Sparks: Think Beyond Borders: How to Cultivate a Global Citizen Mindset With Solvay CEO Ilham Kadri

Thomas Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College in Massachusetts. He is an author, the co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, a Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics. He has spent the last 30 years focused on the Sociology of Information, studying and teaching about how people and organizations use information. He currently teaches MBAs at Babson College about Analytics, Cognitive Technologies, Big Data, and Knowledge Management. Thomas is the co-author of the new book, Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines. In the book Thomas and co-author Julia Kirby discuss the rise of job automation and how humans can secure their place in the workplace in the midst of this shift by using the 5 alternative strategies they lay out. The move towards automation in the workplace, while not new, is a controversial subject that is becoming a large part of our current work economy. There are two camps of people today, those who are opposed to the move towards automation and those who are embracing it. The people who are opposed are scared about the implications of automating jobs. They feel that this shift in our economy will create chaos and wipe out jobs for humans. The camp of people who are embracing it feel that automating certain jobs could be a good thing and that we will always find a way to create new jobs for humans. Thomas talks about how reality is somewhere in the middle of the two camps. While automation could cause some jobs to be at risk, it may not be as perilous as some people may think. He talks about how most jobs have several tasks to them, some of them are automatable and some aren’t. In the podcast he gives an example explaining how automation could help lawyers cut down on the time they take to search through documents and contracts for items pertaining to a case. This process probably only takes up about 20% of what lawyers actually do, so as Thomas mentions, this automation wouldn’t completely replace lawyers, but perhaps in a law firm of 10 lawyers, the automation would relieve the workload to the point where they can do with 8 lawyers instead of 10. In an Oxford study done in 2013 they estimated that 47% of U.S. jobs are automatable. People such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have been very vocal about their concerns with the future of human jobs and our very existence in light of this rapid shift to automation. However, when you look at jobs that have already moved towards automation, such as bank tellers, it shows that the move may not be as rapid as they think. In the 1980s there were a half a million bank tellers, and today, there are still half a million bank tellers despite the invention and implementation of ATMs. While automation may not take over human jobs at an alarmingly quick rate, it is still something we need to be aware of. Automation, bots, and software are getting to the point now where they are becoming more capable of taking over knowledge jobs, whereas before they were only taking over labor intensive jobs such as manufacturing. Because of this, Thomas and Julia felt it was important to write their book that, first of all, encourages augmenting human labor with smart machines as opposed to completely replacing humans with machines and, secondly, shows people five ways to make themselves irreplaceable in the workplace. What you will learn in this episode: Is automation a new thing? Whether or not jobs are in jeopardy because of the growing use of automation and bots 5 steps you can take to be sure your job is secure The kinds of jobs that will be affected by automation and which ones will be safe Some encouraging examples of automation being used today In the move towards automation, what does this mean for organizations? What does it mean for individuals? How we can prepare for automation The timeline for automation and when automation will become mainstream Where the future of automation is going Links From The Episode: tomdavenport.com/ Only Humans Need Apply On Amazon.com   (Music by Ronald Jenkees)

6 Sep 20161h 3min

Jennie Carlson is the Executive and Chief Human Resource officer at US Bancorp.  They are the 5th largest bank in the US, with 67,000 employees.  Jennie has been with the company for 15 years and able to provide valuable insight in this week's podcast. The HR department has a pyramid of shared services.  The normal HR functions such as payroll, employee relations, and recruiting are along the baseline. As the pyramid climbs higher, talent development, advancement opportunities are the focus.  At the very top, the message of how US Bancorp can use people and talent to drive the strategy of the organization cascades down and drives the actions of the entire department.  Other topics this can include are organizational design and fostering a great employee experience to lead to a great customer experience. The role of HR has evolved over the past few years.  The department has seen a shift from an ‘order taker’ mode to become strategic partners that help set the corporate strategy and the organizational design. Employee experience is a huge focal point.  This can include technology, flexible work arrangements, and employee engagement.  Jennie shares how US Bancorp uses engagement surveys from their employees, which they use as a marker for continuous improvement.  Traditional HR Metrics include employee engagement, as well as, other topics such as retention and exit interviews. Moving forward, US Bancorp is moving their analytics team from HR to strategy.  This allows data to be pulled from the same sources, but it is being looked at differently, from the lens of the customer analytics department.  Jennie believes that analytics should be deciphered in the best suited department.  Companies that have larger marketing and customer analytics departments may be able to provide newer insights than smaller HR departments can.  This can allow cornerstones of data, like the employee survey, to be drilled down as much as possible.  Another area is making sure they are keeping in line with their ethical culture.  The future of analytics also allows for characteristic and trend tracking in many employees.  Keeping ahead of trends allows companies to gain a full picture of what is going on inside their company, allowing them to continuously improve to create a better organization. What you will learn in this episode: How HR Is Leveraging Analytics What Type of Data is Collected Analytics for Hiring Skills Needed to Build an Analytics Function How HR Can Work With IT How US Bancorp Provides Value to Their Business Partners How Transitioning Employees for Flexible Work Effects Management Link From The Episode: Learn More About U.S. Bank    (Music by Ronald Jenkees)

29 Aug 201653min

Anka Wittenberg is the SVP and Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer at SAP, a software firm based in Walldorf, Germany.  She holds master’s degrees in economics and international business and is a mother of three.  That last note is what helped launch her career since holding two master’s degrees was not enough to get her an interview with the larger firms in Germany just because she also had small children.  This one difference between Anka and the rest of the workforce is what opened her eyes and showed her the need for more diversity and inclusion in the workforce.   This observation has helped Anka become a guest lecturer, author and advocate for true diversity and inclusion in the workforce.   Being the Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer for SAP means that Anka oversees the sustainability of people and the diversity and inclusion of everyone.  What exactly does that mean? That it does not matter the sex, culture, ethnicity, age, or physical ability of a person but ALL types of people need to be included within the workforce. The uniqueness of your workforce begins to emerge when you include people from all walks of life you begin to see the diversity.  SAP has a goal of having 25% of their leadership roles to be filled by females by the year 2017 and by the year 2020 their goal is to have 1% of their workforce positions filled by autistic people.  Along with this diversity and inclusion you must work on the sustainability of the people within your organization.    One of the biggest changes that is happening today is the change within the corporate culture and thinking with regards to diversity & inclusion.  Organizations are beginning to change their thinking on how they are training and sustaining their employees by focusing more on the holistic picture.  Due to these changes organizations are beginning to see the business impact within employee engagement, improved customer satisfaction and innovation.    What you will learn in this episode: What diversity & inclusion Means. The four subcategories of diversity & inclusion. What the is the business impact of diversity & inclusion. How organizations are changing their corporate culture. How SAP is implementing various programs to be a completely diversified & inclusive organization. What the key points are in an employee’s experience. What is unconscious bias? How can organizations can focus more on diversity & inclusion. Link From The Episode: Diversity And Inclusion At SAP  Anka Wittenberg on LinkedIn (Music by Ronald Jenkees)

23 Aug 20161h

Beth Taska is the EVP of Human Resources for 24 Hour Fitness, which was founded in 1979 and has over 400+ locations and over 23,000 employees serving 4 million club members.  She has held the CHRO (Chief HR Officer) title and Senior HR positions for corporations such as Clearwire, Gap and Sears.  Beth’s career path was not of the norm, she holds an undergraduate degree in Political Science and a graduate degree in Public Administration and worked for several municipalities around the Chicago area before beginning her career in the HR world.  The CHRO role at 24 Hour Fitness includes onboarding over 17,000 people each year from the very inception when someone begins with 24 Hour Fitness and training these people.  There is a duality with recruitment here because there is a large part of the 24 Hour Fitness workforce that uses their position as a stepping stone and part of the workforce includes people that want a longer tenure with the company.  24 Hour Fitness practices relationship based leadership and practices positivity and making a difference in some fashion with their members and their employees.  In this episode Beth will discuss the differences that relationship based leadership can make within an organization and how that affects employees.  What true leadership is and where it comes from, some of the simplest behaviors can make the largest impacts on an individual which in turn can make large impacts for an organization.  How doing a 5 minute “Gratitude Circle” first thing each morning with everyone sets the positive tone for the work day ahead.  What 24 Hour Fitness strives for each of their members with relationship based selling and how they turn that into a positive for their bottom line.  How they deal with having mostly female members versus male employees.  Beth discusses all of these things and explains the impact that being vulnerable makes for everyone within an organization and how to be vulnerable.   What you will learn in this episode: Beth’s story What is Relationship Based Leadership? What is Relationship Based Selling? Four traits that leaders should have. How to work with employees want a long tenure and employees that want a short tenure. How to bring vulnerability to the workplace Are work families a good thing or not what, exactly what is a work family. Why it’s important for leadership to be viewed as human versus mechanical Links from the episode: Beth Taska On LinkedIn BethTaska.club (Music by Ronald Jenkees)

15 Aug 20161h 10min

Bask Iyer is the chief information officer of VMware and serves as the company’s senior vice president. Prior to VMware Bask was the chief information officer for Juniper Networks and held the same position at Honeywell and GlaxoSmithKline Beechcam. He is an industry veteran with more than 25 years experience within the Silicon Valley based technology firms and more traditional Fortune 100 manufacturing companies. VMware was founded in 1998 in Palo Alto and is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and virtualization software services with approximately 20,000 employees and 6 billion in annual revenues but they manage to retain that “start-up” feel. With that in mind VMware strives to stay on top of the latest technology “wave” and to do that you need talent, the right talent. More to the point with today’s technology and millennial talent: “Yesterday’s news wraps fish”, what you did last year doesn’t matter today. So VMware and Bask are constantly changing with the times and needs to recruit and retain great talent. The best talent asks “Why am I here?”, they don’t settle and they want to change the world. To keep this talent, you must have the assignments to capture their ambitions, you have to keep the organization’s innovation continuing to grow and change. Simple tricks such as a ping pong table, free food or a great cafeteria will not keep the talented millennials with your organization because they are not learning and growing with these “shiny perks”.   What you will learn in this episode: Why Millennials – Why Does The CIO Care About Millennials? What Is It Like To Work At VMware? Shiny Perks – Is That All You Need To Recruit And Retain Millennials? Multi-generational Work Force What Millennials Care About and What’s Important To Them How Millennials Are Shaping Tech Decisions Link From The Episode: Bask Iyer on Twitter (Music by Ronald Jenkees)

8 Aug 20161h 8min

Andrew Wilson is the Chief Information Officer at Accenture.  He leads the company’s global IT operations, where his work helps Accenture enable businesses with increasingly advanced technology. Andrew also aids all of Accenture’s 400,000 workers (this includes guest and contract workers) by making sure all of the technology is running, keeping them connected, productive, and happy as well. Post- Millennial digital services, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat, has set the bar on what Enterprise services must deliver for their employees and customers. Legacy technologies, such as email, are still being used, but are not the focus as the digital experience grows. Accenture offers their own report on the state of technology industry and what it means for enterprises.  This is released in an annual report called Technology Vision Report.  Building and elaborating on prior year reports, new major themes and trends are brought to focus.  Enterprises can navigate this report and apply new technologies to their businesses to get a leading edge in technologies ever changing landscape. The prospect of what can be accomplished digitally is changing because technology has a greater range into our lives than it ever has before. Digital is everywhere, it is pervasive.   Andrew is working on creating platforms that mirror our current social media platforms, integrating new technologies such as adding holograms.  There are new ways to train, deliver content, even finding your way around through an organization.  Not adapting to these new ways of work can cause organizations to become irrelevant.  What you will learn in this episode: What is the digital worker? Facebook and Snapchat – How and why people like Andrew are focusing on social technologies The digital culture shock The 2016 Technology Vision Report How Accenture digital worker internally The importance of employee experience in today's workplace Links From The Episode: Technology Vision 2016 Andrew Wilson on Twitter (Music by Ronald Jenkees)

1 Aug 201659min

Frank Tucker is the Chief People Officer of Taco Bell.  Working with the company for the last 23 years, Frank has made his way through the human resources department.  He has worked in designing employee processes, methods, tools and technology, and has become the Chief People Officer in 2012.  Taco Bell owns approximately 900 stores, which represents 40,000 employees.  A huge part of their business is with their many franchisees.  This adds another 6,000 stores, employing an additional 160,000 people.  Because they are located in all 50 states, it is hard to imagine anyone not being familiar with Taco Bell. Taco Bell looks for really great people to start working with them. In some cases, they understand this may only be a stepping stone for certain employees in their careers. In other cases, there are many employees who want to grow and develop within the company. This includes employees who develop into managers and leaders who run their own franchise.  Education is also a key component for many employees. Taco Bell has supported education efforts with their internal training programs, with many college credits being earned from Taco Bell as well as a tuition reimbursement program.  Attracting and retaining top talent is a focus for many companies, especially Taco Bell.   They believe investing in team members will give them a competitive advantage, no matter how long the employee’s career will remain in the company.  This speaks to their broader mission, the future of America is with its youth.  Not only is investing in team members the right thing to do, it resonates with Millennials and Generation Z.  Empowering employees to reach their dreams aids in employee engagement and the quality is raised for the customer experience.  What You Will Learn In This Episode: How Taco Bell Approaches Leadership and People Development Age Differences in the Workplace Frontline Workers and Knowledge Workers Leadership Programs: The Mark, The Quest, and The Spark How the Concept of the Employee is Changing Advice for Future Employees and Managers Link From The Episode: TacoBell.com (Music by Ronald Jenkees)

25 Juli 20161h 10min

Mihir Shukla is the CEO of Automation Anywhere, an enterprise software company.  They are redefining how work gets done by introducing the idea of a digital workforce platform and digital workers that work alongside human employees.  This combination is designed to help the human employee accomplish more than they ever could alone.  Automation Anywhere has 300 hundred employees in 10 offices worldwide.  Mihir’s goal is to become one the world’s largest employer without having any employees. How will they accomplish this? Projections show in the next four years, Automation Anywhere will reach 3 Million software bots worldwide which are producing at the capacity of 3 Million people. While they are a software company, the production levels are so high that they are the world’s largest employer in the digital age. Software bots are digital workers. They can complete mundane tasks, and also tackle more complicated problems as well.  Many employers want their workers to complete today’s problems and tomorrow’s challenges. However, we still have yesterday’s job to do as well.  Processing invoices, verifying documents, generating reports, data entry, and other tasks still need to be completed.  The workforce has been spread very far and work/life balance is not yet where it should be.  Introducing mundane and complex tasks to the digital workforce allows the human employees to think, create, discover, and innovate.  The man and machine partnership isn’t new, and has allowed the world to advance in countless ways.  This concept has now trickled down to our offices, and the outcome can be nothing short of spectacular. Many people cannot tell the difference between if a bot or a human completed a task.  Automation Anywhere provides learning bots that learn from human behavior. There are many industries that use bots, and people interact with them on a daily basis without ever knowing.  Airline processes, car production, even a pen sitting on your desk could have been created using a software bot.   The addition to these bots have allowed workers to have less stress while doing their jobs, provide better service and even reclaim work/life balance in some cases. The bots have allowed human workers to be less of a robot themselves at work and reclaim their humanity while preforming their jobs.      What You Will Learn In This Episode: What Is A Software Bot? Software Deployment What Do Bots Do? What A Human Robot Relationship Entails What Types Of Skills are Needed For The Future Of Work Should Robots In The Workplace Be Feared Or Embraced?   Link From The Episode: Automation Anywhere (Music by Ronald Jenkees)

18 Juli 20161h 6min