HR as a Service – Transforming HR, Delivering Value to Business & Decentralizing the Organization

Nokia’s HR is on the journey of transforming itself into a service provider. In parallel to its own transformation, HR is driving the change to decentralize all corporate functions and make business groups autonomous and fully P&L responsible. Stephanie Werner-Dietz will talk about both transformations, and share experiences and initial learnings on the journey.

• Transforming HR into a service model – decentralizing HR function and changing the way HR delivers value
  • Identifying what HR as a service provider means – enabling a mindset shift, injecting thought leadership and mapping HR function onto services
  • Developing an HR concept that business values and purchases – taking a commercial lens and building a deep understanding of the business
• Transforming the organization as a whole:
  • Decentralizing all corporate functions and changing the model to a vertical one – making business units autonomous and accountable

A Peculiarily Amazonian Approach to Cultural Transformation

Eric Tachibana will lead a lab on culture transformation. He will start the lab off with an introduction to Amazon’s culture and a deep dive into the organization’s approach to culture change. This will be followed by group discussion.
Lab participants will learn the following:

• Explore the elements of Amazon’s culture that enable innovation
• Self-assess own company culture and work in groups to compare and discuss results
• Learn how to go from one cultural model to another

[email protected] – Making your Culture a Business Differentiator

Eric Tachibana will talk about how Amazon’s culture supports innovation. He will discuss how key manifestations of culture fuse together to create a strong culture of innovation. Eric will share insights on:

• The relationship between culture and innovation – what enables Amazon to be innovative
• Creating the environment that embeds the right behaviors and habits – how rituals, stories, values, and artifacts work together to create innovation culture bottom-up
• How Amazon fosters customer obsession and day one culture – and the role of leadership principles in this

Setting up Agile HR to Drive Culture Transformation

Rebecca Koch will discuss why agile HR is key to supporting the business and creating impact. She will detail her approach to drive HR’s agile transformation and new ways of working at DB Schenker. Rebecca will share insights on:

• Setting up agile HR and moving to agile ways of working and agile tribes
• Eliminating centers of excellence which are sometimes far removed from the business and tend to develop fabulous solutions that don’t create the biggest impact on business results
• Creating agile tribes to deliver impactful solutions – positioning tribes in close connection to the business and defining them around business objectives
  • Focusing on business priorities and competences rather than typical HR roles
  • Leveraging main agile principles and a broad global network to connect people working on the ground
• Driving and role modeling new Ways of Working by changing the organizational setup
• Driving leadership for a fast changing world – servant leaders who are open-minded, inclusive and transparent and who think and learn in an agile way

Connecting People, Purpose and Performance

Beth Whittaker will talk about Veolia’s journey to become purpose led. She will explain the role purpose plays within HR strategy and how it drives retention, engagement, and employee experience. Beth will share insights on:

• The approach to connect people, purpose, and performance – and the case for being purpose-led
  • Ensuring purpose has substance and is sustainable
  • Creating the JFK space center moment where everyone feels they contribute to something bigger – and getting the message across
  • Starting with the ‘why’ to the ‘how’ to the ‘what’ – and how purpose functioned as an anchor for people during the pandemic
• The four pillars of HR strategy and how they come together to enable great employee experience

How to Use Innovation, Tech & Data to Become the Earth‘s Most Candidate Centric Company

Innovation is a key enabler for Deutsche Bahn’s talent acquisition activities to recruit over 20.000 new employees per year in a challenging labour market. Kerstin Wagner heads the 800 people strong talent acquisition team at Deutsche Bahn. She will explain what makes their approach distinctive and strategically important. Their customer is the candidate in the labour market. Thus, Deutsche Bahn shapes the whole candidate journey with digital tools, data and innovative methods. This helps to positively increase the image as employer exponentially, to hire a volume of a mid sized city on time and underlines their goal: to become the earth’s most candidate-centric company. In addition, Kerstin takes a look into the crystal ball and shares how Deutsche Bahn, free of organizational boundaries, predicts the jobs of the future. She concludes by showing how her leadership principles, unique formats and a modern training environment foster innovation in her team.

Drivers of Change: How to Manage the Biggest Transformation in the History of Automotive Industry

Astrid Fontaine will talk about the transformation in the automotive industry, especially the transformation at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles. She will provide insights into the key success factors of transformation and the role of HR as a driver of change.

• From “”Bulli”” builder to provider of sustainable and autonomous mobility solutions: the transformation of Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles.
• Shaping the change and securing growth opportunities: How to empower your employees with the right skills for future tasks.
• Collaboration in diverse work environments: highly automated production lines, new software-based business models, and hybrid working in post-pandemic offices.

A Practical Journey to Build a Continuous Learning Culture

Sebastien Lys will talk about how Thales builds skills & competences, and a culture of continuous learning. He will share the approach taken to create time, resources, and support for skill development as well as discuss how the project drives employee engagement. Sebastien will share insights on:

• Why CEO buy-in is not enough
• Challenges and success factors on the ongoing journey of building a learning culture
• How to get real time for skill development and still deliver the value expected
• What does it change on a cultural aspect
• How to leverage employee engagement by offering them the opportunity to be actors on this adventure
• Mid-journey outcomes on HR KPI: retention rate, employee engagement, creativity, entrepreneurship, and more

Empower, Guide and Shield Transformational Talents: Create Security, Community, Collaborative Culture and Boost the Creative and Transformative DNA of the Company

Change within companies is often not as easy and fast as we desire. Judit Richwien, Peter Schardt, and Marc Schlichtner will present initiatives taken at Siemens Healthineers to accelerate cultural and organizational change in support of digital transformation and customer centricity. They will talk about their three individual perspectives through the lens of the Transformers Club (T-Club), a bottom up grass root initiative.

Transformers club – a bottom-up grassroots initiative: addressing the challenge of digital transformation:

• Overcoming psychological obstacles and creating security for people
• Engage, guide and shield people in ‘scary’ and jeopardous change and digitalization?
• Breaking down silos by finding the people who can bridge them and nurturing value networks
• Creating a stage and a career alternative for people with transformational capabilities, enabling them to drive change
• Giving transformers a mic and a stage and access to top management and create visibility and fast tracks
• Building a real community transformation network by using diverse initiatives – from talks, activities, future camps, fireside chats – aimed at connecting everyone relevant for transformation incl. senior management, transformational experts and anyone relevant in driving transformation
• Nurturing value networks and breaking down silos by finding the people who can stand across them
  

How Cherokee Culture Can Teach Us to Innovate: Using Cherokee Values to Develop Empathy for Your Customer Community

Understanding the cultures of the communities you’re serving is critical for effective innovation. David Robertson will talk about how organizations can learn from Cherokee culture to develop empathy dor their customers. He will share insights on:

• The significance of community for innovation
• The case of LEGO – how the organization reconnected with its community and the role of empathy in their turnaround
• How the Cherokee language and culture can teach us new, diverse, and rich ways of developing empathy for your customers
  

Putting the Platinum Rule of Innovation into Practice: Applying Cherokee Values to Your Innovation Process

David Robertson will lead a lab on different ways to use empathy for innovation. He will briefly introduce the platinum rule of innovation and illustrate how the Cherokee’s 12 languages of empathy can serve to provide some new ways to empathize with customers. This will be followed by a card game within the groups. Lab participants will learn and work on the following:

• Learn the platinum rule of design and understand the 12 languages of empathy
• Play a card game to use the 12 languages of empathy to work on either innovating on a selected product or to inspire organizational change

Reimagining Energy: Business Building and Culture Transformation in an Uncertain World

Energy is fundamental to human progress and the challenge is to provide this to more people while also helping the world move to a net zero carbon future. BP has a 100 year incumbency in hydrocarbon energy. In February we announced a new ambition to move the company and help the world get to net zero carbon by mid-century or sooner. This will require BP to develop new global businesses outside of oil and gas. This talk will share some of the successes and failures in BP’s use of venturing and business building in its new Launchpad subsidiary as we have begun to build an ‘ambidextrous’ organisation, able to grow its existing businesses while at the same time entrepreneurially building disruptive new businesses for the future.

Bolstering Innovation Culture through Clarity of Purpose

Cordell Hardy will talk about how 3M is strengthening its culture with clarity of purpose. He will discuss how the organization incorporates purpose from product portfolio to sustainability. Cordell will share insights on:

• The five pillars of 3M’s culture – expressing purpose-driven culture effectively and helping everyone relate to it and act on it
• Tying purpose to product portfolio, manufacturing processes, and sustainability metrics – improving alignment, enabling end-to-end ownership, and empowering decision-making
• Engaging people with purpose-driven culture – drivers and the role of leadership
• Digital transformation as an enabler of purpose-driven culture – from customer impact to democratization of enterprise capabilities

Digital Transformation Journey and the Role of Culture

Cristian Corotto has taken the digital approach and mindset from his work at eBay first to a dental implant company then to ABB. He will discuss the ABB’s four-years long digital transformation journey and share learnings on:

• What the shift towards digital requires – from strategic vision to new organizational capabilities to innovation approach
  • Organizational set-up as the success factor for digital transformation – leveraging ambidexterity and creating distinct units that are tightly integrated at senior executive level
  • Nurturing an agile mindset – listening to customers and understanding business needs
• Results – from growing the business while changing the business model to establishing an agile digital organization and collaborating with customers and partners to co-create scalable digital solutions
• The importance of culture for digital, beyond agile mindset: ways of thinking and working, collaborating, and customer-centricity
  • Changing the style of leading – taking a Socratic approach with the knowledge of not knowing
  • Building a data-driven culture – having the right people and the need to work with data incrementally to create tangible value
    

Empower, Guide and Shield Transformational Talents: Create Security, Community, Collaborative Culture and Boost the Creative and Transformative DNA of the Company

Change within companies is often not as easy and fast as we desire. Judit Richwien, Peter Schardt, and Marc Schlichtner will present initiatives taken at Siemens Healthineers to accelerate cultural and organizational change in support of digital transformation and customer centricity. They will talk about their three individual perspectives through the lens of the Transformers Club (T-Club), a bottom up grass root initiative.

Transformers club – a bottom-up grassroots initiative: addressing the challenge of digital transformation:

• Overcoming psychological obstacles and creating security for people
• Engage, guide and shield people in ‘scary’ and jeopardous change and digitalization?
• Breaking down silos by finding the people who can bridge them and nurturing value networks
• Creating a stage and a career alternative for people with transformational capabilities, enabling them to drive change
• Giving transformers a mic and a stage and access to top management and create visibility and fast tracks
• Building a real community transformation network by using diverse initiatives – from talks, activities, future camps, fireside chats – aimed at connecting everyone relevant for transformation incl. senior management, transformational experts and anyone relevant in driving transformation
• Nurturing value networks and breaking down silos by finding the people who can stand across them
  

Building Digital Businesses, Empowering Teams, and Balancing the Interaction with the Mothership

Porsche Digital was founded with the goal of helping Porsche digitalize the core and open up new business opportunities. Florian Rothfuss has been leading innovation projects for new business areas since the unit’s inception. He will discuss how Porsche Digital builds new digital businesses and interacts with the mothership. Key learnings on building digital businesses:

• Aligning with the mothership but also fighting for the freedom to do things differently and take risks – creating a balance for each project
• The crucial role of collaboration – ensuring all parties involved are partners and share risks and benefits
• Having the humility and gratitude for innovating in new areas to avoid the polarization of the new and fancy vs processes and following rules – the transformation to a more agile and innovative organization should be driven by both sides
• Starting with strong hypothesis development and empowered teams – and daring to cut projects if not successful
• Organizing around project teams – empowering the teams and setting up projects as internal startups
• Collaborating and investing in external startups to see the deal flow and have exposure to startup ecosystem – lessons learned

Leveraging Business Agility for Growth Innovation – in Parallel to Incremental Product Development in the Core Business

As part of its shift away from manufacturing consumer electronics to developing software solutions around its core strength in network infrastructure, Ericsson embarked in 2008 on a transformation effort that prioritized agile to help reorient the entire organization. Through his experiences at Ericsson, Hendrik Esser draws on the essential aspects of the organizational transformation to discuss how to leverage business agility for growth innovation.

• Leveraging business agility – the ability to dynamically shift between approaches
• Why agile is not the one-size-fits-all approach for all contexts in an enterprise
• Ensuring the chosen approach is fit-for-purpose to the challenges at hand
• How to grow the pace of innovation in parallel with the core business

Engendering Mindset Change Within the Organization to Succeed in a Complex (VUCA) World

Ericsson embarked in 2008 on a transformation effort that prioritized agile to help reorient the entire organization. Through his experiences at Ericsson, Hendrik Esser will talk about how to drive mindset change to create an adaptive organization and present some of the key lessons learned:

• How a VUCA world (of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) requires adaptive organizations, empowered people and a fundamental shift in culture and mindset
• How to drive mindset change – key success factors and challenges
• Learnings from Ericsson’s twelve-year mindset change journey

Exploring the Common Pitfalls of Adopting Agile within R&D

The Lab will explore the frictions between the theory behind agile and the real world of R&D. Participants will discuss challenges in adopting agile in R&D, examine different aspects of the resulting frictions, and harvest insights and learnings.

Empower, Guide and Shield Transformational Talents: Create Security, Community, Collaborative Culture and Boost the Creative and Transformative DNA of the Company

Change within companies is often not as easy and fast as we desire. Judit Richwien, Peter Schardt, and Marc Schlichtner will present initiatives taken at Siemens Healthineers to accelerate cultural and organizational change in support of digital transformation and customer centricity. They will talk about their three individual perspectives through the lens of the Transformers Club (T-Club), a bottom up grass root initiative.

Transformers club – a bottom-up grassroots initiative: addressing the challenge of digital transformation:

• Overcoming psychological obstacles and creating security for people
• Engage, guide and shield people in ‘scary’ and jeopardous change and digitalization?
• Breaking down silos by finding the people who can bridge them and nurturing value networks
• Creating a stage and a career alternative for people with transformational capabilities, enabling them to drive change
• Giving transformers a mic and a stage and access to top management and create visibility and fast tracks
• Building a real community transformation network by using diverse initiatives – from talks, activities, future camps, fireside chats – aimed at connecting everyone relevant for transformation incl. senior management, transformational experts and anyone relevant in driving transformation
• Nurturing value networks and breaking down silos by finding the people who can stand across them
  

Developing Your Technologists: Adapting Incentives, Career Tracks, and HR Approaches to Harness the Talents of R&D Staff

Ammon Salter will lead a Lab on managing technologists. He will start off the Lab with a brief introduction to the main tensions in motivating and developing R&D staff as well as the trade-offs in resolving them. This will be followed by group discussions.
The Lab participants will learn and discuss the following:

• Understand the tensions in harnessing the talent of R&D staff – and learn how these tensions map onto the company strategy and culture and what the trade-offs are in resolving them
• Learn what motivates R&D staff and what some of the good practices are
• Self-assess practices from own organizations and identify challenges
• Work in groups to compare, discuss, and share good practices
• Harvest discussion results

More tba

More to be announced

The Intrapreneur’s Journey: Lessons Learned From Building New Innovations Inside Global Enterprises

Our market landscape is changing, our customer’s expectations evolving, and new partners or competitors are springing up faster than ever. Internal innovation isn’t antithetical to global businesses, it is a core necessity. So, what is it really like to be an intrapreneur and what can we learn from other intrapreneurs to help us deliver in this new world? Ed Doran will share real world examples and lessons of moving from new discovery to new products and businesses to help you on this journey.

• Identifying the right emerging opportunities for your enterprise
• Rapidly testing and evolving your hypotheses
• Gathering the right people to build and drive your vision forward
• Knowing where to look to find early market traction and what it teaches you
• Scaling, partnering, exiting… and then starting again

Creating New S-Curves – Foresighting, Working with Technology Platforms, and Collaborating with Startups

Lee Ellen Dreschler will talk about how P&G’s breakthrough innovation unit identifies and develops ideas and technologies to create new S-curves. She will explain how the unit has evolved to become multifunctional, and how its set-up and positioning allow it to work with and develop platform technologies. Lee Ellen will tell the story of the unit’s journey in developing new products from starting small through working with customers and pivoting, as well how it collaborates with startups.

• Taking a panoramic view and incorporating external stimuli to make new connections and identify opportunities for creating new next S-curves
• Working in a dedicated unit with a team that evolved to become multifunctional – the benefits of having a unit that can create technology platforms and provide continuity
• The journey of developing EC-30 – starting small, working with Indigogo and with customers, adapting and pivoting to demonstrate value before bringing the project into the business
• Creating value by enabling consumers to have a direct relationship with a product through smart and connected products
• Key learnings on working with technology platforms
• Bringing in partners when needed and collaborating with startups to identify ideas that may support the P&G business

How Cherokee Culture Can Teach Us to Innovate: Using Cherokee Values to Develop Empathy for Your Customer Community

Understanding the cultures of the communities you’re serving is critical for effective innovation. David Robertson will talk about how organizations can learn from Cherokee culture to develop empathy dor their customers. He will share insights on:

• The significance of community for innovation
• The case of LEGO – how the organization reconnected with its community and the role of empathy in their turnaround
• How the Cherokee language and culture can teach us new, diverse, and rich ways of developing empathy for your customers
  

Putting the Platinum Rule of Innovation into Practice: Applying Cherokee Values to Your Innovation Process

David Robertson will lead a lab on different ways to use empathy for innovation. He will briefly introduce the platinum rule of innovation and illustrate how the Cherokee’s 12 languages of empathy can serve to provide some new ways to empathize with customers. This will be followed by a card game within the groups. Lab participants will learn and work on the following:

• Learn the platinum rule of design and understand the 12 languages of empathy
• Play a card game to use the 12 languages of empathy to work on either innovating on a selected product or to inspire organizational change

Reimagining Energy: Business Building and Culture Transformation in an Uncertain World

Energy is fundamental to human progress and the challenge is to provide this to more people while also helping the world move to a net zero carbon future. BP has a 100 year incumbency in hydrocarbon energy. In February we announced a new ambition to move the company and help the world get to net zero carbon by mid-century or sooner. This will require BP to develop new global businesses outside of oil and gas. This talk will share some of the successes and failures in BP’s use of venturing and business building in its new Launchpad subsidiary as we have begun to build an ‘ambidextrous’ organisation, able to grow its existing businesses while at the same time entrepreneurially building disruptive new businesses for the future.

Leveraging Design for Digital Transformation: The Journey and the Lessons Learned

Thales has been on a Design Thinking journey for more than 10 years, implementing in the process a strong design (thinking) center network (15+ DCs opened across the world). More recently, Thales Digital Transformation has opened a new design workstream focusing on User Experience Design creating a unique context for the creation of a design organization/capabilities.

In this talk, Didier will present synthetic elements of this journey and the more recent convergence towards Thales Design which brings together design thinking, UX/UI, product/service design & industrial design. Didier will present some of the lessons learned and key pivots along the way.

Bolstering Innovation Culture through Clarity of Purpose

Cordell Hardy will talk about how 3M is strengthening its culture with clarity of purpose. He will discuss how the organization incorporates purpose from product portfolio to sustainability. Cordell will share insights on:

• The five pillars of 3M’s culture – expressing purpose-driven culture effectively and helping everyone relate to it and act on it
• Tying purpose to product portfolio, manufacturing processes, and sustainability metrics – improving alignment, enabling end-to-end ownership, and empowering decision-making
• Engaging people with purpose-driven culture – drivers and the role of leadership
• Digital transformation as an enabler of purpose-driven culture – from customer impact to democratization of enterprise capabilities

Digital Transformation Journey and the Role of Culture

Cristian Corotto has taken the digital approach and mindset from his work at eBay first to a dental implant company then to ABB. He will discuss the ABB’s four-years long digital transformation journey and share learnings on:

• What the shift towards digital requires – from strategic vision to new organizational capabilities to innovation approach
  • Organizational set-up as the success factor for digital transformation – leveraging ambidexterity and creating distinct units that are tightly integrated at senior executive level
  • Nurturing an agile mindset – listening to customers and understanding business needs
• Results – from growing the business while changing the business model to establishing an agile digital organization and collaborating with customers and partners to co-create scalable digital solutions
• The importance of culture for digital, beyond agile mindset: ways of thinking and working, collaborating, and customer-centricity
  • Changing the style of leading – taking a Socratic approach with the knowledge of not knowing
  • Building a data-driven culture – having the right people and the need to work with data incrementally to create tangible value
    

Accelerating a New Venture Internally – and Leveraging External Partners

Sebastian Budischin will talk about Bosch’s approach to growing an internal scale-up within a corporate environment. He will discuss the approach taken to maintaining the right degree of flexibility and independence for the venture as well as the strategy for collaborating with partners to accelerate growth. He will share challenges and best practices on:

• Growing the internal venture within a corporate environment – the process, setting the right KPIs, and managing external partnerships
  • Managing the challenges of growing the venture from an exploration to an exploitation phase – from managing processes to getting around legacy funding cycle discussions to preserving flexibility and building a sales organization with a different set of capabilities in a yet undefined market
  • Addressing the challenge of customer building – starting with segments and building a roadmap of key deliverables to increase maturity from financial, capacity, and technology perspectives
  • Maintaining transparency with the Board to drive the project forward
    
• Engaging with the ecosystem – looking into ecosystem roles, identifying customer segments, building the necessary competencies to select partners for joint value creation
• Lessons on partnering with the ecosystem in the growth phase, such as the need for openness, transparency, and talking at eye level for win-win partnerships

Collaborating with Startups – The Approach, Ways of Working, and Lessons Learned

Kelly Van Dyke will talk about how PepsiCo collaborates with startups. She will introduce the organization’s tripartite collaboration strategy and will delve deeper into partnerships within R&D workstreams. Kelly will share insights on:

• The PepsiCo positive (pep+) journey – how sustainability impacts the organization
• How the organization approaches external partnerships with three different lenses – from M&A to Pep Labs to the R&D partnerships group
• The R&D partnership approach – collaborating inside R&D, process overview, prioritization, and identifying new projects
• How the R&D approach complements and accelerates knowledge and capability in targeted areas to deliver on business needs and consumer centric products – an example of successful startup partnership on biodegradable material
• Lessons learned on making partnerships work and leveraging the strengths of both the corporate and the startup

Building New Business: Managing Challenges, Scaling, and Collaboration with Startups

In this fireside chat, Volker Hammes and Axel Rosenø, CEO of Innovation Roundtable, discuss new business creation at BASF. They discuss how BASF is organized for new business creation and delve into lessons learned on building new businesses, managing challenges, and scaling. They further discuss why organizations should not go it alone and how to co-innovate with startups.

Leveraging Open Innovation and Collaborating with Customers and Startups on Sustainability

Abstract tba

Building New Businesses & Leveraging Open Innovation – Adapting Methods, Making Purposeful Investments in Startups, and Lessons Learned

Thomas Canova will talk about how Solvay develops and incubates new platform-based businesses. He will discuss how the organization identifies new opportunities, manages uncertainty, and collaborates with startups to develop and incubate new businesses. Thomas will share learnings on:

• Developing platform-based businesses – from road-mapping to open innovation to resource caps
• Defining the right topic from the market and tech perspective and executing on it
• Determining whether to work with agile or waterfall – and adapting the selected method
• Establishing governance with the business and ensuring that leadership is transferred from research to business teams
• Lessons learned on venture capital from why investment should be about purposeful money to what the company should bring to the startups to partnering with internal businesses