Source: Fortune
Summary
Okta’s President and COO Eric Kelleher shared an example of an inefficient expense report process that was flagged by the company’s auditing system, highlighting the waste of resources and the need to question existing processes. At the Fortune COO Summit, Kelleher and other executives discussed the challenges of identifying and eliminating wasteful processes, citing confirmation bias and the difficulty of changing established systems. They also emphasized the importance of fresh perspectives, such as those brought by interns, and the need for executives to sponsor transformation efforts.
Our Reading
The numbers tell one story.
Okta’s Eric Kelleher flagged an $18 overpayment on a $2,000 dinner as “waste.” FedEx Freight’s Patrick Maier found a useless sponsorship of a minor league team. IBM’s Joanne Wright led a two-year transformation that yielded a 30% improvement in its operating model, or $4.5 billion. The disease: confirmation bias with a salary attached. The status problem nobody wants to name: transformation efforts stall when there’s no executive with enough cross-functional authority to force people out of their silos.
Companies are deploying AI on top of broken processes without fixing the processes first, making their dysfunction more efficient.
