* Change is not a bad thing
Does change scare you? It scares me. I hate change. It’s comforting to do things the same way, on the same schedule, day after day. (For good or bad, that also means I get the same old results with what I do.)
Change is not a bad thing. Really. Especially in business. To quote FedEx CEO Fred Smith, “Change is inevitable. The failure to change leads to business failure.”
Smith should know. He sits at the helm of a Fortune 100 company with $22 billion in revenue and more than 260,000 employees and contractors worldwide. FedEx did not reach such a pinnacle by doing the same old things, the same old way, year after year.
For example, FedEx, known primarily for package shipping services, branched into retail operations in 2004 by acquiring Kinko’s, known for its ubiquitous and convenient copy/business centers. This merger of seemingly disparate businesses brought instant convenience to customers looking to ship packages by giving them a place to drop them off 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
FedEx is one of a handful of companies that is featured in a new series of online broadcasts called Change Artists. Produced by HP, broadcast by CNN and CIO, and hosted by Network World Editorial Director John Gallant, the Change Artists program features in-depth interviews with the CEO and CIO of companies that are credited with vast business transformations enabled by the innovative use of IT.
The program is broadcast live every other month or so, and of course the Webcasts are available on demand at any time. Visit hp.com/changeartist to view interviews with top executives from McKesson, Nestle, Reuters and FedEx. Each program is about 30 minutes long.
Why spend the time watching a broadcast of Change Artists? Well, unless you are a senior executive at your company, you rarely get to the see the big picture of your whole organization. Most IT professionals function as a gog in the wheel and only occasionally catch a glimpse of the whole machine. At the same time, one article after another says that IT professionals need to become “more strategic” in their roles, and to learn more about how IT overall supports business needs.
Chances are you aren’t going to get 30 minutes alone with your company CEO and CIO, but you can feel that level of intimacy in the Change Artists interviews, and it’s inspiring. The conversations will give you ideas on how you can look beyond your “gog” to see how you can help the overall “machine.”
For example, Reuters CEO Tom Glocer and CTO Roy Lowrance talk about how they encourage “playfulness” with technology. Glocer tells employees to learn from technologies in the consumer space and figure out if there is an application for them in the business world. As a financial news service, Reuters makes a living from delivering high value financial information very quickly. The company is a big user of instant messaging today. Glocer, the CEO, learned about IM years ago by playing with ICQ at home. He wondered how his company could use such technology to deliver information almost instantly. It led to experimentation, and eventually to a whole new way of delivering business value.
The Change Artists interviews are full of inspiring nuggets:
* FedEx CIO Rob Carter says that one of the top objectives of his department is to use IT to “improve the customer experience.” He says too many companies have “drive costs lower” or “improve productivity” as top objectives for IT. While higher productivity and lower costs are admirable, they won’t sustain a competitive advantage like making customers happy will.
* McKesson CEO John Hammergren says that IT should no longer be just a resource for a company, but rather a central strategy. According to Hammergren, “Technology is at the center of reinventing ourselves.”
McKesson, by the way, is a Fortune 100 company and the world’s leading provider of healthcare services. The company is using IT to transform the way these services are delivered and managed. One example is a program that allows patients to monitor their own health conditions at home for chronic diseases like diabetes. This program is enabled by common PCs and broadband Internet connectivity – technologies that weren’t widely available just a few years ago.
It’s the job of leaders to inspire and direct continuous improvement and healthy change. Get inspired by some of the best. Tune in to Change Artists today.
