Robin Speculand

The Story and Lessons from a World-Class Digital Transformation

Digital transformation impacts every part of your business, yet fewer than one in three organizations complete it successfully.

This keynote is ideal for leadership teams looking to avoid falling into the traps that are tripping up two-thirds of organizations around the world in digital transformation. It highlights what works and what to avoid, how to shift from horizontal to vertical leadership, and how to accelerate your digital transformation based on DBS Bank’s success.

DBS has been awarded the World’s Best Bank for the past five years and ranked among the top 10 digital transformations of the past decade by Harvard Business Review.

Under the stewardship of CEO Piyush Gupta, DBS Bank adopted “Making Banking Joyful” as its digitalization strategy in 2014. In their group meeting that year, leaders discussed how nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to do banking. An opportunity was born! By leveraging technology, DBS could make banking invisible to its customers. Making Banking Joyful became a passion that inadvertently turned into a rallying call for a banking industry revolution.

The bank digital transformation focused on three strategic principles, as this keynote accentuates:

1. Become Digital to the Core
2. Embed Ourselves in the Customer Journey
3. Culture by Design and Think Like a Start-Up

Discover how to:

• Aligned the whole organization behind a digital purpose.
• Transform your leadership style from vertical to horizontal.
• Place the customer at the core of everything you do by adopting customer journey mapping.
• Engaged employees from the very start by leveraging digital tools.
• Transform to a totally data-driven organization.
• Re-architecture your core technology.
• Build effective ecosystems.
• Measure your digital strategy.
• Accelerate your implementation.

Transformation in a Digital World

“The winds of change are blowing faster and harder externally than they are internally.” – Speculand

Organizations are operating in a hyperconnected world where the strategic landscape is rapidly changing underneath them. As a result, leaders must be aware of what is happening outside their organization and the effect on their key stakeholders. Therefore, they must not plan to have a digital strategy; they must … but to have a strategy in a digital world.

This is not semantics but, rather, a critical positioning for success. Having a digital strategy narrows your perspective and opportunities. Having a strategy in the digital world dramatically broadens your perspective. You become more aware of what is happening around you including geopolitical shifts, changing customer demands and technology breakthroughs. With the evolution of ecosystems, adopting a broader view is critical in today’s increasingly hyperconnected world.

Organizations transforming in a digital world need to respond faster to customer requirements by leveraging technology and data. Leaders
require a powerful digital purpose that inspires and aligns the whole organization. That means they need to re-architecture their technology platform while becoming agile and creating a culture that supports adopting a new way of working. To achieve this result requires leaders to shift their mindset and encourage agile experimentation as they shift from vertical to horizontal leadership.

Why is this change needed? Because the top reasons two-thirds of transformations in the digital world fail are:

• Leaders fail to shift their mindset.
• The organization’s culture works against the transformation.
• Leaders apply “digital lipstick” instead of guiding a complete business model transformation.

In this informative and engaging keynote, you’ll discover what it takes to overcome these common failures. You’ll learn how to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the different moving parts of transformation in the digital world and gain hard-won insights from successful organizations. Most important, you’ll come away with a framework to guide your complete transformation in the digital world.

• Pinpointing why digital implementation frequently fails
• The Ticking Clock© Model – highlighting the strategic and operational requirements
• Explaining how the Ticking Clock works with examples and use cases to reinforce key points

Strategy Implementation Challenge

Customers notice your implementation not your strategy.

After the board has approved the strategy, the challenge is to implement it. This involves aligning the whole organization, engaging employees, changing your measures and the way you operate and nurturing your communication throughout your implementation journey.

Only one in three implementations are successful. Leaders habitually repeat past mistakes and do not conduct enough due diligence on their organizations readiness to implement.

The challenge is also that leaders have been taught how to plan but not how to implement and they are missing the skills and tools.

This Strategy Implementation Challenge keynote addresses what leaders need to think and do differently. It opens by asking audience members if they would prefer a good strategy implemented badly or a bad strategy implemented well. This question stirs a vicarious audience discussion that is addressed during the keynote.

Having identified the problems the majority of organizations face, the presentation then focuses on the eight areas for excellence in implementation. They are captured in the form of the Implementation Compass™, a propriety tool developed by Bridges to provide structure and guidance for the implementation. The Compass has been adopted by organizations and governments around the world to guide them through their implementation journey. Specifically, it ensures everyone is taking the right actions.

This straight-talking, hard-hitting presentation is invaluable to leaders who want to avoid common pitfalls and successfully implement their strategy. It explores:

• Why strategy implementation fails more often than it succeeds.
• Provides the framework, the Implementation Compass to guide an organization through the eight areas required to succeed in strategy implementation.
• How leaders can identify the right actions and develop the discipline that is often missing.
• How to spur the workforce into action beyond giving out t-shirts and coffee mugs.
• Secrets of strategy implement strategy from one of the world’s thought leaders.

Through examples, stories, videos, provocative questions and mini case studies, leaders come away with an understanding of how to conquer the Strategy Implementation Challenge in their organizations.

The following key areas make up the Implementation Compass:

1. People – the calibre of your people dictates the success of the implementation
2. Biz Case – addresses why your organization must change
3. Communication – nurture communication throughout the organization
4. Measure – identify key measures, track performance and define corrective action
5. Culture – your culture drives the implementation
6. Process – change the way the organization operates
7. Reinforcement – reinforce employees’ behavior when they take the right actions
8. Review – conduct regular reviews to stay the course and take corrective action