(soft ambient music)
-: Hello, I'm Dominic Klemmer,
managing director and partner from the Cologne office
and a core member of BCG'S Transform team.
Today I'm welcoming Reshma Ramachandran.
She's a seasoned transformation expert,
having worked for ABB, Adecco,
and many other companies.
Reshma, we know that 70% of transformations fail.
What do you think are the key success factors
for the ones that really work out?
-: That's a very good question.
As you rightly said, 70% of transformations fail,
which is a massive number in that sense,
considering that almost all of the Fortune 500 companies
are today undergoing a transformation.
So from both being a person who has led transformations
and now being on the other side of the board
where I have a perspective
to see transformations differently,
I would say there are three key critical success factors
to any transformation.
The first and foremost is the "why."
Why are we transforming?
So every organization has ambition to transform
because, as I said, you can't afford
to be in the status quo, but you need to articulate the why.
Why are you transforming?
And along with the strong why,
there needs to be a very clear strategic direction.
What's the direction you are actually undertaking
to transform the organization.
The second I would say with a strong why
needs a clear alignment within the leadership team.
So when I say the leadership team, it's CEO minus one.
The CEO needs to be a hundred percent
behind the transformation.
You need to have the CEO minus one
200% behind the transformation,
and then engage with the top leaders.
Maybe it's 1%, maybe it's 2% of your top leaders.
Make sure that everybody sings the same tune.
And the last, and probably not the least
is communicate, communicate, and communicate.
There is literally no over-communication
in any transformation.
-: You said that the CEO and the full leadership team
need to play a central role in any transformation.
So how can it really become one team?
-: It's a very good question.
And you know, my personal point of view is
that in any transformation, any successful transformation,
the real chief transformation officer is the CEO.
And to come back to the question
on how the tandem should be established
and how a right and successful tandem works,
is the CTO is always an extension of the CEO.
So the articulation, the drumbeat, the governance,
making sure that the organization
stays on the strategic direction chosen,
the employee engagement,
everything is orchestrated by the CTO.
And that's the only way
that strong tandem can be established.
-: What is your perspective about the leader journey?
What do you mean with it,
and what should be done to make it successful?
-: So you have the leader journey,
you have the program journey,
and you have the people journey, and it's a triage.
All of these needs to come together
for a transformation to be successful.
So starting with the leader journey,
why is the leader journey so important?
Organizations do not transform in a big bang.
It is actually a personal change
that actually gets reflected as an organizational change.
And the change always starts at the top with the leader.
So that's why the leader journey is important,
and how can we successfully engage in the leader journey
is where leaders are personally committed to the change.
Where leaders are personally standing behind the why
of the transformation and where they're able
to articulate that why from a personal perspective,
and the storytelling becomes very important.
It has to come from deep within.
-: What needs to be done to really ensure
that it trickles down, that you have transparencies?
-: So this brings to the people journey part of the triage.
And this is also where the diversity of thoughts
are so important.
So how can you actually unleash that human potential
in terms of bringing in the innovation,
bringing in a different perspective to problem solving?
That is only through transparency.
And that is why I'm a strong believer
that you have to slice and dice the elephant--
which would be the transformation--
slice and dice the elephant into multiple pieces
so that each person in the organization,
each individual in the organization really understands
what he or she can actually bring to the table.
Problems are never solved in headquarters,
problems are actually solved,
especially when you talk about customer problems,
it's not in the headquarters where the problems are solved,
it's actually in the frontline
where the problems are solved,
where you are actually seeing the problems
and you can come up with creative solutions.
-: What's the role of digital, of AI,
for today's transformations?
-: Now, I think where we are extremely being disrupted
as a world is around the artificial intelligence,
machine learning, generative AI.
So I do believe that digital and technology
in that sense is a critical lever to transformation.
And some of the transformations that we have seen
in the recent past is actually how do you leverage
the digital technologies to help your company
or an organization actually deliver more value
for the customers, more value for the greater good?
Think about sustainability, for instance.
The whole technology has been able to give
a completely different dimension
to the sustainability solutions.
Organizations that are on a transformation
needs to look at it from a perspective of saying,
"We are transforming, and how can these technologies help us
in taking the transformation to the next level?"
So, again, going back two decades ago,
if the lever of a transformation was cost out,
if a lever of transformation was supply chain optimization,
I think we need to look at it from a different lens
and say today the biggest lever
we have on our hands is digital.
So in any transformation, make that lever,
or bring that lever, to full life,
and that way you can actually also deliver
much more benefits on the transformational side.
-: Thank you very much, Reshma.
-: Thank you so much for having me,
and let's continue to transform.
(soft ambient music)