Here is what Carolyn and Sameer had to say!

A quarter of a century of constant change

Over the past 25 years, the constant for the OPEX/business transformation sector has been continuous change, according to Sameer Anand, Director, Enterprise Business Agility Transformation for BAE Systems.

“The velocity of change is going to keep accelerating,” says Anand. “Speaking personally from my specific career experiences, OPEX started from select analytics-heavy Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) Kaizens and Design for Six Sigma DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify) led by black and green belts within repeatable services, usually IT and operations, with a focus on reducing variation.”

Reflecting on the ongoing change since 1999, Anand says that to begin with, Lean initiatives took place “generally in manufacturing, with an aim of reducing waste”, followed by Lean leadership initiatives, such as strategy execution, “with a purpose of aligning organizations to key goals and objectives in a cascading manner across business functions and IT.”

“Then there were Agile initiatives happening primarily in IT, initially focusing on individual empowered teams, as well as offshoring, and automation, RPA initiatives and user-centered design,” Anand recalls. “We also had organization design, organization development and change management initiatives to generate pull, alignment, transparency and empowerment.”

In 2016, PMI announced a bold new purpose: to deliver a smoke-free future. Since then, the company has been working relentlessly to accelerate the end of smoking, and evolve into a broader lifestyle, consumer wellness, and healthcare company. PMI’s ambition is to be, by 2030, a substantially smoke-free company with over two-thirds of its total net revenues coming from smoke-free products. This transformation represents significant shifts into a completely different space requiring new capabilities and ways of working.

Carolyn Lum, Vice President, Operational Excellence at PMI, reflects on her experiences with PMI, as well as working for Danaher, where she spent 11 years from 2003 to 2014, and Philips, where she was Senior Vice President and Head of Continuous Improvement and Philips Excellence from 2014 until 2021.

“What happens in a large organization is that people come to the organization with different experiences, so everybody is driving things the way they drove them at their last place of work,” is how Lum sums up one of the major challenges of change management.

At all three companies, Lum was involved in periods of major change – Danaher started out as a manufacturer of traditional industrial products in the mid-1980s, but moved into other industries, such as dental and medical technology, Philips moved from being best-known for light bulbs and moved into medical technology, and PMI is driving towards a smoke-free future.

When Danaher went through a period of major change, Lum says it was important to “listen to the things that kept [the executive staff] awake at night, what were the top business challenges that we could help them with … this was one of the ways to get the executive staff to be committed.” Starting at the top and getting buy-in from the CEO and senior management is the best way to ensure success, especially when dealing with what Lum describes as “big, hairy monster problems.”

Lum was involved in the process that moved Philips from being a decentralized company to a more centralized organization. She recalls there were around “80 versions of problem-solving”, which confuses people. However, she adds that it is important to “link that centralized structure very closely with the business.”

“At Philips, we started in manufacturing, but over the seven years I was there, we drove operational excellence, lean, daily management and problem solving resulting in significant business impact and results in almost every function – sales, marketing, innovation, HR, IT, finance and service.”

Technological change at pace has made change management more complex, especially in the past decade.

“As technology and analytics got more powerful, change got more complex and organizations became more fluid, there was a need for more holistic transformation across horizontal value streams and vertical functions,” says Anand. “We saw more of a focus on scaling up and across, and it was not sufficient to have a career with just one specialized skill set – more and more, enterprise system offerings and transformation approaches require flexible skill sets and mindsets.”

To explore Sameer's and Carolyn's perspective on recruiting, reskilling and effective people strategies & developing and scaling change management throughout their dynamic careers, access the full interview here!