-1.svg "Close Icon (3)-1")
.svg "Close Icon (3)")
- Share
-
In a world of rapid change, where do you start to make sure your financial services business model matches the needs of your customers – and makes the best use of the latest knowledge and technology? Here are some suggestions from someone who’d know – former IBM chief, Hans-Ulrich Maerki.
In June, BlueChip attended this year’s Amplify Festival, which canvassed the challenges and opportunities of staying relevant in a changing world. Hosted by AMP, it featured a program of international speakers: entrepreneurs, researchers, trendspotters, academics and authors.
Hans-Ulrich Maerki is the former IBM chairman who led the transformation of the firm from a mainframe to a service-based business. He presented on the key areas a leader of corporate transformation needs to consider.
In a world that’s experiencing a shift that’s affecting the way we work and communicate, as well as how we service clients, his tried and tested framework, outlined below, offers a strong starting point for the organisation that wants to stay relevant in an environment of flux.
1. Mobilise
First, Maerki suggests management ask themselves: "Why change?", “What do we value?” and “Are we delivering it?” If the answer to the latter is no, then transformation is required, and it’s management’s role to ensure the values, the ‘jam’ that holds the company together, are clear and can motivate a unified workforce on the journey.
2. Consult with staff
Additionally, Maerki says that bringing staff along on the transformation journey can be achieved by letting them define the change that’s needed. He refers to a lesson from his past, where 150,000 staff at IBM defined the values and the company’s 10-year priorities back in the 1990s. This type of crowdsourcing (before crowdsourcing was even invented – or perhaps, named) was pivotal to revolutionising the business.
3. Passion only gets you so far
While Maerki says that a great leader is passionate around the clock, you need more than that alone to convince your people to change. Fact and figures count. He cites Net Promoter Score (NPS) and client satisfaction questionnaires as key sources of data. The standout point for me though, was the outward looking focus that leaders joining an organisation with a remit of transformation must have. The successful ones don’t talk to management in the first 90 days, he says; instead they talk to clients to identify the real problems.
4. Manage the process
Simplicity and accountability count. The way to establish this in your business is to make only one person accountable for each business-as-usual (BAU) process and remove anything that complicates it. Maerki also recommends we harness technology to our advantage and go as state-of-the-art as we can afford.
5. Invest in transformative innovation
Technology does not fix flawed processes, says Maerki. Reinvention must precede it. So, if you know you have a gap of social skills in your team, how are you going to approach it? You can create a Facebook page (though without social skills, that sounds scary!) or, like one HR leader Maerki refers to, you can run an entire recruitment campaign using only Facebook to hire people to meet your company’s social needs.
6. Know what you want to ask the data
This seems like an obvious question, but we do need to think more broadly and more deeply about systems and patterns, says Maerki. For example, IBM introduced a new metric of ‘customertricity’ which by measuring how much time the sales team spent with customers, rather than how much product they had sold, revolutionised the business model. This reinforces the trend we’re seeing in financial services: that trust is the key currency in relationships; success is no longer just about the product, it’s about knowing your clients and tailoring your solution accordingly.
7. Competencies
As a leader, what do you need your management team to be able to do? Maerki believes the ability to handle uncertainty, be collaborative, apply systems-based thinking as well as having diversity on the management team are valuable. If you’re keen to learn more about these, ‘Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?’ is Louis V Gerstner’s inside view into IBM’s historic turnaround, which covers 11 key competencies involved in IBM’s revolution.
Crucially though, Maerki says: "It's not the people that have to change, it's the management that needs to change”. He says that “the most difficult thing to change is culture,” and this has to be lived, breathed and driven by the company’s leaders, coming back once more to values.
This means that if a company’s values are dedication, trust and innovation, instead of being afraid of change, we can make transformation an inspiring experience. With that thought, Maerki suggested that the theme of the Amplify Festival be changed from ‘shift happened, transformation required’ to ‘shift happens, transformation inspired.’ So when you feel like the ground beneath you shifts, you can either scream, or you can sit back and enjoy the ride.
