by Ulrich Irnich & Markus Kuckertz

Shownotes

Folge #24 behandelt die Frage „Wie halten Unternehmen ihre Innovationskultur aufrecht?”. Zu Gast ist dazu Steve Bandrowczak – Chief Executive Officer von Xerox in Norwalk, USA.

Steve leitet den Xerox-Konzern, der wie kaum ein anderes Unternehmen für Innovation steht: Wir alle kennen die Kopierer und Drucker – aber es gibt einige Fakten, die weniger bekannt sind: zum Beispiel, dass die grafische Benutzeroberfläche, die Maus als Eingabegerät, der Ethernet-Netzwerkstandard und der Laserdrucker von Xerox und dem von Xerox gegründeten Palo Alto Research Center erfunden wurden. Wer wäre als Gesprächspartner für das Thema Innovationskultur mehr geeignet als Steve?

Uli, Markus und Steve diskutieren die Bedeutung von Innovationen und ihren strategischen Wert. Sie sprechen darüber, wie man Unternehmen organisatorisch aufstellt, um Innovationen erfolgreich zu machen und welche Bestandteile eine innovationsfreundliche Unternehmenskultur hat. Zur Sprache kommen nicht nur die Notwendigkeit einer schlanken und agilen Organisation mit Start-up-Mentalität, sondern auch Diversität, Inklusion und Zusammengehörigkeit als wesentliche Bausteine einer erfolgreichen Innovationskultur.

Wer sich weiter informieren möchte, wird hier fündig:

Euer Feedback zur Folge und Vorschläge für Themen und Gäst:innen sind sehr willkommen! Vernetzt euch und diskutiert mit:

Mitwirkende – Hosts: Ulrich Irnich & Markus Kuckertz // Produktion: Daniel SprĂĽgel & Sören Wahlers, Maniac Studios (https://maniacstudios.com) // Redaktion: Marcus Pawlik // Kommunikation & Community: Anna-Lena Sodies // Team behind the team: Sonja Uller © Digital Pacemaker Podcast 2023

Zusammenfassung

In this episode, we dive deep into the nuances of maintaining a culture of innovation within organizations, featuring insights from Steve Bandrocek, the CEO of Xerox. With his extensive experience and solid track record in driving disruptive change, Steve embodies the spirit of innovation that has been the hallmark of Xerox for over a century. We explore the vital role that innovation plays in sustaining success amidst a rapidly evolving technological landscape and discuss how it can be strategically channeled to continually redefine a company’s identity.

Steve emphasizes the electrifying pace of advancements in technology and the necessity for companies to embrace change rather than succumb to it. He lays the groundwork by reflecting on Xerox’s historic innovations that include the graphical user interface, the mouse, and Ethernet—items many take for granted today. Our conversation delves into the importance of nurturing an agile organization with a startup mentality, which is crucial for fostering creativity and responsiveness to customer needs. Steve articulates that innovation is not merely a goal but a means to achieve strategic objectives that directly improve customer experiences.

Throughout our discussion, we address how companies, like Xerox, can identify challenges faced by their clients and craft solutions that resonate with current market demands. Steve provides a detailed look into macro trends—such as the push for improved productivity, heightened customer expectations, and the imperative for data-driven decision-making—that shape how Xerox approaches innovation. He shares the company’s initiatives related to IoT and AI, elaborating on how these technologies help to enhance operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Steve also highlights the pivotal role of diversity and inclusion in driving a robust culture of innovation. By integrating diverse perspectives and encouraging collaboration across different demographics, Xerox is better equipped to harness a wealth of ideas. He notes how essential it is for organizations not just to aspire to diversity but to weave it into the fabric of everyday business practices, ultimately making challenges into opportunity.

Further, we discuss how an agile mindset is crucial for the future workforce. Steve asserts that in a world of constant change, the ability to lead with passion and motivate others is paramount. The skills required for future employees, he argues, will lean more heavily on attitude and adaptability rather than traditional educational credentials. The conversation transitions into the future of technology, where Steve reflects on the unpredictable nature of innovation and the importance of being prepared to capitalize on unforeseen advancements.

Our episode concludes with Steve sharing his personal purpose and vision for Xerox’s legacy in the coming century. His commitment to ensuring that Xerox remains a leader in technology while adapting to the demands of the modern age showcases a refreshing outlook on how forward-thinking can become a driving force behind lasting success.

Join us for this engaging conversation as we uncover valuable insights that not only apply to Xerox but can resonate with anyone interested in cultivating a culture of innovation and resilience within their organizations.

Transkript

Speaker0:[0:00] If you can’t be excited today about being in technology, you need to go find another role. Because it is about as exciting as it’s ever been, and the opportunity cannot be any more magnitude and driving bigger each and every day.

Music:[0:15] Music

Speaker0:[0:28] Welcome back to the digital pacemaker podcast with your host uli oenig and me marcus kukas today we are talking about the ways companies maintain their culture of innovation and how they use it to reinvent themselves again and again. Our guest today is Steve Bandrocek. We call you Steve B, if it’s okay. Chief Executive Officer of Xerox. I’m very excited to have you as our guest today. Steve, welcome. Thank you, Marcus. It’s an honor to be here. Steve and his colleagues run Xerox Group, which stands for innovation like few other companies. We all know the company’s plain paper copiers and printers, but there are some facts that might be much less familiar. For example, that’s a graphical user interface or GUI, the mouse as an input device, the Ethernet network, standard and the laser printer were invented by Xerox and the Xerox-founded Palo Alto Research Center or PARC. So who could be better suited as a discussion partner on innovation culture than Steve? And I would like actually to welcome you, Uli, as well, the co-host of the Digital Pacemaker podcast. Uli, can you remember when you first came into contact with innovations from Xerox?

Speaker1:[1:36] Definitely. I had a mouse. So, you know, when you are in the age I am in, right, you have already seen a lot of innovations, right? And the beauty on Xerox innovations is that they understood, and Steve will tell us a bit more, always to re-innovate and re-imagine their, let’s say, value chain again and again. And that’s, I think, one of the success formulas for companies going forward because you cannot rely on your revenue streams you are in today because there are many other outsides which might disrupt your, let’s say, business model and therefore you need this kind of innovation forces.

Speaker1:[2:17] Coming back to your question, Marcus, beside the mouse, one of my famous innovation I liked in the, I think it’s in the 90s, right, is this print where you go, right, because especially if you have big companies and there are a lot of printers around, right, and then you start normally printing and you print on a printer somewhere, but then you forgot it, right, and then your printed stuff lies outside. And Xerox was one of the first ones who has this kind of print where you go, right? You have your badge and then you can, let’s say, access your print out via the printer, wherever you are with your badge and get your print out, right? Which was first, of course, from a sustainable perspective, a pretty good thing because you don’t waste paper, right? And the second thing is also if you have confidential things, it doesn’t lie somewhere and you got really in trouble, right? So that was a really, really, I would let’s say, a step change in office printing, to be honest.

Speaker1:[3:21] And, you know, at this time we talked already that we need paperless offices, but the reality at that time was the opposite, right? Everybody who is keen to print, print it, right? And, yeah, so I’m very, very happy, Steve, to have you here. Steve joined Xerox in 2018, has been chief executive officer since 2022. Prior to that, Steve held senior position at several international corporations, including Avaya, Nortl, Lenovo, DHL, AFNET, and Allied Solutions, an information technology and consulting company. So with a wealth experience, Steve teaches leading disruptive change in the digital economy, which is perfectly at the Columbia University and is a mentor at the Columbia University Center for Technology Management. Steve holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Long Island University and a Master of Science degree from Columbia University, both in New York. Steve, with your, let’s say, background and your innovation power, I ask myself, what is your trigger standing up each morning and drive, let’s say, innovation in your company and so that people feel this kind of passion and energy?

Speaker0:[4:40] Yeah, Louis, first of all, thank you for having me. And I always share with my class that I teach at Columbia, today is the slowest technology will ever be. And if you think about that, the change that technology is driving, you can do one of two things. You can let change happen to you, or you could be a driver of change. And I’m trying to create and continue the unbelievable innovation that we’ve had here at Xerox over the last hundred years. You know, you talk about Palo Alto Research Center and the things, you mentioned the mouse, you mentioned Ethernet, you mentioned what we have done historically. But there are things that we’ve done in and around IoT, things that we’ve run around artificial intelligence.

Speaker0:[5:26] And that culture is alive and well here at Xerox. When we think about everyday getting up, it’s really how do you drive customer outcomes? How do you drive customer success using technology and opportunities? You know, today, the consumer world, what we see in our everyday consumer world is colliding with the enterprise. And you’re seeing it in your business as well. The disruption of applications is creating an unbelievable expectation of what the experience should look like from our end users, both employees as well as our customers. Easy, simple. How do you anticipate? How do you think about the world of big data? How do you think about the world of artificial intelligence? So when I think about innovation and I drive it here at Xerox, it is an opportunity. It is an unbelievable opportunity we have to grow and to help our customers be successful. And what I really love about it is that it builds off of the 100-year innovation history that we have. When I come to work every day, it’s like, continue what we’ve always done, but we’ve got to do it faster.

Speaker0:[6:42] Continue what we’ve always done, but we’ve got to be more meaningful. Continue what we’ve always done and not just impact the way in which work happens, but how do you actually help an individual of one? My background as an enterprise CIO and an enterprise leader, we always talk about creating a single solution for an entire company. And the reality is new disruption and innovation is the innovation for an individual. How do you make an individual more productive? How do you make an individual more valuable? How do you drive customer success? And so when I wake up every day, that’s what makes me exciting and what gives us a great opportunity to really reinvent industries, reinvent the way people work, reinventing the way things happen. And by the way, contribute to some of the big macro trends around the world. When you think about climate, you think about the Great Recession, you think about the amount of pressure that’s hitting our companies today in terms of being more efficient, driving more and more productivity. We’re at the heart of that, and I could not be more excited every day about leading this company.

Speaker0:[7:53] Steve, we prepared a bit the things we want to talk about with you, and we came up with three blogs. First of all, Steve, you state that innovation is not an end in itself, but must follow clear strategic goals and fields. At Xerox, these are the pillars of innovation. We will talk about that. And secondly, in order to make innovation successful, you recommend a lean and agile organization with a startup mentality, in addition to a strong degree of customer sensitivity. Last but not least, you describe diversity, inclusion and belonging as the essential building blocks of your innovation culture. Let’s get straight to the first block, Steve. Xerox Heritage, it’s great innovations in the information age. How do you identify what challenges your clients are facing and how you can best bring solutions to them? Yeah, I think there’s a couple of different ways. First of all, the macro trends, right? You think about today how we’re all trying to solve ESG, whether it’s around climate, whether it’s around social, whether it’s around diversity. What are the big macro trends that are happening out there? Think about the Great Recession and how do you drive customer productivity? Think about what is the growth of companies in the future? It’s around data.

Speaker0:[9:08] GDP growth in countries around the world, company growth and expansion around the world is going to be around data. Data has value that needs to be unleashed. And so when you think about how we wake up every day, how do we look at those macro trends? Then you look at verticals, very specific things like in my business, I got 14,000 technicians that are out there that are servicing, physically servicing my end devices. Well, guess what? Every company, Vodafone included, every company in the world has a service fleet, whether it’s your own fleet or whether it is fleet that you outsource or you stitch together a bunch of partners, what’s happening in the service industry?

Speaker0:[9:54] Inflation on salaries. The workforce is getting aged, meaning that a lot of people are retiring and we don’t have enough talent and enough people to be able to service industries. Three, your customer expectation is getting higher around what that service experience should look like. Four, the consumer experience. Think about an Amazon. You need to anticipate what my problem is before I even know it and fix it without having a technician come to my house. And so we look at those macro trends, and I’ll give you very specifically within the vertical of service. We created a product called Care AR, and we could talk about that a little bit later. But Care AR is around how do we revolutionize the service industry? So when we look at things, we look at the macro trends. We look at the very specific industry and vertical trends, and then we think about what are the technologies that can go help around artificial intelligence, IoT.

Speaker0:[11:02] Big data, cloud, all these things, machine learning, all these things that are tools to us, and then how do we stitch them together to revolutionize and dramatically change? You know, I tell my team all the time, Marcus, I don’t want to crawl to mediocrity, meaning I don’t want just a little bit incremental improvement. Let’s change the game. If we’re going to do it, let’s change the game. Why do we go through all the trouble of just improving by a little bit? And I know that’s in the heart and DNA of Vodafone, right? How do we change the game? How do we revolutionize? And we’re at the end of this. How do we make sure that we have something that’s differentiating? differentiating, important markets focused on customer success and customer outcomes?

Speaker1:[11:44] That’s a perfect thing. Because if you look, especially, you know, at the World Economic Forum, right? And if you look at their top 10 risk, they see for the next decade, five out of 10 are all environmental risk we are facing, right? Are we able to turn this climate change around? Are we able to live with all this flooding and all kinds of these forces which we got from the weather, right, and from the climate itself? And I think we have a big role to play as companies, right? First, to be really the first mover on that and also how humans together with technology can help to change that.

Speaker0:[12:25] No question. And that’s what I love about Vodafone, Uli. You know, it’s not about 5G and 6G. It’s about how we change. People absorption of content, that content driving new behaviors. In my case, less drivers, more remote solve. How do we do more customer self-serve? How do we do more customer solve where I can reduce the carbon footprint because I don’t have to roll a truck? I don’t have to have a truck that’s using miles. Even an EV, even if I use a full EV fleet, I still got to charge my vehicles, right? The best way to have a positive impact on the environment is to not roll a truck, have a customer self-serve, or remote solve. And so we’re using technology that is allowing us to do that. Vodafone with 5G gives us a whole new playing field. We can’t use video in a dialogue. We can’t use video in yesterday’s network technologies. What you are bringing is incredible, incredible transport that allows us to put information and insight and data inside of those packets that gives us insight to our customers, which is tremendous.

Speaker0:[13:37] Xerox is also dipping its two into 3D printing. Uli, I think that’s one of your favorite topics as well. But also Internet of Things and cleantech, the journey from copiers and printers to 3D printing can be understood. What prompted you to start looking at the Internet of Things? It’s a topic that we, of course, at Vodafone care a lot about.

Speaker0:[13:57] Yeah, no, Marcus, I think it gets back to what I talked about, and that is data. You know, we’re so focused on traditional data, data that’s static, right? Whether it’s CRM data, whether it’s financial data, you know, pick your data of choice, very static, old. And then you start to think about what IoT gives us, right? 50 billion, 50 billion IoT devices that are going to be connected in the future. Those connected devices, those connected IoT data points now give us data and insight that allows us to create new customer success. So if you think about IoT data in bridges, you think about IoT data in homes, you think about IoT data that we see in cars, we see data in motion. We then now can combine that with our static data, CRM data, customer data, device data, whatever it may be, and we now can drive new paradigms of change. Simple thing like a gas leak at a home. An IoT device can pick that up. We change how we think about dispatching technicians, how we think about dispatching emergency vehicles.

Speaker0:[15:10] 3D is another example. You think about today’s supply chains. Supply chains, I’ve built it. I was at DHL. I had one of the biggest, largest logistics companies in the world called the Logis. And the reality is we built supply chains around physical distribution.

Speaker0:[15:27] Physical ability to have spare parts, physical ability to have things. Well, guess what? Go into certain parts of the world, Middle East, Africa. There is no robust inventory. There is no robust supply chain. So how do we think about 3D in some of those other areas? How do we think about 3D to print parts that we only need once as opposed to having inventory and warehouses of inventory of spare parts that we may not need in the future, whether it’s around airplanes, whether it’s around military devices, whether it’s around autos, 3D allows us to change the supply chain dramatically. It changes it financially. It changes it physically, logistically. It changes it in terms of storage and warehouse. Again, having a very positive impact on the environment because I don’t have to physically move goods. I can print them. And so 3D, for me, is just another evolution of how do we solve some of these world macro challenges that we’re seeing today.

Speaker1:[16:29] Definitely. And I’m so excited about 3D printing because you can reimagine things, right? And also, if you look, I had an interview with a doctor, right? And their research is looking for 3D printing of bones, right? And normally, it’s so important that especially if you have a bone, that is individual for you. That’s not something you can build in a factory in mass technology or something like that. And if you look how they defined this kind of printing and they got stability, but also this kind of tension, you have the flexibility with your bone. That’s really exciting, right? And that’s something we couldn’t do a couple of years ago, right? And now let’s imagine what technology can bring to us to solve some of these kind of really burning questions in the world.

Speaker0:[17:18] Yeah, no question. And you know, it’s interesting. In 3D today, we can create new and unique parts, which is dramatically changing. You know, we’re doing some things for the U.S. Navy on an aircraft carrier. And the reality is all the different fire suppression systems that are an aircraft carrier, they have to carry a wrench. Very simple. There are hundreds and hundreds of wrenches because of all the different systems. Well, now with 3D, you can create and print one wrench and, that they can have that services the entire aircraft carrier. Game-changing. Game-changing in terms of one wrench. Game-changing in terms of what you need to store. And so we’re seeing more and more of those where because you can model these materials and you can model these parts in software and predict the stress, predict how they’re going to be able to react to environmentals, you now can create unique parts. And so 3D is going to be very interesting as we go forward as well. So let’s speak about customer centricity and lean and agile organizations. We would like to participate in your experience. How did you organize yourself to promote the culture of innovation at Xerox?

Speaker0:[18:32] Yeah, I think it’s a couple of things. So first of all, innovation comes from everywhere. I talk about the sales team has innovation. Why? Because they spend time with our customer.

Speaker0:[18:44] Innovation starts with a customer problem, customer challenge, what they’re seeing in the customer. So when I talk about innovation, it is not just innovation in our labs, not just innovation in our R&D. Innovation comes from a lot of different ways. And I include the Salesforce. I include my service team. Every day service team, you are on site at a customer. What are you seeing? How can we bring them value? What can we drive in terms of customer success. I invest in venture capital. We have startups that we invest in. Why? Because VCs are focused, again, starting on technologies and how can they solve. So when we talk about innovation in Xerox and how do I talk about customer centricity, I’m looking for data points in a lot of different areas, whether it’s the sales team, service team, obviously my traditional R&D and my engineering team, venture capital in terms of what startups are seeing, what they’re doing. And so we then put that all together and we start to look at what are the big macro trends that we’re going to see two, three, five years from now? And how do you start to build customer outcome solutions? You see the challenge first, and then we figure out how do we go solve it? How do we go make it actually happen?

Speaker0:[20:01] But Marcus, we also do things like gamification. You know, I rolled out RPA three years ago. And when we started it, the idea is, well, RPA replaces people. And it was kind of scary, like AI, kind of scary. People don’t know what to do with it. And so we started this thing of gamification.

Speaker0:[20:19] And now we’ve got tens of thousands of employees that get into RPA gamification tournaments. And we have fun with it. We’ll do the same thing with AI. And so, you know, you can have fun with these things. It’s not as scary. And, you know, one of the things that’s beautiful, Marcus, is that.

Speaker0:[20:38] Every day in our consumer life, we talk about artificial intelligence and we talk about like it’s this abstract, scary thing. And then you remind people you see artificial intelligence every day. Where do you see it? Well, if you’re on the Netflix and you’re watching The Crown, all of a sudden now the next five things comes up on what is related to the monarchy. What is related to Prince Harry, right? Why? Because I am in the mood of watching a video and I get marketed to right then and there. You take a look at your banks. You get on, you read a bank, and all of a sudden somebody comes up and says, would you like me to help you with that transaction?

Speaker0:[21:18] All of this is artificial intelligence. So it shouldn’t be scary. We’re seeing it in our consumer life. And, Marcus, what I think is actually going to happen is it’ll actually drive adoption faster and, more importantly, drive expectations that Vodafone Xerox will have to go even faster to go drive solutions because the expectation is going to be so high. Why do I have to have a paper invoice? Why do I have to have, in your case, cell phone bills the way they are today? All right. How do we make that simple, easy? How do we make a consumer experience? And so when we think about today inside of the company, I try to use that. I try to use consumer ideas. I try to use what’s happening without end customers, innovation that everybody understands that they contribute. You know, I had one of the largest IT budgets when I was at DHL. DHL is an IT company. And the reality is I used to own all the smart technology around the world.

Speaker0:[22:20] Right. When you wanted to know what was happening, you came to a DHL. You went to an IBM because they had all or you went to a bank like Deutsche Bank. They had all the technologies. Now, where do you go? You think totally different. It’s in the consumer space is disrupting. Right. And so those are giving us ideas of how we can disrupt and how we can go faster and have a culture that is really important at Xerox. So maybe let’s add the topic of agility to that to understand customer centricity is especially data driven, how you see it. So and yeah, agility. The thing is, I mean, we are both IT guys as well, Uli and myself. And of course, we think it’s no longer possible to imagine software development without this thing. But I guess in the development of hardware, it’s rather mixed success. How do you handle this topic?

Speaker0:[23:12] Yeah, well, think about the life cycle of my traditional devices. You know, going back, it’s a five to seven year life cycle. And then I’m trying to introduce the topic of innovation in and around software. You get to a year end or you get to a month end. What do you do? You don’t put any changes. You don’t want to put any risk.

Speaker0:[23:32] Those environments have to change and change dramatically. And so when we think about agile and we think about the different ways in which we need to think about our company in the life cycle and the speed of those life cycles, we no longer can do it the traditional ways. You’re absolutely right. Agile is a pretty important, but I’ll even argue we even need to think about how we go faster. And I don’t know what the next generation of that looks like, but we need to fail faster. We need to go faster. We need to have much, much more ability to create bite-sized chunks. Check it. Go. Does it work? Yes. Keep going. If it doesn’t, throw it away. Start again and go faster. Okay. And so when we think about agile, it’s not just a methodology. It’s about a mindset of how we go faster. By the way, how do we get our end users to think and go faster as well? All right. Because in an agile, in the way in which we’re developing in the future, It’s a combination of customer success, meaning their outcomes, along with the technologies to make it happen. And how do we make it go fast? You know, the beautiful thing, Marcus, is we’ve seen in our industry many, many, many technologies, many softwares. When they first start, the original intention was never where it ends up.

Speaker0:[24:47] You know, you think about today, you think about the Ford and the automobile. If you had asked Ford many years ago when they first started and they asked their end customer what you needed, they would have wanted what? A faster horse because it was a horse. I just need a faster horse. I don’t need an automobile. And so many times when we ask our own clients, when we ask our own customers what they need, we need to understand their problem. And then we can help define how we get there through innovation.

Speaker1:[25:14] You are totally right. Because when I look to IT, right, 52 years ago, we sent the first message through the internet and now we see the pace of innovation is picking up massively right so we’re expecting in the next five years as many innovation as in the last 50 right and that seems also that we need this kind of let’s say inspect and adopt right mentality you mentioned it like agile mindset or growth mindset to see the opportunity in that that’s something which is really beautiful on agile because you find out yourself what’s possible what’s not and then adopt and scale it and that’s how it works it sounds for some people scaring changing that kind of perspective and looking to the opportunities i think that’s the big management task for us and leadership task i would say to open this kind of perspective yeah

Speaker0:[26:08] No question when you can get employees involved and you can get your customers involved it’s game-changing because now they’re part of the solution now they’re part of what you’re trying to drive so let’s turn to the employees you talked about diversity inclusion and belonging as essential building blocks of your culture could you illustrate that for us what does this look like in practice.

Speaker0:[26:31] Yeah, there’s a couple of things, Marcus. First of all, you know, I’m very proud of what we’ve done here at Xerox. You know, we’ve got what we call employee resource groups. I was actually at a celebration for one of our employee resource groups, which is our women’s group, celebrating seven years of the group that’s been together and been driving. And so it’s not just something that we kicked off. It’s been a part of Xerox’s culture for a very long time. And so when you think about today, the ability to get the best and brightest of ideas, you must have diverse thoughts. You know, one of the things that I’m sure you do the same thing. I always try to have somebody who’s like nails on a blackboard on my staff. Why? It’s a complete different set of thoughts, different than myself, different than what we would normally do. And so we think about diversity. Let’s talk about that for a second. Think about how many different work groups you have within Vodafone. We used to talk about millennials like they were some group that’s about ready to come. Guess what? They’re running out companies today. You think about today, individuals coming out of grade school versus somebody that’s been out of college for two years. They can’t even talk to each other because there’s such a big divide. Somebody who’s coming out of grade school today was born a digital native. They don’t know anything different.

Speaker0:[27:57] And we’re going to continue to have these generations in our workforce. Then you start to think about global diversity, having different rates of technology absorption. We embrace that, Marcus. We bring all that together. And that makes us so much stronger, so much better in terms of our products, in terms of how we get best ideas. You know, you think about today, how do we have somebody who’s got an incredibly brilliant mind, but their vision is impaired or their hearing is impaired? They have a different sense than you and I have because we got perfect hearing. We got perfect vision. But when your hearing is impaired, your eyes become Superman. And so when you think about how do you get all those best ideas in terms of how you run the company, how you run the groups, that’s what I mean in terms of D&I and has an important part to the company. You think about the workplace today and, you know, we’re trying to drive and think about the workplace, not only today, but the workplace of the future. What is the workplace of the future? Well, it’s an employee wherever he or she is, whether it’s at home, wherever it may be running. How do you think about the workplace of the future and how do you create solutions that allows that individual to be as productive as possible?

Speaker0:[29:18] And what are those tools, what are those capabilities look like? So for us, D&I is incredibly important. It gives us incredibly different thought.

Speaker0:[29:26] The same thing with Vodafone and your company. You think about the diversity, not only from a country and a geographic standpoint, but your customers. How diverse are your customers today, right, in terms of the end, not only internal employees as a customer, but your external customers. Think about all the different constituents that you have and how do you service them. So for me, D&I is incredibly important. You know, you talk about Davos and what they talk about at Davos, whether it’s around climate. The second big topic is around diversity, right? How do we think about diversity so much differently? Our boards are thinking about it, right? We’re seeing big regulatory bodies thinking about it. And so as technicians and as technology drivers of change, we have to think about it as well. We were speaking about mindset in terms of agility. And when we think about the individual employee, what are you doing to keep the culture of innovation up and running? Are there programs or specific measures? How do you keep innovation activities and stick to the core business you are doing? Is that easy? Yeah. Look, I’ll give you a couple of examples. I talked about Care AR a little bit earlier. So Care AR for us is augmented virtual reality with artificial intelligence. So let me just give you a quick synopsis of what it looks like. If I go back a couple of years ago, my technicians would get a call service. Now we get a trouble ticket in.

Speaker0:[30:50] We would dispatch a service technician to a customer. If the service technician had the right experience, had the right part, we’d get the problem fixed and resolved. But a 30-year versus a 30-day technician in terms of experience, dramatically different. I have the part, don’t have the part, dramatically different. By the way, a lot of the things the customer could have serviced themselves. So we have things like eight-hour response time, four-hour response time. Meanwhile, our customers are sitting there waiting. They’re not productive. And so what did we do? We had three things we needed to fix. Number one, how do we bring the best and brightest to every technician? Meaning that how do we bring all the information possible that we can bring to that technician? Number one. Number two, how do we think about training those technicians and giving them different ways in which to learn? You think about today in your personal life, you go and you buy a barbecue, you go buy a stove. the last thing you do is open up the instructions. You get on YouTube and you find the video that shows you how to install that product. So we learn differently. We learn through video. And then the last one is, how do we get the right help, expertise to that individual in the field? So what does it look like today? Number one, I’ve got 8 million devices that are physically connected. You talk about IoT. I am in the IoT world. I’ve got my devices connected. My device has a fault on it. I sense that fault.

Speaker0:[32:16] Somebody back in my contact center realizes that there’s a fault. I proactively now reach out to my customer using a KRIR link, which is an augmented virtual reality link. We send them a text. They open it. Now I have my call center and my customer who are now interacting on that problem. And I can use video to help them. I can use augmented reality to help them. I have an expertise in my call center. Let’s assume none of that works, Marcus. I now need to get a part. I need to change a board.

Speaker0:[32:48] When I dispatch my technician, my technician already has all of the things that have been tried before. So I’m not starting from scratch. I now go to the field. By the way, inside of my call center, with that fault, I use artificial intelligence to take a look at every trouble ticket over the last five years, all my engineering notes, all the information about that particular fault or that particular device that’s had fault. And I service up the top three ways in which artificial intelligence tells me I should be able to fix that problem. And so now I’ve changed the customer experience. And so we can change the world. We can change the way in which our customers, our employees think about what good looks like.

Speaker1:[33:35] And especially this use case as you described, Steve, the expectation of the customers will be anyway that they will get that, right?

Speaker0:[33:43] Yes, that’s right.

Speaker1:[33:44] All other players in their digital ecosystems, they are teaching us what is our next level of expectations. And this will be raising all the time, right? Because if you get that experience, you want to get it everywhere. And I think the beautiful of, let’s say, the jobs we are in, because we are creating this kind of imagination. We bring it to life. And together with the customer, we open new perspectives on that. And listening to you, I think empowering our technicians to get really every information, to get the problem of the customer solved, that’s very, very important. For us, I would add a second dimension on that. Because in any problem which happens, it’s destroying a bit the relation with the customer. And we need to have our employees engaged to repair that kind of relation because that’s so essential. Everybody can have problems, but the appetite which you leave with the customer, that’s essential for, I would say, the relation going forward.

Speaker0:[34:49] So let’s take a look ahead in terms of employees. What do you envision for the next generation of employees? What skills and competencies do you think will be important in the future? So I think there’s a couple of things, Marcus. First of all, change leadership will never change, meaning that the ability to be able to lead and drive change is so important, especially when it’s accelerated each and every day. So what do those skills look like? Somebody who can have a vision, somebody who is passionate. One of the things about innovation, how many times do we hear another company had the idea and it just didn’t go anywhere? I’ll put all the telecom community in this bucket. Google should never exist today. Never. The cloud environment should never exist today. The telecommunications industry had this back in the 80s, but what stopped them from expanding the vision?

Speaker0:[35:43] The passion. In order to drive change, you’ve got to be fearless. Why? Because it’s new. It’s brand new. Everybody is taking shots at it. You’ve got to have fearless. Four, you’ve got to be able to motivate people. You’re going to take companies, you’re going to take employees, you’re going to take customers to a place in which they are scared because they’ve never been there before. How do you motivate them to get there? How do you reward failure? Yes, reward failure. In our world, you think about DHL, you think about Vodafone, failure inside of those environments, catastrophic. And so the very nature of your company is 99.99% ready to go before we even try a pilot. That’s not innovative. So how do you think about that? How do you change that community going forward? You know, I was at Nortel. Unfortunately, it was one of the areas of my career where I really failed. I got there two years before we went into bankruptcy.

Speaker0:[36:42] And everybody was convinced that IP routers, the things that we see today, voice over IP, would never exist because we were so focused on the carrier. Went out of business. Didn’t take very long. And you’re talking about some of the smartest engineers in the world at Nortel. By the had a $300 billion market cap at one time. Huge, absolutely huge, but couldn’t get their mindset on, oh no, this thing that’s a Cisco, whatever, they’ll never be successful. They’ll never be successful. All right. And we see that because we fear, we fear that change. And the individuals that can drive that change, see the vision, passionate about it, fearless, motivate people, energizing people. Those are the skills that we’re going to need. Last skill we’re going to need, Marcus, is, you know, if you ask Uli and I today, what’s the technology that is going to be the top of the list five years from now, we would be wrong 100% of the time. And so it’s not about what’s the technology five years from now. We really don’t care. What I care about is, can I see it? Can I absorb it? Can I leverage it to drive customer success? That’s what I need to be able to do we’ll see a lot more use cases and a lot more differentiation and power at the end user at the end device.

Speaker0:[38:01] What all those use cases look like? I don’t know. But I do know it’s going to put more to the edge. I do know it’s going to put more on my consumer. I do know it’s going to create more experience and more opportunity. That much I do know. So how do we think about that going forward?

Speaker1:[38:17] And that’s exactly, Steve, what you described, right? If you look for the future skills, it’s more or less attitude, right? So it’s people who are, let’s say, passionate about to drive things, to change things, to make an impact on that. And that’s more important than have a degree on. Of course, it’s necessary to have some education, right? But it’s not your CV you’re pitching for. It’s your attitude and how you want to shape your world in the future.

Speaker0:[38:47] Thanks a lot to you both. That was a very inspiring discussion. Yeah, and like every time at this point of our episode, we ask, what did you take away from the conversation? And the tradition is that Uli starts.

Speaker1:[39:00] You know, it feels like home, right? And a really great discussion, Steve. Thank you very much for that. For me, the reflection again is, especially your point, the sky is not the limit, right? So it’s even above. Think big for all your dreams. You want to imagine, that’s one of the points. Then start with small steps and looking that everybody is behind you because that’s important, right? So that you’re not running alone in that front, that people getting that image and imagination and start realizing the vision?

Speaker0:[39:34] You know, Marcus, for me, Vodafone and Xerox have been around for a long time and very successful. We have a tremendous role to play in the future of the world. Tremendous role to play in the future of these macro trends that we’re seeing out there. And we will be innovating and we’re providing solutions and customer success for many, many years together. Vodafone is a great partner of ours. We love working with you. We love the way in which you think. We love the way in which you approach the market. We’re going to be around a long time disrupting a lot of industries and helping out customer success for a long time based on the innovation that we have brought, based on the innovation, our history, and our rich DNA about how we think about customer success. And so for me, it’s just an exciting time. If you can’t be excited today about being in technology, you need to go find another role.

Speaker0:[40:29] Because it is about as exciting as it’s ever been. And the opportunity cannot be any more magnitude and driving bigger each and every day. Steve, by tradition, we have a very special question to ask our guests in the closing section of our podcast. And that is a personal question. We touched that at the beginning already. And the question is, what is your personal purpose like? What do you get up for in the morning? You know, four years ago when I joined Xerox, it was one purpose in mind, and that is making sure that Xerox was around for the next hundred years. You know, it’s a incredibly premier brand, not just in the U.S., but around the world. Xerox must be around 100 years from now, must be a part of driving success. And so my purpose every single day is to get up and make sure that we are positioned for the next hundred years. My successor could be sitting as an intern somewhere in Germany, in the UK. I want them to be out as excited as I am about this company. You know, two days ago, we had our EC meeting, executive committee meeting. And I called up an individual in the field who had celebrated 50 years with being with the company. One hour later, I called up another employee, 45 years being with the company. And by the way, Marcus, that was only for the month of January.

Speaker0:[41:56] I have a bunch of them every month coming up. And so if you think about employees staying with the Xerox, why? Because we make a difference. We make a difference to employees. We make a difference to the environment. We’re making a difference to our customers. We matter. And so for me personally, it’s making sure that Xerox continues to make a difference for the next 100 years. Thanks a lot, Steve, for taking the time. So this was the Digital Pacemaker podcast on how do companies maintain their culture of innovation. Thank you, Steve, for being our guest. If you would like more information on the episode, please check out the show notes. We will find also the related links and the topics we were speaking about. And if you have any questions or would like to join us for discussion, please use the post and comment section on LinkedIn. We look forward to your comments and feedbacks. Your Digital Pacemaker podcast airs every 14 days on Tuesday on Spotify, Apple and anywhere else. You get podcasts. Click the follow or subscribe button now if you don’t want to miss an episode. Have a great time and see you soon. Yours, Uli and Markus.

Speaker1:[42:59] Rock and roll.

Music:[42:59] Music

 

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