welcome to the latest episode of the executive Circle podcast I'm joined today by Simon Morris area vice president of solution Consulting hi Simon hi cat it's great to be with you today so let's just start with a bit more of an intro what do we mean by area vice president of solution Consulting for service now what do you do I have the best job at service now I lead an amazing team of people that are really familiar with our platform and our products and our services at service now and we're also experts at understanding our customers challenges as well and we try and line those up so what is the customer trying to achieve how can we help them and with a big emphasis on business value if you spend one pound with service now you should expect something better back um but how are we going to return that value in different forms around productivity or risk and so on perfect but obviously we're not here today to talk about product and selling service now we're talking about big Mega Trends and I don't mean the latest fashion trends which of course I know Simon you are you'd be brilliant at talking about but we're talking about the big trends affecting businesses today so what are they and and why Mega Trends why not just Trends well I mentioned in my introduction that as service now we try and understand our customers problems very deeply and how can we provide solutions to those problems I think in business there are a category of problems which transcend any one business they affect every business in a particular industry and actually these Mega Trends are cross industry they affect everybody in our economy and in our society as well so we're talking about the really intractable hard things to solve so the four Mega Trends are climate change inflation and the prevailing recession the trend of the empowered consumer and the change in future Workforce so these are issues which every business has to deal with or they're going to get left behind and they are so much bigger than the problems affecting one business business in a particular industry and you obviously mentioned these obviously they they are problems businesses do have to react and be agile and how they adapt to them but there's opportunity in those those Trends as well isn't there absolutely and uh every problem is an opportunity for somebody and I think what we see with our customers is they recognize the benefit of moving fast being an early adopter of technology or jumping on a trend or transforming their business so going fast is an advantage but actually the penalty of going last is also really scary if you look at the the S&P 500 index of 500 companies the biggest in the US um if you go back 30 years the average age was 70 years they were around for a long time and now the average age of an S&P 500 company is about 15 years where have those companies gone they didn't run out of cash they didn't run out of customers they just didn't keep up with these emerging Trends they didn't see the opportunity to move fast and I think that's something on every business Leader's mind today and I guess many Business Leaders will look at that and think wow I've got four four big priorities to tackle do they have to be tackled at once is there is there an order of priority and and if so how do you prioritize those big those big things well customers and businesses have to solve the challenge in front of them so generic problems aren't helpful every customer is unique in why they do what they do what they do and how they do it but I think things like climate change are going to fundamentally rewrite how we operate as an economy and a society we're talking today at a time where the cop 28 climate Summit is going on and we're not hearing very encouraging news from that from that Summit so are we going to move to a period of adaptation we're no longer going to try and solve climate change we're going to have to adapt to the impact of climate change these are things that no company can ignore yes there are opportunities but I think I think there's a big theme here about risk management am I going to build the resiliency of my business so I can withstand this changing economy this changing Society influenced by for example climate change and I think there's something interesting you just said there around you know businesses tackling it and being adaptive themselves but I think there's definitely something there around businesses coming together to tackle mean climate change can't be sold by one person it can't be sold by one business are you seeing a lot more of the sort of con businesses coming together competitors working together to solve some of these big trends we really talking there about ecosystems so companies that are finding new ways to come together to create new forms of value for for their customers so maybe companies that wouldn't traditionally work together or even competitors that are now having to cooperate in new ways so you're right so things like climate change can't be done by one company it's going to be done by people that are cooperating together to kind of force multiply the impacts they can have I think the one that s jumps out for me is obviously the empowered consumer do you think businesses feel a little bit LED down the Garden Path by what consumers are demanding today or you know are Business Leaders still in the driving seat and in terms of the things that they're creating well the Empower consumer is a fascinating one um it's not a new trend I mean we've been empowered via the Internet for example for the last 30 years we've been buying online now since the mid 90s or a little bit later so it's not around is this trend going to happen it's an inevitable Trend but it's about how quickly can businesses adapt it's about forms of competition changing you know there are a lot of me too products out there it's very hard to really differentiate on the products that you sell you really have to focus on how you make your consumers feel is that experience of consuming your product or the after sales experience it's driving customer lifetime value rather than driving that once off buying moment at the beginning of a relationship and these are real top level priorities for anyone in retail or any kind of director consumer business consumers are more empowered but it's actually a story about how slow companies are sometimes to adapt to a trend it's it's interesting talking about experience I think that seems to be a Common Thread throughout them as well we talk about a changing future Workforce you know the experiences that aging population are experiencing the experience that businesses need to provide that different demographic both for their employees and for their customers it seems like experiences something that sort of permeates across all four of those Trends well you sp there about the um the changeing future Workforce that is a real opportunity for businesses we are going to have because of the extended working life of people and uh longer life expectancy overall we're going to see more Generations in the same Workforce and one size fits all solutions just won't work in the future so we have to understand the differences between these generational groups I don't think it's defined by can they use Tech or not there's millions of people at older ages that are fantastic at Tech um sometimes these boundaries are drawn along economic boundaries know social economic boundaries are you did you have a good education did you have access to Computing when you were growing up and so on but for businesses they're going to have to deal with the trend of more Generations in the same Workforce tailoring that employee experience to get the best out of each individual according to their needs and their preferences obviously we can't we have to touch on on technology and and on the the key word of today which is AI you know is is there a there can't be obviously one siiz fits all technology to solve all these things but you know where where can technology uh support those opportunities with businesses well I like to talk about the uh the kind of the Trinity of delivering Services now if you're going to deliver a service to your customers or your colleagues or your partners you need to get three things fundamentally right that is velocity intelligence and experience so are you making work flow quickly are you driving velocity are you making good decisions either human-based decisions with analytics or with AI making decisions automatically and are you driving the experience for the consumer of your service I think we need to understand work and how it flows and Technology can really reduce the friction at points in that Journey driving the velocity up through workflow systems making better decisions through AI models and of course generative AI is a really exciting moment in Tech and in business and in society but also providing a great experience come to me where I am if I'm on my mo mobile device in the back of a cab or I'm in Microsoft teams having a conversation come to me where I am rather than expecting me to come towards you as a service provider so we're seeing more conversational more mobility and just much better experiences overall so if you could give a piece of advice to a business leader there sitting here think thinking going into 2024 I get I can't tackle all these at once I get that they're not going to go away what advice would you give that leader I think there's a three-stage process to any transformation regardless of the company the industry or even a thing that you're transforming first of all you have to modernize so we have to reduce the the friction in the employee experience remove the number of tools and really Drive Simplicity and standardization by providing modern tools to our workers but a transformation can't stop at the modernized phase all you've done is bought more tools and probably spent more money so then you have to get on to the second phase which is about optimize find the efficiencies through Automation and here we should be seeing technology driving down the operating cost of running a business so now we've modernized we' found the efficiencies and we should be running things more effectively at a lower cost and now we get to the really exciting bit we've realized Capital we've got money in the bank I hope now we can start to manage the future surviving than managing the debts and the Legacy and the complexity of today can we help our Business Leaders focus on how do I manage the future operating model the future opportunities and those future threats know climate change inflation consumers being more demanding and more empowered having to deal with um the future Workforce we need Capital to take advantage of those opportunities tomorrow's projects are going to be funded by the efficiencies that we can find today that was brilliant Simon We've Ended on a really positive there with some advice for Business Leaders today thank you so much for joining me oh thank you K so we're going to be doing a few more episodes going into a bit more detail on the megat trends and it would be great for you to ask a question to our next guest um on this series of podcasts if you could ask a question around one of these Mega Trends what would you ask oh that's a that's a good one I think for climate change I'd like to ask the next guest about the role of innovation so we really talking about you know consuming less resources and flying less and recycling more but where does innovation fit into how we change our economy and our society to Net Zero brilliant question thank you ever so much you've been listening to the executive Circle [Music] podcast