How Do We Change The Way People Work?

Transcript

Dee Waddell:So today, first let me bare my soul a little bit. So I've been at IBM a little over 3 years, and coming into IBM, I've actually been now in the industry and in your chairs for a number of times. I was in the commercial department at United Airlines. around some of the digital initiatives around loyalty, around united.com and some of the e-services there. Also went into the IT side, so have a good balance of commercial and then the IT as well. But to be clear, our industry, and we'll talk about this a little bit on the panel, is truly about bringing people together and making the world a better place through peace and other, other means. When you travel to other countries, we know it brings the world together. So a pure passion of mine is how do you humanize technology. And this is gonna be one of the topics we're gonna be talking about today. But first of all, let me go ahead and jump in really quick before we have Bernie come in. I wanted to share with you a couple of things. Number one, in a digital world, we have to make sure we bring new thinking. We cannot use the same thing we've had in the past about the future. So the question is, what can we do? And we're very pleased to have Both Bernie here from IBM, our Chief Innovation Officer, as well as in a great panel, we'll talk a little bit more about innovation. So we know it's a very important piece that you're thinking about as well. Another one, let me just give you a sense. This is one of— we call this our Global C-Suite Study. We do this on a yearly basis. Here are some of the new technologies that we think in our industry in specific— in specificity that will lead some of the digital transformation. First one, we talked a little bit about it through the video, is mobile. We know that everybody has a mobile device, not just your, your consumers who are flying on your planes or going through your airports, but it's also about your employees. They want to have access to the digital tool sets that they're used to when they're in a consumer. We know that the AI piece, automation, Internet of Things, you've heard of some of these, but these are some of the technology innovations that are spurring then business innovations as well. Let me move on. Technology and transformation is complex. Lots of different things you can be thinking about. McKinsey recently published a study about digital transformation initiatives, and they said that 70% of all digital transformation initiatives fail. So the question is, what are we going to do? What are you going to do together to make sure that you're not in that 70% of failures. And so we recognize that making sure that you focus on a few things that have major impact and material impact, that's the secret. We'll talk a little bit about that. One of the things at IBM that we've focused on and the message into our market, particularly within the airline and travel and transportation space, we know our industry has a significant amount of employees. If you take a look on the broader travel and tourism, we're about 1 in 10 jobs. I think yesterday, Peter, you talked about roughly 4, 3 to 4 jobs in the aviation space and the rest is in tourism. But what we do know through the principles of design and mobile and empowerment, when people and technology and data come together, we know that change can happen. People want change. They want to remove barriers themselves. We've seen it with some of the portfolio items we've created here. This was back in a few years ago where IBM and Apple came together on an exclusive partnership. Oh, hopefully this is— we may be losing some of the fidelity here. But we came together and we talked about how important empowering people with technology and data that they can review processes, eliminating barriers. This is what we've done in a portfolio with IBM specifically for the aviation industry. So of course IBM has many portfolio items, but as a leader within the travel and transportation space, we have a very strong focus on the portfolio we have. We have what's called the IBM Travel Platform, and we're building specific capabilities through AI, through mobile, and other pieces. And this is based on a partnership that we have with Apple that continues to this day. You're not going to be able to see this for some reason. The fidelity on the PowerPoint, I guess, has been lost. But we have a portfolio of over 15 applications that are prebuilt that we have over 9 airlines on today that bring together— and you can't see this on the left-hand side, but each of these lines represent a work package for some of these. And we'll have to— I'll have to go back and look at that. make sure that the presentation comes back in full fidelity when we actually share it. But the point is, between line maintenance workers through onboard staff, staff through in-airport staff, how do you bring this team together to collaborate and have higher efficiency and make it a better customer experience? One of the things that we've said, it's not only by enhancing your website or your direct channels, Are you able to influence customer experience? One of the things we think is around employees enabling empowering them with the tool sets around mobile data AI will give them a better opportunity to to drive customer service in addition to cost performance and revenue performance. So we'll continue to move on. We build a community. These are some of the brands that we that we work with regularly. This is in our Toronto workshop. We're actually having a users conference for those on our our. Our Apple mobile applications, and we're working with great airlines— Air Canada, Delta, United, others as well, Finnair, Lufthansa, and so forth. So this is one of the things we're doing. Now let me just finish up here. Transformation is happening in the industry. We're seeing great profitability in the industry, particularly in North America and even in Europe in some areas. We recognize it's been a challenging arena here in the Gulf, in GCC. But the point is there's great opportunity, and we see the transformation can happen with the right focus on business innovation and technology innovation. And we'll go ahead and move to our next segment. So let me first of all welcome up Bernie Meyerson. Now Bernie Meyerson is our— and I'll do a brief introduction. We'll have him come up and take a seat as I have a a short fireside chat. We're very fortunate to have Bernie in the area with us. So Bernie, let me just— before he comes up, he's our Global Chief Innovation Officer, world-renowned, sought after by many clients and frankly many governments and other places. He's advisor to many of the world leaders and influencers. He has an extensive list of achievements. I don't think we're gonna have time to go through it. Fellow in IEEE, he's been a presenter of what we call the Turing Award, which is essentially the Nobel Prize of Computing. He has been Inventor of the Year through states and countries, Distinguished Inventor of the Year, and actually yesterday we were talking about some of the public service medals, or one of the public service medals he got from the government of Singapore. So again, we are very fortunate to have Bernie here. Bernie, why don't you come on up and we're— let's welcome him to the stage by just a quick applause. Thank you, Dee. Thank you for coming.

Bernard Meyerson:Can you hear me, my friend?

Dee Waddell:Yep.

Bernard Meyerson:Let's see if they turn on my mic.

Dee Waddell:We have the mic on. Actually, one of the things that we were talking about— now Bernie, in his spare time, and I don't know where he finds it, also is a pilot, a private pilot, but he also builds his own planes. So maybe there's some point where we can ask him a little bit about that. But again, we're very glad to have you here.

Bernard Meyerson:And I'm still here to talk about it.

Dee Waddell:Yeah, you're still—

Bernard Meyerson:That's always a good sign.

Dee Waddell:Well, so you heard what we talked about. Obviously, you're interested in our industry as well. Is there anything that perhaps you'd like to start out with in saying, you know, from an industry perspective, from your personal perspective, what are the things that we can learn from your experiences and your background?

Bernard Meyerson:You know, look, I work for a company, as you guys all know, that's about the size of a small nation. We're about 420,000, 430,000 people around the world. And like any company that is of that scale, velocity is very hard to come by. And so the challenge we've always faced, and the challenge this industry faces, is if you want to transform yourself, people talk about it, and then they talk about it, and they talk about it some more, and then they run it by the lawyers. And when they're done with that, they go through 7 levels of management deciding how they're going to do this, and it can take 6 months to a year to launch something. And it's, you know, that's not pointing fingers, it's pointing fingers at ourselves. And so one of the challenges is when we were faced with this, we actually had to rethink how we run governance. And we basically took this sort of transformational work off to the side and we developed a program where basically within 48 hours of somebody coming forward with a really great idea, we execute it. I mean, we staff it, we fund it, we launch it, and we run it.

Dee Waddell:Yeah.

Bernard Meyerson:And it has turned out to be the most transformational thing in terms of how people think about working for the company and in terms of the results that we get financially. So it's a very hard thing to do because it requires trust. It requires believing in your people and saying, look, I'm going to give you this opportunity to do something really amazing. Get it done. And you also have to— basically, I hate to say it, but you need death from above. Which is to say, the people who lead the company, your chairman, your CEO, has to make it really clear that these people have the mandate. It doesn't matter what level they are. They could be just level engineers. But if you get in their way, you answer to me. And that's been a huge success, partly because Ginni has been hugely supportive of this. So it's really— part of transformation is the transformation of governance. It's not just about technology. That's good.

Dee Waddell:Well, that's a good one. And personally, I've seen it, having been recently coming on IBM. And we've, in our industry, have participated and partnered on those quick— we call it speed funding, of course, to move very quickly in creating assets for the industry and like that. So one of the things we talked about is at the World Economic Forum, we have— I know here you've done in the past, and I think coming up here again around the 10 emerging technologies, kind of prognosticating, saying here are some of the innovations that we ought to be considering. So maybe you give us a little bit about the overall technology and the innovation cycle that's going on, and then see if there's a couple that you can relate to our industry as well.

Bernard Meyerson:If you— as part of the World Economic Forum back in about 2014, they asked me to take the 600 or so ideas people wanted to bring forward and whittle it down to 10, which is quite an exercise because that means you have 590 people who are not going to be happy with you. But it turns out that you can do this, and we each year publish now, including this year, jointly with the World Economic Forum and Scientific American and Nature, this list of the top 10 emerging technologies. And what we mean by that is they will become material socially or financially or both within a period of 3 to 5 years. And in this industry, for instance, we were looking back in 2014 working on that set that publishes at the beginning of '15. At the use of AI. And back then, the commercial utilization of AI was almost nil. Now, as an example, something on the order of 75 to 80% of all developers say that when they write code, it will have an intelligence within it and/or machine learning capability. And it's incredibly important to this industry because if you think about it, when somebody calls up one of your agents, they're not necessarily the happiest human in the world. Because many people are booking through mobile systems. When they're calling you, it isn't always about good news. Having that agent having an assistive technology with them that can pull up and analyze all the relevant data to the issue that they're presenting and give them an accurate response virtually instantaneously is transformational to the experience, as opposed to somebody saying, you know, we'll get back to you in a week. It's a very different thing. And so yeah, those kinds of things—the ability to be essentially instantly responsive—is one. The other thing is the ability to predict the future. We all look at the future and say, that's science fiction. You can't predict it and change it, but that is not true. Right now, for instance, if you look at the AC packs on systems, which during the summer, if you've flown out of Dubai, you understand how incredibly important that both AC packs on the— whatever, let's say an Airbus 320, you really want them both working unless you want to cook the occupants. This is an important thing, but they— frequently, or they certainly more than you'd like to see fail. The really interesting question is, can you predict the future of that failure so that 4 days before a part fails, you not only know it will fail, but during overnight maintenance you pull the part out and you replace it so there's no failure? That sounds like science fiction, but it's happening more and more readily throughout this industry. So again, these kinds of changes where you revolutionize how you do things, where you fix it before it breaks. Not just for regular maintenance, but knowing exactly what part will fail and when is no longer science fiction. It's based upon the access to AI, machine learning, and big data essentially handling it.

Dee Waddell:Well, I know there's some others as well, like quantum. I know that we focus on, of course, the cloud and mobile and others. We talk about this journey to AI or cognitive. We also talk about the journey to cloud. I mean, on the horizon, in addition to some of these you just mentioned, how do you see this impacting the world and again the industries as well?

Bernard Meyerson:One of the— you've got 3 fundamental challenges you're all trying to deal with, right? One is the volume of data coming at you is huge, just immense, because when people have mobile devices, by definition, they will swamp you with data. They will take 30 different experiments as to how to get from point A to B versus talking to somebody, they'll do 1 or 2. Similarly, the velocity at which that data is arriving is becoming frightening because the Internet of Things has connected everything. So every airliner you have in the air literally is spewing data, or when it shows up at the gate, does a vast dump of data as to what happened during the flight, which you have to analyze instantly. And the really scary stuff is veracity of data. Is it real? Is somebody simply launching a denial of service attack? Right. All of these things are at a complexity and at a velocity that a human cannot deal with. So yes, what's happening is the emergence of these technologies like AI, like machine learning, like the cloud, they deal specifically with these very issues that are emergent, which if you fail to deal with them, they will deal with you. That's the problem, particularly if you look at cyber. Cyber, back when I started in this industry, was a joke. That was somebody broke into your offices and stole your machine. That was about the extent of cyber. Now, of course, somebody breaks in from 3,000 miles away, steals all the personal data of your folks, and oh, by the way, you just signed up, depending upon where you live, you signed up to paying $10 a year for 2 years as a guarantee against somebody's identity being hacked. If they stole 30 million people's data, you just signed up to a $300 million loss without even knowing it was coming. So these are huge issues which are important. And actually, by the way, I didn't make those numbers up. That happened in a state far west in the United States, and we'll just stop there without citing who got hit.

Dee Waddell:Yeah, well, clearly there's threats, there's opportunities as well. You know, I think one of the things that we've talked about here is around data, right? We know that data is— we call it IBM— the new oil, the new you know, the next generation in, in that's really driving the industry and the explosion of data. Our industry clearly has a lot of data, right? So the problem is, is it's between governments, between airports, airlines, and the ability to share is a challenge. So let me ask you, in your experience advising world leaders and organizations and clients, how do you bring people together to collaborate because we know it's good for the industry, we know it's good for passengers, and frankly it's good for economic sense. But how do you get people to do that?

Bernard Meyerson:Well, first of all, you have to accept the fact that data in a silo is worthless. In a silo, by definition, you're part of a system. So if you keep the data in a silo, you're not contributing to the system nor getting any advantage from it. In the case of governments, one of the ones that I regularly sit down with What we did was we finally, as a team, myself and a few others, convinced them to create a Chief Data Officer because it broke down all of the barriers between the governmental departments because a country is a system of systems. It is an enormously complex interconnected entity and you cannot run it by having somebody only hold the water data. That probably isn't helpful because you probably also want to know how many houses you're building to drive the need for additional water supply. This isn't rocket science. It's no different in this industry. You guys are a small part of an industry called tourism. You thrive on it or you die by it. Tourism is an enormous driver, but what it really says is there has to be a way to now break down the barriers so that people agree that there is a set of what we'll call pre-competitive data that you may want to share. You may want to keep it anonymized. You may want to use something like blockchain to keep it secure. But at the same time, if you de-identify that data but you still know what the trends are, everyone in this industry benefits. So there really might be a point at which you want to say, look, we're going to take the chief data officers of 10, 15, 20 of the largest entities here and say, can we basically coordinate with the people who provide accommodations, the people who provide tours, and at least share that general data to float all boats in terms of driving more tourism to the industry. You still compete individually for those candidate passengers, but at least you drive wealth into this region by promoting it in a way that actually leverages all of the data available to you, not little pockets, because it can be revolutionary if somebody has seen something that nobody else has and they share it. And that lifts all boats. It's not to say you give up your competitive edge, But you sure leverage it to drive essentially a wealth for the region.

Dee Waddell:Yeah. And we talked— I know there's some sessions yesterday about how do you share that to enable. So for instance, if you're stuck in line for an hour or 2 in immigration and going through, the likelihood and your propensity to go into a duty-free shop to go buy—

Bernard Meyerson:Goes to zero.

Dee Waddell:You're probably— yeah, goes to zero. So everybody's boats can It could be floated. That's a great, great point. So I know we've just got a few minutes left before we go into the broader panel, but you talked about leadership. I mean, clearly you have been around the world. You have had major impact. Again, we're fortunate to have you here. Any thoughts of leadership and rethinking leadership that you've seen? I mean, you've— the 48-hour, you know, the turnaround, the speed moving that. What are some principles?

Bernard Meyerson:You have to— you know, many of the people here are very senior executives. of the organization. And there's always a fear that if I give too much authority down into the ranks, I'll lose control. And, you know, you may lose a bit of control, but you may gain some spectacular outcomes. The way in which we ended up with this program I described earlier is I took 100 of our top technical and business experts and I asked them what made them crazy in terms of getting in their way, and they said that it takes 6 months for us to launch an innovative project. So I promised to them I would basically launch in 48 hours this essentially new thing that they wanted to do if it met certain metrics. The thing that made it feasible was Ginni. Ginni Rometty, our chairman, said, yea, verily, we'll do this. It is the hardest thing as a leader to give that level of trust so somebody else below you can sign off on everything and just get it done.

Dee Waddell:Right.

Bernard Meyerson:But you're not giving it for free. There is accountability. Take my word. The other thing is, honestly, you also have to have a bit of a sense of humor about it because not everything is going to work. The other thing is, frankly, IBM, as you know, we love acronyms, right? IBM, International Business Machines. I mean, we're an entire room. CAPA, an acronym.

Dee Waddell:Yeah.

Bernard Meyerson:We're a room filled with acronyms. When this program started, I didn't have a name for it. It actually became quite successful very quickly. I decided, I came up with a simple name. It actually is called the Speed Program. People always say, well, what does it stand for? I said, it's not a damn acronym. Get a dictionary. It's focus. That's what it's about. It's get it done quick. If it doesn't work, kill it and move on. It is about trusting as a leader and making sure the people you bring along, basically people beat down the door to work for them. That's the other important part of leadership. If people aren't beating down the door to be part of a program like that, go look in the mirror for where the problem is. It's a very hard thing to be self-critical, but it's extremely important to get the buy-in of your people for this to work. And many of the leaders here have done a fabulous job, there's no question, but that is a challenge and it does involve allowing people well down the ranks to have the authority to get it done, get it done right.

Dee Waddell:Yeah.

Bernard Meyerson:and holding them accountable if it doesn't work without just, you know, group assassination on the first failure. There has to be some tolerance of risk. Very tough lesson to learn as a leader.

Dee Waddell:No, that's fantastic. And in our industry, while we feel that we're progressive and future-focused, we oftentimes follow each other because of the marketplace. And I think this is a good example about how we can move quick. And we talked about it earlier, and perhaps in the next segment we'll talk about it. about moving quick, because there's large blocks and then there's moving quick on some smaller pieces as well. All right, so last question here. We talked a little bit about your passion, your interests. I don't know how you find the time, but, you know, being a former pilot, or pilot, as well as then, you know, building your own planes, talk to us a little bit about that, maybe even some learnings that, you know, the folks on the commercial side, the airline and airport space, can learn from.

Bernard Meyerson:I'll tell you what, when you're the first guy who's going to fly a plane you built, you get to be really, really careful. Look, it's just taking responsibility, but at the same time, you have to have a life. I mean, I know many of you work insane hours. Believe me, I define that at times. But if you don't find— we used to call it work-life balance. I gave up on that. We now call it work-life integration. But if you have a passion, and mine happens to be, you know, things that make loud noises and go fast, it's just whatever your passion is, it doesn't matter what it is.

Dee Waddell:Yeah.

Bernard Meyerson:Just find some time to do it. I've never met anyone who just did their job who after a while didn't burn out. There is a point, I mean, I do some horrendously boring seemingly stuff, which is you take a piece of sandpaper and smooth the rivets in an airplane, which by the way has 10,000 rivets. Take my word on this, this is not a highly intellectual pastime. But I will tell you, if somebody's around the 500th rivet, you're very calm because all you're doing is sanding a piece of metal. Yes, when you move on and you're doing quantum mechanics and worrying about electron lines, well, never mind. That's another part of your life, but you have to find some time for yourself. It's not good enough to just sit at the end of the day and say, wow, I drove 0.03 basis points improvement in the bottom line. If that's the only thing you're getting out of life, you are missing something. So it's a hard balance to find, believe me, especially in where we live under the gun, all of us as executives. But it's vital that you actually take that time for your life, your family, yourself. Just, you know, this isn't any great wisdom. I think— I would hope you've heard that before from somebody else.

Dee Waddell:Well, perhaps your leadership legacy, and having seen that personally within IBM, your legacy will continue to be felt. We appreciate you being spending some of your retirement time coming back, continuing to advise our clients, and having an impact in the world and the industry as well. So thank you for joining us today.

Bernard Meyerson:Thanks, it was fun.

Dee Waddell:All right, thank you.

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