Every so often a voyage of discovery will land you somewhere totally familiar. In recent months BT has travelled the world with a conference for senior business people and their government counterparts. In Bogota, Hong Kong, Istanbul and Singapore we’ve asked what they think is the most important of the current strategic trends affecting our world today. Is it the end of limitless resources, instant globalisation, the unbalanced economy or the power of the individual? As we can see from our earlier posts, we got some different answers from difference places.
But when we came to Sydney it was all so familiar. It was all about the individual. It was all about what people could do – because be it in sport, business or in carving out their country in just a few decades, it’s the power of the individual to make a difference that Australian’s understand.
The Hon Nick Greiner, AC former Premier of New South Wales spoke passionately about the Australian opportunity. He argued the strategic trends offered both problems to be solved and opportunity to be seized. He could see the Australian potential given the nation’s geography and resources both natural and human. But he feared the country was “shooting itself in the foot”. “As individuals, as voters, as citizens” he implored. ”We have to change Australia because the world is changing around us.”
That theme was taken up by Fiona Packman, Partner at strategic search company Egon Zehnder as she spoke about the changing role of the CIO. As CIO’s most of the audience no doubt agreed with her premise that they should be the individuals at the right hand of the CEO informing future business strategy – not IT strategy – business strategy.
Peter Hiom, Deputy CEO, Australian Securities Exchange talked about the brave new world of financial markets where virtual trading communities are created in data centres in Sydney connected to counterparts in Singapore, London, Chicago, New York etc. However, he concluded “This machines and their markets are operated by people and those individuals can be anywhere on this planet.”
Some of them, no doubt, would be customers of the Australian Post Office. And as Maha Krishnapillai, General Manager, Telecommunications Products and Services, Australia Post pointed out “Each one of our customers wants to be treated as an individual and to communicate with us how they want. We have no option but to comply.”
Maha’s case study into how Australia Post had used communications technology to create a customer-centric business made for compelling listening and viewing. At the start of the conference, delegates expressed a hope that they would get fresh ideas and big thinking. When asked from what they had benefited most, they said it was learning how other businesses had transformed.
Dr Nicola Millard, Customer Experience Futurologist at BT brought the event to a close talking about how BT was transforming its approach to research and development from a lab-based exercise to one that created new personal experiences. “Innovation in of itself is useless,” she said. “It’s how innovation impacts the individual that matters. If people aren’t part of the experiment, it’s all a bit pointless.”
So after these presentation, it should come as no surprise that when asked to rate the most important trend in the next two years, our Sydney audience voted “the power of the individual” (40%) ahead of “instant globalization” (33%) with the “unbalanced economy” and “an end to limitless resources” equal third on 13.5%.
But perhaps more tellingly, at the start of conference they were asked to rate the most important trend today. They voted pretty evenly across all four. But one trend, the Australian trend, just sneaked out in front – “the power of the individual.”