Hello, I'm Daniel Gheno.
Welcome to our techno centre in France.
(light techno music)
Since 2015, I am the senior vice president
for our medium voltage line of business.
And, on top of that, since last year,
I'm driving the agile transformation
of our entire energy management business.
Schneider Electric is a 180-year-old company.
We had to reinvent ourselves many times.
We had to acknowledge that our historical capacity
to generate growth by innovation was dulling.
We identified three challenges:
customers with increasingly tailor-made expectations,
evolving faster;
competitors, with more emerging players
and more and more local players,
by definition extremely agile;
and employees with new kinds of expectations
in terms of purpose or autonomy.
We simply built a comprehensive transformation plan
based on three pillars.
Experimentation: allowing people to learn by doing,
by providing them the right level of coaching
so that they can test new practises.
Learning: we had to help the team
identify new areas for study
and then provide them with learning materials,
such as online courses, webinars, videos, newsletters.
And then, at last, scaling:
building an enhanced operating model
that would not only support the ongoing cultural changes
but amplify them.
Scaling agile implies major changes.
Breaking the silos between countries or functions;
defragmented resource allocation,
for example, rethinking the role of experts;
changing leadership style;
minimising interdependencies between teams.
Let me try to quote a few success factors.
Start as soon as you can,
giving you the means to support, to coach, to train people.
Always start with the "why"
and don't try to solve everything.
I have bad news, agile will not solve
every problem of your company.
And last but not least,
even if we speak of a cultural change,
find a way, relevant to your company,
to measure the progress and define a clear starting point.
I don't believe that you can build
such a transformation plan by yourself.
You need an outside perspective.
You need somebody helping you take a bit of distance,
understanding really what are your pain points,
and setting the right level of challenge.
And I want to be very fair-and that's not to please BCG-
we would not be there without them.
We have been able to make some business impact
already very visible.
We are now realising innovation
in waves of 12 to 24 months
instead of 4 to 5 year projects before.
In 2021, energy management divisions
will start launching a certain number of offers
which are the results of this agile transformation.
Hundreds of customers are now embarked
on the art of innovation
far before the commercial launches.
That's amazing.
(light techno music concludes)