
This is quite a journey as you all have narrated. So there are some learnings and I think Bobby, you started talking about the learnings in specific instances. If you were to take a stab at this question of if you had to do this all over again, what would you do differently? What would be a response to that, Bobby?

Bobby George [00:24:38]:
Maybe not bite off as much as we did in year one. I think definitely this has put a tremendous amount of strain on the internal digital teams. So you need to be able to. We were going through multiple levers of transformation at the same time. So for example, as John said earlier, we were combining the organization into new organizational constructs of COEs and shared services organizations and BU focused digital functions that Ellen and others represent. We were doing that.

Bobby George [00:25:13]:
That’s significant organizational change. We were upskilling the organization at the same time. So the training that John talked about, we were going through our internal coaching transformation which is centered around Agile, so autonomous teams driving that and we were executing a tremendous amount of programs which were all time bound and high risk. So I would say the organization went through a period of tremendous strain especially now. You couple that with Covid the inability to bring together people in a common room to have a walk, the walk kind of conversation and really having to do it all over, Zoom meetings, etcetera, those were sort of troubling and challenging for us and maybe I repeat our transformation journey initially a little bit differently just to make sure that people are not burnt out in the process. We have taken our pedal off the accurate a little bit since then

Bobby George [00:26:10]:
but we continue to push forward into new areas that we talked about, whether it is new digital products and platforms that we’ve launched and a lot more customer engaged direct to customer consumer type, e-commerce and digital capabilities as well. So that would be my one big thing is pace the transformation journey.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:32]:
So Ellen, when you went into the execution and I’m sure you would have many learnings as well, what would you say you would recommend for the listeners like almost like an advice or a warning, a caution you’d like them to heed and also if you were to continue your execution path with new ideas and new things that you are putting in place, how would you change your style? How would you change your approach to executing things?

Ellen Trager [00:27:01]:
So as far as I guess a caution, I’m not sure if I have that as much as some continued steps right. I mean we talked about working hard to go fast, putting the right metrics in. I just wanted to make sure to add to it. One of the things that I’ve tried to do over the years is focus on continuous improvement as it relates to operational excellence. One of the great things that our infrastructure team has done is put a team in place that really cares about what is the root cause analysis, how do we get better, how do we hone our metrics to make sure that whatever we see, if it’s green, it means that the users actually feel green. So I guess I would make that as an ad and make sure that folks recognize that the high level stuff, it’ll get done, it’ll get done fast. But the journey has to keep going as far as how we move forward from here. There’s so much opportunity, there’s so much demand for our team and the great things that we’ve been able to develop and deliver so far.

Ellen Trager [00:28:01]:
We have to find ways to prioritize doing the right things at the right time and with the business units and business teams that are ready and that means they’re ready to really hunker down and be an integrated part of the agile scrum teams that we have. They’re ready to roll up their sleeves and solve problems and address their data challenges and commit to change management. We all know that adoption and change management are the key to value. We can deliver the most amazing piece of technology, but without those other two elements, we’re not delivering the value we need. So it’s making sure that we have that complete understanding of the path to value and tracking people and resources throughout it.

Bobby George [00:28:48]:
Yeah, I mean, that’s a great point, Ellen. I think meeting the teams where they are is I would say, a very significant part of this thing as well, because not everybody is as ready to get on this transformation journey as everybody else.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:04]:
So, Ellen, one quick question. So you mentioned about continuous improvement. So many times people look at that and say, yeah, that is going to be business as usual with some tinkering but if you’re transforming, there has to be some creative destruction come along the way as well. You let go of something for making room for the new. Did you guys have to do anything in that regard?

Ellen Trager [00:29:24]:
Yeah, I mean, we let go of a lot of the old ways of working. I mean, even as simple, quote unquote as waterfall to agile, I mean that’s letting go and there’s a huge amount of education for ourselves, education for the business partners and consistently looking at how well are we really doing on that. Are we really learning as we go and improving our capabilities with each project, with each other and that’s a different muscle that we have. It’s just an example of one that we have to continue to build over time and the initial shift where you say next year I’m going to go from 0 to 70% of my projects to be agile, that’s the big rip off the band aid moment but to get from, if you get there, then going from 70 to 75 to 80, that for me is continuous improvement and it’s where tons of opportunity come forward.

Sanjog Aul [00:30:19]:
And to all of that, John, you talked about the culture, the foundation, what you set out to do in terms of the kind of culture you want to fix or tweak in order to get started. And now you were neck deep into the transformation and there is more to come. Would you say you have a holy grail of a culture that you would like to set or get to so that this doesn’t remain a snapshot of a project, but it becomes an ongoing, disruptive, transformative journey where you always reinvent yourself and kind of maximize your own potential as a company?

John Souther [00:30:52]:
I think that’s a great question. And to some of the points that Bobby and Ellen were raising earlier, one of my favorite quotes is if you want to go fast, go with a few. If you want to go far, go with many and I think when we were talking about a lot of the transformation we were doing, it was on infrastructure, service, desk, backend things where we as a digital function could just look within ourselves and go fast. That’s you. We now as a digital team are accustomed to a pace, we’re accustomed to a speed where almost changes the constant and I think and that’s our culture that we’ve built and we have great team members, we have nimble team members, we have people willing to get creative all times

John Souther [00:31:35]:
but now we’re transitioning to this. We need to bring the organization with us on some of these new changes. As Ellen was saying, the programs we’re working on, adopting that, and this is now that part where we have to realize we have this fast paced digital culture and we have a culture of excellence, a carrier that’s been moving at a different speed, focused on different initiatives. These are now starting to come together and once again, we called it friction earlier, but it’s just a conversation that needs to happen and we have to find that right balance point and I think when it comes to culture, I think that’s really where we have to start thinking about as we become one, when we were one digital, now as we become one carrier moving at the speed of transformation, moving at the speed of the market, introducing new ideas, new concepts around edge. With carrier IO and some of our new digital recurring revenue products, we have to find that right cadence where carrier comes together and we build that culture of co innovation and co transformation that comes with speed and it comes with the best of both of all the mentalities that we’ve had, this 100-year-old stable manufacturer who’s been delivering excellence and a digital team that’s new and working with speed, building that best of both, I think is the next step in our journey and I see a ton of promise there

John Souther [00:32:53]:
and I’m really excited about the progress so far but once again for me everything can always be improving. So what are those next steps that we can do to make ourselves better and make sure that we’re in lock stake step as we go along this digital transformation journey and our journey for bringing more digital products to market.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:12]:
So one last question for each of you. Give one leadership tip which these individuals individually are collectively working in any organization trying to turn around, not sure even they could ever come close to your 100 year old startup transformation but if anyone is trying to do any startup transformation or any other transformation in their businesses, starting with you Bobby, what would be that one leadership tip you will give them?

Bobby George [00:33:40]:
So I would say for me, I have always looked back and said how do I know we are successful in transforming carrier? Like what is that key measure that we would identify and say yep, we got there. For me it is it our business unit presidents and our leadership team clearly understands our position in how carrier can influence in the mega cycles that we are in, whether it is sustainability, whether it is healthy air that we are in a unique position to solve but there is one key thing, right technology tailwinds that enable us to help drive this and how can you create a defensible position for your business in the long run using technology as a key enabler for that and for that when everybody in the business is aligned and key part of their strategy and how they think about the business is they think about the business today as a digital business and if they want to grow and scale and respond to customer needs, no matter what they do, they understand it is digital. So it is front and center of the strategy for each one of our business unit precedents and that’s how I recognize that we have a right.

Bobby George [00:35:01]:
So it is not the CDO or the CIO pushing a digital agenda. It is when your leadership team is speaking to that same tier. In my mind that’s what I would say is a key learning or takeaway is to have one or two of those key KPIs that you can measure and say okay, how did I get to that goal?

Ellen Trager [00:35:20]:
I was thinking about the way that we work together as a team. It’s not been always pretty smooth path. We are very strong minded, experienced senior leaders, but we do have the best for carrier in mind and we solve problems together when we need to and we’ve been able to move the organization forward.

John Souther [00:35:46]:
Everybody says this, but it really comes down to people and it really comes down to building the best teams, making sure that the teams are aligned and you’re all focused in a single direction. I think we have to realize as carrier we’re not building a widget, we’re not implementing the next service desk. What are we doing? We are helping grow carriers revenue, we’re helping carriers bottom line and I think having a strong team that realizes that’s their mission but then they own a piece of that entire mission. So you put ego aside, you put personal ambitions aside and it’s once again what’s best for carrier and what’s best for a joint mission and getting everybody thinking about that and excited to come to work every single day to drive the one carrier mission I think is absolutely critical.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:37]:
Once again, thank you so much Bobby, John and Ellen for sharing your insights about reinventing carrier this 100 year old organization into a startup mode and reaping the benefits. Thanks so much.

Bobby George [00:36:52]:
Thanks for having us.

Ellen Trager [00:36:54]:
Thank you.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:55]:
And listeners Please connect with us on social media, subscribe to our podcast. Once again, thank you for listening to CTN. This is your host Sanjog Aul signing off. Till next week take care and god bless.

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