Um First of all, let me start by saying, thank you for uh joining me today. I'm very excited to be here and to be um amongst so many great presenters um today, what an agenda. So um my company is GX, we have an executive decision intelligence platform.I'll talk a little bit about that at the end of the um conversation today, but I think that it will certainly provide some context. So today, I wanted to have a conversation about the realities and the complexity of transformation and business. Today, I want to come at this though, um a little bit differently and bring both an anthropological and a technology perspective um to bear. Um I am thinking mostly about leaders today, very senior managers, the C suite and the board and I firmly believe um that the C suite and the board need artificial intelligence and database tools at the top of the house. If they are going to um succeed and navigate today's economic climate and market, we're also going to spend a little bit of time talking about the future of boardroom decision making. So my name is Angelique Mo and I'm the founder and the CEO of GX. I've been an executive in technology for 20 plus years now. Um I am uh a published anthropologist and bio archaeologist as well. I always say that's a bear worthy conversation that I love to share with people.

So if forever in the same space, reach out and let me know. So just a little bit on the anthropological view of technology and leadership today. Um I think back to when I was an archaeologist working um primarily in Latin America. And one of my rules was to reconstruct economic trade through the health of seemingly disjointed communities that were nearly 1000 years old. And we literally did this one fragment at a time. It would take months if not decades to be able to understand how these organizations and they were very complex organizations actually fit together in what those dependencies were with. The um continued advancements of technology, not only has this moved forward in bio archaeology and anthropology, but when we bring it into business, looking at those complex systems of people and the work that they're doing and the dependencies across the market has shifted to something that we can do now in months, days and in many cases, even minutes.

The reason is because we're in the age of the network, this age of the network means we are all incredibly interconnected. It goes well beyond our concept of simply being connected on social media in organizations and as leaders managing your risk, your resources, your brand security inside of your organization. It has to include sophisticated tool sets today, designed for the leadership in the top of the house.

Just some of the priorities that you have your cultural risk, the digital investments that we've all seen accelerate over the last 23 years building in long term resilience because the state of change is our new normal. I know you've probably heard this even several times today.

This pace isn't going to be slowing down. And so we're gonna be in a constant state of transformation. We've got the challenge of not only finding talent but keeping talent and of optimizing the talent that we do have because all of us as leaders are getting pressured to do more at less cost. So there's that ongoing pressure of how do you create value within your organization and how do you do so with an understanding of what your network looks like? What I've seen over the last several years is there's no shortage of organizations focused on tooling up employees in the middle management. We certainly saw this as we all move to hybrid working and working from home during the pandemic. We've all seen automation, we've all seen the positive impacts of robotics, digital visualization, hiring analysts and um advancing your data analytics. It definitely can create positive mo movement inside of an organization. But what we're lacking is actually thinking about how to tool up leaders that are managing all of this complexity, the automation programs, the employees, the analytics. So I'm seeing positive movement inside of organizations but not necessarily forward movement.

And I'll give you a few more examples of this merry go round. It's what I call the leaders dilemma. So we see the strategic planning, your off sites, your workshops, the three day sessions where you're prioritizing what you're gonna focus on for the next 3 to 4 quarters or 3 to 4 years. And out of this, you create your action plans and your um KPKPIS, but then the cycle of distraction begins. So you've got that optimism in the beginning and you're starting to see some momentum and then there's a fire, a priority. A disgruntled employee, a disgruntled um customer uh breakdown in the um value in your sorry, in your supply chain, whatever that fire might be, it tends to be something that you think you're gonna be able to put out in a couple days to maybe a couple weeks. I would ask how many of you have said I can't do this right now, but let's come back to it in 2 to 3 weeks because I just have to take care of and insert the name of this fire that you're facing right now. I know I've been guilty of it myself many times.

What happens though is that all of the hard work and effort is in putting out the constant fires and it is hard work, but it's mostly reactive work and you get your fires put out and you do an optimistic reset and you focus again. Here we are back at the strategic planning, resetting our action plans and we hit repeat. The key thing is though is that hidden costs are often millions inside of organizations. It's something that I've spent many years quantifying for organizations today and millions in the market and the majority, I mean, the vast majority of these fires that we all face in that reactive state can be avoided. And by avoiding these leaders can move out of this reactive state into a proactive and much more strategic one. The challenge that we have though is again, leaders are lacking a technology supported framework, not just one platform but a framework for thinking about how to drive better organizational decision making in their hands at their fingertips. We know that turnover at the C suite and amongst leaders is at an all time high and it's climbing year over year. Um I've had some of the biggest financial services agencies saying that their turnover is um over 80% 80%. That's incredible.

But when you think about it, who really wants to stay in a role in which is impossible to be strategic, you kind of get worn down and that average um staying cycle is between 8 to 18 months. Do you wanna stay in a, in a role in which you're not able to take those intelligent decisions that you're expected to be able to take at pace or to understand what's really happening inside of your organization today. You're also faced with more pressure as a leader and more reporting. Um We did an audit with one organization that noted that they were spending 250,000 per quarter in one division inside of their organization just on creating reports. That is astounding The challenge that you also have is the roll up of this data is oftentimes where the gap is in understanding what's happening in your, your organization, your team, your group, your business unit. And this is where the risk tends to grow and it becomes a hidden risk and eventually a hidden cost that surfaces, the data in those reports are often inaccurate, they're outdated, they're historical looking, making it impossible to genuinely take those forward looking decisions.

And again, you're stuck in that reactive cycle that we've talked about. So what does an A I driven company um look like when they have A I artificial intelligence at the top of the house? We think that and we've seen that it becomes your competitive edge in the market today. And I think most organizations that are faced with these cost cutting strategies so transform do more with less. And while you're doing it, by the way, can you save some money? We know that um digital acceleration over the past few years has rendered vast amounts of data. And this data can become like your fingerprint for your organization. It's unique just to your organization. There might be two organizations that are structured similarly, there are never two organizations that are identical. So by taking a step back and taking a strategic approach to your data, and I mean, let's move beyond, we're gonna create a data lake and we're gonna hire some data analysts.

I want you to start thinking about it as your hidden blueprint and it's waiting to be uncovered to solve exactly what you need it to to solve for. This is going to liberate you as a leader and it's gonna enable you to take decisions um in the light with the data in front of you versus blindly or oftentimes in the dark. So executive decision intelligence for the board, the C suite and the leadership is something that is becoming much more structured in the market. It's actually a practical domain. It brings together a wide range of decision making techniques that have been around for decades and it combines those with advanced discipline overlay artificial intelligence on top of this. And you've really got something special inside of your organization. Many companies have started with an ad hoc approach to decision support. This is where the employees are making decisions, supported by um diagnostics or predictive analytics, decision augmentation I think is where most of leadership in the top of the house should be focusing because you still have the human at the center of this.

But you're using that advanced thinking um analytics, the artificial intelligence and machine learning. Um And you can drive multiple decision scenarios to understand what's gonna be best for your organization. Then there's decision automation, not something that I completely agree with at the top of the house, but most definitely, there's many places in your organization where your decisions and your work flows can certainly become fully automated. What I want you to start to think about is how to think about your position inside of your organization as a leader a little bit differently. I want you to think both vertically and horizontally and I know most people think that they already are. Let's say that you're the CMO the Chief marketing officer inside of your organization, you're probably gonna think about marketing and your customers and meeting the customer demand and those shifts in the market and the impact that the entire organization, every part of it, every group, every business unit can have on your marketing strategy and how you can support the company that's still vertically thinking.

It's your role in marketing. Um looking at it from the perspective of marketing across the organization. What I would challenge you to do is to think about, well, what other decisions are being taken by my peers, by my colleagues within the market across the other business units or functions that can actually impact me and that I can impact. And so you're stepping outside of just the KPIS or the um accountability that you have within marketing and understanding how those other organizations taking marketing out of the picture can actually impact you. So it's possible today to start to see horizontally and vertically and you can actually do it at the pace of change inside of your organization. Let's talk about where you might wanna begin. If you're not sure you can look at what your competitors are doing. What tools are they using? Who have they recently hired, who's leading in their organization and where are they going? What kind of skill sets did they have? And how do they compare to you? What are nearby accelerators supporting? I am not a big fan of putting all your bets inside of the next Innovation Center or Accelerator. I think that's a model that's been um overused over the last, let's say 10 to 15 years.

However, accelerators have taken leaps and bounds forward in how they work with um new innovative start ups in the market and what they're doing. And so what are the ones that a Microsoft might support versus a large retail organization? Like, I don't know, a Walmart or an Amazon versus a big bank? And how can they fit, what are you seeing coming out of those that might actually make your life easier as a manager or a leader or someone sitting in the C suite? You can also challenge your vendors to deliver more. How can they improve their service for you? Maybe they're solving 50% of a problem and you can ask them to start to think about and partner with them on the other 50%. And you can ask your teams to seek out profound proven solutions in the market. There is no shortage of information about the cool things that are happening and the problems that are getting solved in today's complex business world. Just some ideas that you can consider is looking at how organizational behavior has a quantifiable impact on your ability to deliver change. How is is the behavior in New York affecting the behavior or the outcomes on strategic delivery in Germany or Singapore or London or Toronto?

You can look at portfolio performance and look at the dependencies that don't seem to be there but are in fact there with other groups not working in those portfolios, but influencing them. I've often seen that cost tens of millions of dollars in um hidden costs and waste. Definitely a worthwhile place to consider. Exploring you can look at governance and its impact on productivity or productivity and its impact on employee life cycles. And the list goes on the challenge though that I would give you is I would like you to start to think about it from your specific position. Imagine advanced scenario modeling where petabytes of data are processed in just minutes to work through potential scenarios right in your board meetings or right in your strategic leadership meetings. Imagine decision, intelligence being there for you the minute that you wake up, I'm not talking about a digitalized executive assistant who needs to remind you to pick up your dry cleaning. I'm talking about predicting how a change in the market could impact your priorities that you need to take today. Right now. What would make your day focus better? How would your day go if you could remove or eliminate the number of fires that you have to deal with?

Day to day, week to week? How can you step out of that? Oftentimes three week cycle that we see, I'll be with you shortly. Just give me a couple of days to a couple weeks. I just have to deal with this problem and then I'll get to be that strategic leader that I want to be. I don't know how many times I've thought this in my past, in my past life. So what do you need? What do you need to eliminate the fires that you have? Because those fires are indicative of organizational challenges that you have often behavioral, sometimes just governance and process. How can you fix those? And if you think it's not your problem because it's sitting somewhere in the organization, I remind you, we're in the age of the network and we are all indeed incredibly connected in these complex businesses and complex world trust. It's possible to solve these problems. Now with technology, I really don't think you can give us a challenge that we can't solve in the next six months, 12 months or few years. So if you can find the problem, find the solution by the solution, maybe even go build it yourself. With all of this, you can actually liberate your leadership, including yourself. Did you know that you can drive 20% greater return on investment across all of your strategic initiatives in just two years? If you invest in your leadership now, including yourself 20% greater return on your investment.

The vast majority of initiatives today including the most strategic initiatives sponsored at the top of the house, either die fail or they become zombies. Zombies are just those projects, those strategic programs that get renamed, rebranded and new leadership stamped upon them.

But it's the same problem that you've been trying to solve. So I get that you need to invest inside of the organization and I understand that you need to continue to invest in your employees, particularly with our focus on optimizing talent and talent retention. But if you want forward movement versus just having movement, I do suggest that you get that technology framework built into your own strategy for yourself as a leader and for your leaders, this is why we built KX. We liberate the C suite boards and leaders around the world.

I'm happy to share more with you and have a conversation on how we've helped organizations save tens to hundreds of millions improve their productivity and dramatically reduce the complexity. In other words, no more fires. Thank you everyone. I do hope to meet each of you individually.

Please feel free to reach out in on linkedin and I look forward to talking to you soon. Cheers.