9. Postcards from the Dual
Transformation Journey

Dual Transformation contains no easy answers. Leaders driving dual transformation need to reposition their core business in the face of market disruptions, an action that can entail significant cost cutting. They must in parallel create a powerful, disruptive growth business that isn’t fully distinct from the core but is connected by a carefully stocked and actively managed capabilities link. Success requires leaders to demonstrate the courage to choose before the data is clear, the clarity to focus on the highest-potential opportunities, the curiosity to explore in the face of uncertainty, and the conviction to persevere in the face of predictable crises. And, as the Xerox example in chapter 1 shows, the reward for success is that you get the chance to do it all over again as the next gale of creative destruction starts to blow.

We’ve aspired to build your confidence that dual transformation is possible by presenting here a diverse set of case studies, and to arm you with a set of tools to assist you as you follow your own dual transformation journey. The word journey is purposeful. Look at the length of the stories in this book. It took four years after commercial introduction for streaming video to constitute more than half of Netflix’s revenues. Gilbert spent six years driving dual transformation at the Deseret News. It took seven years at Adobe for digital marketing to become one-third as big as its traditional businesses. Steve Jobs returned as CEO of Apple in 1998. It took more than a decade before the full impact of his work was felt. Xerox’s dual transformation took place over fifteen years. And in none of these cases could leaders shake their fists, proclaim victory, and ride off into the sunset.

Transforming a company is indeed a journey, one that is both unpredictable and perpetual. It requires patience, discipline, and constant attention. Don’t expect that you’ll speed through your journey in a business quarter. Rather, you need to come up with a rough view of how you will balance activities over a three-year period. The appendix to this book contains a simple template that lists almost twenty milestones that you could think about staging through your journey (along with several other tools and discussion guides to help you implement the ideas in this book).

Viewing dual transformation as a journey is another way to maintain conviction when challenges arise. That the crises described in chapter 8 will arise is predictable, but exactly when is not knowable in advance. A multiyear view allows you to take any single event in stride and react appropriately.

In this concluding chapter, we share postcards from the journey, with leaders like you sharing the lessons they learned at critical moments along the way, grouped by the three categories of crises described in chapter 8. Let’s first meet the protagonists from this chapter and then go through thirteen specific moments.

Leader Profiles

This chapter shares firsthand quotations from leaders at six organizations. Aetna, Arizona State University, Manila Water, and Singtel are featured in other parts of the book; Ford and Settlement Music School appear here only. Following are the leaders, with their organizations in alphabetical order.

Aetna: Mark Bertolini, CEO and Chairman

Mark Bertolini became CEO of Aetna in November 2010, and the chairman of the board in April 2011. He joined Aetna in 2003 after spending time at large insurers (Cigna and New York Life) as well as upstarts (SelectCare). His passion for health care reform traces to deep personal involvement when his son was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in 2001. Bertolini’s passion for alternative medicine springs from a devastating ski accident he suffered in 2004, when he broke his neck in four places; he eschewed traditional pain killers and embraced acupuncture, yoga, and meditation.

Since 2010, Bertolini and his leadership team have been working to transform Aetna from a company that sells health insurance policies to businesses, to one that sells insurance to consumers (transformation A), and IT solutions to providers (transformation B). Aetna has made big bets, ranging from the $500 million acquisition of Medicity to a huge attempted acquisition of Humana (the outcome of this attempt is unknown as of this writing). Bertolini’s quotations come from a series of discussions we had with him in 2014 and 2015.

Arizona State University: Michael Crow, President

Michael Crow became president of Arizona State University (ASU) in July 2002. The son of a navy sailor, Crow had a long career in academia before assuming his role at ASU, with previous roles as the executive vice provost of Columbia University, where he helped develop Columbia’s online education strategy, and professor at the University of Kentucky and at Iowa State University. Since joining ASU, Crow has focused on creating what he calls the “new American university,” with a commitment to research excellence in a select number of fields; digitally enhanced, accessible teaching on ASU’s campus; and the creation of a powerful online platform to bring education to broader populations.

“We have taken the classic university structure and highly modernized it by changing the culture of the faculty, the culture of the students, and the design of institution,” Crow said. “That has resulted in dramatic changes in performance along every dimension you can imagine.” In a September 2016 interview with coauthor Scott Anthony, Crow described ASU’s transformation as one from a “rigid, bureaucratic, public-agency modeled public university” to a “high-speed, adaptive, public enterprise university.”

Ford Motor Company: Mark Fields

Mark Fields became president and CEO of Ford Motor Company in July 2014. A graduate of the Harvard Business School, he joined Ford in 1989 and served as the head of Mazda Motor Corporation, then a Ford subsidiary, from 1998 to 2000. Fields became the business unit chief of Ford’s Americas operations in 2005, leading the effort to develop a plan called The Way Forward, which helped Ford successfully navigate the 2007–2008 global financial crisis without needing to seek government bailouts. Soon after taking the CEO role, Fields launched an ambitious effort to streamline and reconfigure Ford’s core automotive business (transformation A) and to aggressively create new mobility service businesses (transformation B) as part of an overall effort to shift the company from being an automotive company to an automotive and mobility company. His quotations are from an interview with coauthor Mark Johnson in August 2016.

Manila Water: Gerry Ablaza, CEO and President, and Ferdz dela Cruz, COO for Manila Water Operations

Gerry Ablaza joined the board of directors of Manila Water in 2009 and became its president and CEO in 2010. He previously spent a decade as CEO of Globe Telecom, a sister company in the portfolio of the Ayala Group. Ferdz dela Cruz worked with Ablaza at Globe before joining Manila Water in 2011.

Ablaza and dela Cruz arrived at a critical moment in Manila Water’s history. The company had solved the problem it sought to address in its 1997 formation: providing basic potable water to six million consumers in the eastern portion of Manila. The duo launched a dual transformation effort, with the aspiration of doubling net income. Transformation A involved fundamentally restructuring Manila Water’s operations in existing markets and developing a new water-as-a-service model that would allow Manila Water to expand to new geographies; transformation B involved building a portfolio of new service offerings. The remarks from Ablaza and dela Cruz are from an August 2016 interview with coauthor Scott Anthony, where both executives agreed that Manila Water was roughly halfway along its transformation journey. “We are like a baby that has just started to stand up and walk,” Ablaza said. “We are learning new skills and trying to develop new competencies to learn how to walk, and then how to run.”

Settlement Music School: Helen Eaton, Executive Director

In 2010, Helen Eaton became executive director of the Settlement Music School, a not-for-profit organization that provides music education in the Philadelphia area. An accomplished musician who trained at the Juilliard School, Eaton soon set out to transform the more than one-hundred-year-old organization, whose six branches provided about ten thousand classes to five thousand students each week.

Transformation A involved going beyond Settlement’s traditional target of children and youth to developing innovative offerings for adults. Offerings such as Adult Rock Band—where a group of adults, initially strangers, would come together weekly and get instruction from an expert—were aimed to reposition Settlement facilities into places that provided adults a sense of connection and community. Transformation B involved working with other local providers to bring equitable access to music instruction for all children in the Philadelphia area. Eaton’s efforts won Settlement a range of prestigious grants and have the potential to drive a lasting impact in the local area and beyond.

Singtel: Chua Sock Koong, Group Chief Executive Officer

Chua Sock Koong became group CEO of the Singtel Group in 2007. Singtel is Southeast Asia’s largest telecommunications company, with more than 600 million subscribers. In its 2016 fiscal year, fully owned operations in Singapore and Australia contributed close to S$17 billion in revenues and S$5 billion in EBITDA (equivalent to roughly US$12.2 billion and US$3.6 billion respectively), and substantial investment in regional operators in markets such as the Philippines (Globe Telecom), Thailand (AIS), India and Africa (Bharti Airtel), and Indonesia (Telkmosel) contributed another S$2.8 billion (US$2 billion) in pre-tax profits.

Chua (following eastern convention her family name appears first; Sock Koong is her given name) joined Singtel in 1989 as treasurer. She then served in various key capacities, most notably as the CFO before assuming the group CEO role. Starting in 2010, Chua and her leadership team chartered a dual transformation strategy where they would shift the core business from voice to data and create new digital businesses that extended Singtel into markets such as advertising and cybersecurity. Her quotes are from an October 2016 interview with Anthony.

Crises of Commitment

Does your historical core have a future? Are you serious about investing in new growth? What will you do when a hyped new growth effort stumbles? Here’s how our leaders describe making the commitment to transform, handling setbacks, and leveraging the advantages of incumbency.

On Committing to Transformation

Fields (Ford): “When we have affected new strategies as a company it’s always been when our back was up against the wall. Now, the business is on a firm foundation. There is no burning platform. Yet, we have an incredible amount of change going on in our industry. We have a number of new nontraditional competitors interested in automotive, as well as established competitors doing new things. There’s a real sense that we have to deal with this. We have the opportunity to be proactive to secure our future, as opposed to reactive to secure our future.”

Crow (ASU): “It has been easier than I thought [it would be] to convince the faculty that they needed to become part of a student-centered culture. People were ready for that. I think it has also been easier to find a way to break down departments and disciplines. Yes, there were people against it, but not enough to stop it. The creativity and the design power of the faculty has been greater than I thought, if not remarkable.”

Bertolini (Aetna): “I don’t think transformation begins and ends. I think it’s a continuous process. I think every organization I’ve ever been a part of has been in constant transformation. Everybody has the same problem. We need to look to ourselves as leaders to make that happen. The tools are there, the ideas are there, the theory is there, but I think in the end analysis, we have to personally have the courage to take it out and make it happen.”

On the Critical Role of Transformation A

Chua (Singtel): “For us, the transformation A is actually even more important, because we have to get our core right to earn the right to do transformation B. I speak from the perspective of a listed company that has shareholders who expect yield and growth. People seem to have the impression that transforming the core is less dramatic than building a new business. That’s a misperception. If you look back far enough in Singtel’s history, our core was once telex and telegram. Then IDD [international direct dialing] became the main revenue and profit contributor. Today, our business is all about data, mobile data, and fixed data. That’s all around the transformation of the core. Without that transformation, we risked becoming irrelevant. In fact, there were some telcos whose livelihood was entirely dependent on IDD. They never transformed themselves and now they’ve just disappeared.”

On Challenges, Setbacks, and Stumbles

Fields (Ford): “It would be easy to say that we have a harder job because we have this whole new element of the business that we never had before. But that’s not how we view it. Our predecessors forty years ago had their own issues and their own crises. We try not to think about that too much, because if you do, you can rapidly find yourself in the abyss of paralysis. It’s more like, ‘It’s hard. The world is big. Okay, we’re at an inflection point. Let’s figure it out.’”

Dela Cruz (Manila Water): “It is not easy. My advice to other leaders is, the further you get from the core, the more you need to be resilient and support the team that is still in the trenches learning. We were way off on our assumptions. To use the Mike Tyson analogy, we were punched hard in the face. We have to keep reminding ourselves that it is a process, because we get impatient. You have to trust the process.”

Eaton (Settlement Music): “Transformation is a roller coaster ride. You have moments of great highs and lows, moments where you are certain about what you are doing, and moments where you question deeply. It is never easy. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. We have had a host of successes and some failures along the way. We have developed systems to evaluate those successes and failures, and learn from them. We understand our audiences better, because we are asking the right questions and responding thoughtfully. This has all led to the organization’s capability of doing even greater and more impactful work, and so we become more ambitious, and the journey continues.”

Chua (Singtel): “Getting into the digital business was a lot more difficult than we expected. The cultural norms such as the pace of change and what motivates people in a company like ours and in startups are very, very different. These are some aspects that we are still trying to address in order to better attract and retain digital talent because we need this talent not just for our digital business, but also for all our businesses going forward. We’re trying to change how Singtel is perceived and also our compensation policies. For example, when we made acquisitions like Amobee and Trustwave in the United States, we created long-term incentive schemes based on Amobee and Trustwave’s own performance rather than Singtel Group LTI [long-term incentive] plans. This was quite a big departure for us. We like the Singtel Group LTI plans because we want Amobee and Trustwave employees to buy into Group objectives. But we recognize that the motivation and connection may not be as strong for them as compared to the rest of our staff.”

On Leveraging Scale Capabilities

Crow (ASU): “The most significant asset we have is the faculty, and we share that widely. We also share our library, which is far more than a library. We have millions of books and tens of thousands of journals and millions of digital assets, all of which is completely searchable. It is nothing like Google. This is reviewed, certified, published material that is digitally searchable and usable. In essence, we have made the entire set of faculty products available through our enhanced technology platform. This new conceptualization of a library helps to bridge the gap between faculty research outputs and students on campus, students on online platforms, and students on emerging platforms.”

Chua (Singtel): “We have always believed that any new investment we make must provide a strategic difference and a competitive advantage compared to any company that wants to get into that new business. If all we bring is money, there are lots of companies that probably have cheaper cost of funds, and there won’t be a sustainable differentiation that would generate superior outcomes. That’s why when we were identifying new businesses to go into, we made sure that they were businesses that leverage on our telco assets and customer relationships. An example is cyber security. At Singtel, we monitor and secure traffic flows and have trusted relationships with our customers so it very naturally led to the business of protecting networks and services from cyber threats.”

On the Positive Spillover Effects of Driving Dual Transformation

Ablaza (Manila Water): “Our transformation communicated to the organization that we are embracing innovation and change. This opens up two innovation tracks. One is in the core, where we find innovative ways to improve things that we do there, such as turning waste to energy or creating cost-neutral plants. Telling our people that we are looking to do new things gives them permission to innovate where they are today.”

Dela Cruz (Manila Water): “We have a lot of good young engineers that run boring plants. We can give them new excitement by having them work across our two entities.”

Crises of Conflict

Whom do you back in the battle between today and tomorrow? Who gets dibs on scarce resources? What happens when key stakeholders complain that progress is too slow? Here’s how leaders selectively separated A and B, managed tensions between the two, stared down stakeholders, and used results to quiet critics.

On the Importance and Limitations of Separate Disciplines

Bertolini (Aetna): “Setting out to transform an organization, as we have learned at Aetna, requires a different approach than what we do to drive excellence in our core businesses. For the core, we typically have a version of ‘the truth’ that is expressed in numbers and spreadsheets, and we manage our business against the variance of those numbers. This makes sense within a well-understood business, but it suboptimizes our ability to innovate. For the more forward-looking businesses, we know that whatever numbers we come up with will likely turn out to be wrong; so what is most important are the ideas those numbers represent, and the assumptions behind them. When you look at the full range of assumptions, then, you have a sense of the risks inherent in that direction, and you can have a discussion about what you need to believe to take those risks.”

Dela Cruz (Manila Water): “Leaders need to wear two hats. One is for the core business, and the other is for a new venture. The visual of the two hats helps us make sure we are clear what conversation we are having and wear the right hat. Our CFO served as one of the best symbols to the organization on this point. I think we are fortunate that Chito [Manila Water’s CFO] in prior roles was exposed to ventures. Organizationally the CFO is such a strong symbol of how much risk an organization is willing to take. Some companies have problems because the CFO blocks everything. For us, the CFO is a strong symbol of embracing dual tracks.”

Chua (Singtel): “Traditionally, for a mobile business case, you know what your cost drivers and revenue drivers are and monitor them. For new businesses, it is still necessary to do a business case and track the drivers. But these drivers are different as they relate more to customer usage. If the customer numbers are way out from what was in your business case, you know that you’re never going to achieve the business case. So, you still need to determine the milestones and targets, but you’ll probably be tracking different indicators and at a different frequency than you would in the traditional businesses.”

Fields (Ford): “When you have separate teams, some of the things coming from the new role can threaten the established role. You ultimately have to make choices on capital allocation, and so it becomes a skins-versus-shirts exercise. Our approach is to think about these things at the same time, which, ultimately, allows you to get more buy-in for the hard choices you need to make, and it develops a team. It also develops the team. The other way we’ve dealt with this is we’ve spent a lot of time with the management team talking about how we are not going from an old business to a new business—we are building a bigger business. Our core business and the emerging opportunities are interconnected. In mobility services, you have to have a car or a truck, and it’s got to be world class. These things are part and parcel.”

On Using Results to Quiet Critics

Crow (ASU): “We operate an institution within a set of institutions that are not interested in change. For example, we want to introduce new technologies into teaching and learning paradigms. There are all sorts of people out there that say what they were really concerned with was whether using keyboard on iPads was diminishing of the learning process, because you think more slowly when you use a pencil. Learning needs to be a slow process, but ultimately it needs to be something that is done in the context of access to massive amounts of information and data, and massive amounts of knowledge, and massive amounts of access to other people being available to almost everyone. What we have decided to do is to outperform everyone and take Cicero’s adage to heart: we criticize by what we create. We have decided to create a student body truly representative of our population at scale, run [the university] in ways contrary of a lot of normal logic, and simply outperform everyone else.”

Bertolini (Aetna): “To have the right to move towards transformation, you have to deliver performance in your core businesses. This is like ‘jacks or better to open’ in draw poker; unless you meet a certain threshold, you can’t play. You meet your commitments, and, as you get results, you earn the right to broaden the vision. At that point, it’s critical to take everyone through the logic behind how you made the transformation choice, how observing the fault lines creates the case for change. It’s also important to emphasize that the broad outlines of the required changes are clear, but that the strategy will likely evolve over time. So you highlight the markers to look out for what will indicate whether we’re on track or if another change is required.”

On Breaking Free of Constraints

Crow (ASU): “What I would have done differently is to break out of the constraining model more quickly. I’d build a network outside of the university more quickly. I’d make that network local and national and global more quickly. Do not allow the institution to chase others. We are not here to be the next UCLA, the next Minnesota, or Ohio State. We are not here to be measured against the previous attainment by some other institution. Ford is not measured by whether or not its cars as the same as Maserati’s. We have a silly business in education where people are ranking schools, not against what they did or the value they added, but, if you are measured against highly exclusive institutions you are measured by how well you do at becoming highly exclusive.”

Chua (Singtel): “The most important thing is to be open to new ideas. If you are very successful in what you have been doing, it is sometimes even more difficult to want to change. In our case, if we were not open to new ideas, such as going overseas or creating new digital businesses, we’d be a lot smaller than we are today. Could you imagine Singtel being in the advertising business five years ago? Probably not. Well, we’re now in the digital advertising business. The fact is we can’t allow our past success to limit what we will do in the future. As a leader, I have learned personally to be more open to ideas. There are times when I hear a new idea, and my instinct is to say, “No forget it, it’s crazy.” I try to refrain from saying no, look at things from the other party’s perspective and think about why the person believes this idea would work. After a while, I sometimes begin to see that this actually could make sense. I think I’ve become better at this.”

On the Importance of Senior Support

Ablaza (Manila Water): “The Zobel brothers [Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala and Fernando Zobel de Ayala, the CEO and COO of the Ayala Group] have taken an active interest in the work. They visited one of our Healthy Family plants personally. That sends a very strong signal. It gets blasted in our online gazettes and publications, and showcases that there is support at the highest level of the company.”

Crises of Identity

Who are you? Whom do you hope to become? What does it mean when the answer to those two questions is meaningfully different? Many of the challenges in dual transformation are existential in nature. Here’s what leaders have to say about alignment, communication, and the power of purpose.

On Aligning Leadership and the Board

Fields (Ford): “Making decisions and choices is hard. Not just where to play, but even more important, where not to play. When you decide where not to play, there are implications for the business. Previously, we’ve always had that burning platform where we had to make really hard decisions to close plants, eliminate product lines, and say good-bye to people. It’s harder now, because the business is on a firmer foundation, but the strategic choices are just as important.”

Bertolini (Aetna): “Your top leaders have to be aligned around the long-term vision and the assumptions about the future that underpin it. But you also have to change the nature of the dialogue with them, away from one about certainty and predictability, and towards one about assumptions, managing risks, and ‘what you have to believe’ for a certain course of action to be the best one. This is a significant shift for even the most successful leaders, and some might not be able to make it. You can’t expect everyone to evolve at the same pace, but you have to see progress; for me this means being ‘realistically expectant’ and ‘patiently tolerant of progress.’”

Ablaza (Manila Water): “I was surprised by how easily the leadership team embraced this type of innovation, and I think a lot of credit goes to the idea that you have to create separate governance practices. We were able to find a structure where we are not trying to use old tools to answer new problems.”

Chua (Singtel): “The board plays a part in setting strategy for the business. So it’s easier for our board directors to understand the threats of disruption and better appreciate the exciting opportunities out there that we bring to their attention having seen it themselves. That’s why we took the board to Silicon Valley, Israel, and more recently to India. We recently increased our exposure to India, and we wanted them to feel the buzz in the market place to really appreciate it.”

On Clarifying and Communicating Focus

Bertolini (Aetna): “Changes are rarely going to happen as fast as you think they will. When they don’t, doubt can start to creep in with your stakeholders. This is why it’s so important to frame the vision as resting on a foundation of clear assumptions about the future. People can debate the assumptions, but once you agree on them, the logic behind the vision solidifies, and people recognize the danger of not changing.”

Fields (Ford): “We’ve always had five-year business plans, and that has been our strategy. This is the first time we’re taking a future-back view of what the world is going to look like fifteen years from now, and then putting together a strategy that allows us to have the maximum chance of success in that world that we see. We’re answering questions about where to play and how to win, who we are and who we are not, what we do well, what we do better than others, and where do we need to improve. I’ve been very pleased with how the team has really opened up their minds to think about this in a very expansive way—without biases or preconceived notions. The spirit of the discussions has been very thought provoking. The senior team knows we’re going to really focus. Some vehicle platforms will make it, and some won’t. In emerging markets we’re going to pick our shots, and some will work out and some won’t. That clarity is refreshing for the organization.”

On Motivating Through Purpose and Mission

Fields (Ford): “Most of our senior leadership team have spent their entire careers here at Ford. On the one hand, you can get very hardened in how you think about things. On the other hand, we all think in terms of the legacy we want to leave for the next generation. We’re part of the Ford family. It’s not just a job. We’re standing on the shoulders of the people before us, and we want to pay it forward for the next generation. That’s part of the pride of a 113-year-old company. It’s going to be messy. We’re working new muscles. It’s important to acknowledge people’s fears or concerns, and make sure people feel like they are part of the process—a participatory process, although it may not always be a democratic one. This can’t be about us coming in and saying, ‘Here is the strategy.’ It’s like that old saying: ‘If you want to build a ship, you don’t teach the team to go out to the forest, cut the trees, saw them, bring the planks back, and nail them together. You teach them the love of the sea.’ The process here is how do we teach ourselves—and our entire organization—the love for where we want to take Ford and then organize the extraordinary efforts we’ll ask them to do to get us there.”

Crow (ASU): “We had to change the culture of the faculty. First, you basically say to the faculty, in all seriousness and with a sound intellectual and behavioral argument, ‘We are not here for you. We are here for the students.’ If you stick with that message, it has a huge impact on people’s behaviors. And second, we also say that you are no longer required to stay within the rigid, conservative design of academia. You are no longer bound to the bonds of structures of other institutions. What do you wish we could be doing on life sciences? What do you wish we could be doing on other complicated topics? Moving from faculty centric to student centric, and making faculty free agents that could design their own intellectual agenda, turned out to have huge impact.”

On Communicating to Employees and Other Stakeholders

Bertolini (Aetna): “It’s easy to underestimate the amount of communication that is needed. You have to be tireless about it, consistent and persistent, and keep battering the core messages home week after week. Your leaders have to as well, and they have to tailor the message so it has the appropriate level of fidelity relevant to each part of the organization. A person working in a call center might need a different set of messages to understand how he docks in to the big picture than a line manager, and so on. Communication is an ongoing challenge, but I try to make it easier by creating a company culture consistent with our vision, including being approachable and available to everyone who works here.”

Crow (ASU): “Communications is a big deal in changing any culture. Culture trumps strategy every day of the week. The German army had fantastic strategies, all of which were defeated because their culture was fundamentally weak to the core. We have been able to constantly give the message that we are here to measure ourselves against the success of our students. You have to constantly project those messages, or you can’t change the culture.”

Eaton (Settlement Music): “From the beginning, I decided on a three-pronged approach to change management. The first is that I would have the highest level of transparency with our staff, teaching artists, and board members even when it meant telling them something that they did not want to hear. The second is that I would also take the necessary time to seek input on the most critical decisions. And the third is that I would personally take responsibility when something did not go well. This approach has led to tremendous support of the changes, and even when people have not been fully behind the changes, they have accepted them for the good of Settlement.”

On the Challenges and Opportunities of Transformation

Fields (Ford): “Transformation is uncomfortable and exciting at the same time. If this is big enough to make a difference for the company, it should be extraordinarily exciting, but at the same time scare us. It’s like when we redesign [an] F-150 or redesign the Mustang. You hold these two things in your head where you feel incredible pride and excitement because you’re working on this icon, but gosh, you don’t want to be the team that screws it up. It’s the tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time. We get to help set the rudder for Ford Motor Company going forward, but at the same time we’re responsible for 200,000 employees and their families and communities. That drives us to make sure we make the right decisions for the future.”

Chua (Singtel): “We’ve set five-year milestones and targets for our transformation journey and we track our progress towards our five-year goal on a yearly basis. Transformation is a continuous journey and you need to set milestones and targets so that you know how you’re doing. You also have to constantly calibrate against the external environment and decide if the goals that you have set are sufficiently ambitious or realistic. Sometimes when you set the targets, you may look at them and think you are not going to get there. But when you break it down into smaller parts, it may be easier to achieve than you think.”

Eaton (Settlement Music): “Our transformation has been both complex and inspiring. Complex because we have needed to honor a hundred-plus-year-old institution—Settlement Music School—and its heritage that is deeply embedded in our community, work with and keep very close to us a great number of teaching artists, staff, and board members who have dedicated decades of service to Settlement, and at the same time acknowledge that our field of work is changing and the business model needs continual analysis and renewal. It has been inspiring because, despite all of these challenges, our community has come together to stay true to the founding mission and at the same time embrace change for the betterment of the school.”

Crow (ASU): “Students are a huge source of inspiration. We have a university representative of the totality of society, and the aspirations of their dreams are no different than yours or mine. I am deeply and personally inspired by helping them to reach those dreams. I have little doubt of the outcome of our collective future because of the nature of the people we have gathered at the university. It is truly inspiring.”