Zinnov Podcast - Business Resilience series

The DNA of Resilience: Building Dynamic, Sustainable, and Transformative Organizations

Large companies often undergo extreme changes that are triggered by external events such as strategic mergers and acquisitions, change in investor group, and today, the current pandemic and the resultant recession. Changes like these ultimately impact not just the business line, but also customers and employees. Organizations that have stood the test of time, have resilience built into their system; in a sense, they are antifragile, where they do not just hold their own against these stressors, but become stronger. But what enables such organizations to build this inherent business line resilience? How does it translate from a process and a structure perspective? What are the other leadership aspects that leaders need to double down on to fortify their businesses in the face of both external and internal stressors?

 

In this episode of the Zinnov Podcast, Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov is in conversation with Dominique Cerutti, CEO of Altran to understand how despite having undergone rapid transformation across various business facets, Altran has displayed resilience that is deep-rooted in the structure and fundamentals of their organization. Together, Pari and Dominique share perspectives on the key tenets of building business line resilience.

Hyper Intelligent Automation – Going Beyond Resilience

Hyper Intelligent Automation has become a critical addition to the CXOs’ arsenal in the current business climate. In our latest Zinnov-UiPath report on Hyper Intelligent Automation landscape 2020, we found that more than 75% of the Fortune 250 enterprises have already made significant investments in Hyper Intelligent Automation (HIA) and its adoption becoming an absolute is only a function of time. In this episode of the Zinnov Podcast, Diego Lomanto, VP Product Marketing, UiPath shares his perspectives on the rapidly evolving role of automation, the current state of the Hyper Intelligent Automation market and its future, and the role of COVID-19 in accelerating HIA adoption.

Adaptive Innovation – Recalibrating for Business Resilience

Unlike the economic crisis of 2008, the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) industry has been playing a crucial role in helping the economy stay afloat in these unprecedented times. The BFSI sector has not only been acting as agents of disbursal of stimulus packages, but they are also on a path to rapid digitalization to ensure that customers are not impacted.  In this episode of the Zinnov Podcast, Sukanyya Misra, Head and SVP of Mastercard India Tech Hub shares with us her perspectives on how the overall BFSI industry is combating COVID and the ensuing repercussion. Sukanyya also shares her learnings, and best practices from Mastercard on how they are recalibrating innovation thinking for better business, employee, and community outcomes.

The Resilience Factor – Innovative Business Models to Variabilize Technology Development Costs

Enterprises globally have deployed different playbooks to minimize the impact of the pandemic, adapt to new circumstances, accelerate recovery, and orchestrate growth. Businesses have had to adopt liquidity planning and cash conservation, enable modernization of infrastructure, rethink demand generation to sustain while focusing on product, captive, and functional carve outs, territory and service line expansions, Intelligent Automation, and M&As to evolve and prosper. Enterprises operated amidst unknown unknowns.                       

 

In this episode, Sandeep Kalra, President of Technology Services at Persistent Systems and Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov discuss how businesses can plan for such uncertainties in the future, the various innovative business models that can help them variabilize technology development costs, and the different strategies that companies can deploy to become more resilient.

Leadership Model – Passion With Purpose

In this episode of the Zinnov Podcast – Business Resilience series, Rick Crandall, a technology stalwart and author of the book, ‘The Dog Who Took Me Up A Mountain,’ talks about why the leadership model of passion with purpose is key for effective leadership. Rick, after a stellar career in technology, found an unlikely partner in a dog who made him discover a new passion for mountaineering and gave him a renewed sense of purpose. At the age of 64, he started pursuing something that most thought was impossible – he scaled all 58 of 14,000 ft mountains in the Rockies. Rick shares with us his experiences – both business and mountaineering – and explains how ‘WILL’ trumps ‘SKILL,’ how partnerships are important, and how any problem, however complex, is not insurmountable if one has passion and purpose. This is especially relevant in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business environment, where organizations and leaders are striving to stay ahead and keep their eye on the metaphorical summit.

SMBs – The Bridge of Resilience (Part 2)

In part 1 of the podcast, Praveen Bhadada, Managing Partner, Zinnov and Sameer Garde, President of Cisco India and SAARC discuss the state of Small Medium Businesses (SMBs) in the wake of COVID-19 and how technology is playing a key role in helping SMBs combat the COVID crisis. In the second part of the podcast, they discuss the role of government and technology companies in keeping the SMB sector afloat.

SMBs – The Bridge of Resilience (Part 1)

COVID-19 has affected millions of Small Medium Businesses (SMBs). Many of these SMBs are fighting for survival as they face severe liquidity crunch, supply chain issues, and unavailability of workers. In this podcast, Praveen Bhadada, Managing Partner, Zinnov and Sameer Garde, President of Cisco India and SAARC discuss at length on how the current pandemic has impacted the overall SMB sector, how SMBs are fighting back, and what role is technology and different ecosystem players can play to help SMBs chart a course of recovery.

Cost Optimization - The Margin of Resilience

The current COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted every industry, every vertical, especially Travel, Hospitality, Gaming & Casinos, Airlines. It has compelled companies across the globe to go into survival mode, with little or no room for error. As companies evaluate their costs, they have been forced to make difficult decisions like furloughs and lay-offs. In this episode of Zinnov Podcast, Nilesh Thakker, Managing Partner and Global Head of Zinnov’s Engineering Excellence Practice, shares his insights on how companies can take a hard look at their budgets to optimize costs and achieve up to 20% savings on their bottom line.

Leadership ‘Jolt’ – Reinventing Oneself

In this episode of the Zinnov Podcast, Roopa Unnikrishnan, Head of Strategy at HARMAN and Award-winning author shares her leadership experiences with Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov. Roopa and Pari discuss how internal and external jolts (like COVID) force leaders to rethink their fundamentals. Roopa, who first came up with the idea of ‘Jolts’ in her book ‘The Career Catapult’ shares anecdotes on how these inflection points make leaders find and practice courage that allow them to be effective when there are many variables and unknowns. Through the conversation, Roopa and Pari discuss the types of leaderships that exist and how the path of resilience lies effectively on the shoulders of those leaders that can strike a balance between business and humanity, and can stay authentic while they continually reinvent themselves.

Telemedicine – The New Arsenal for Healthcare

While the healthcare sector has been at the forefront of this crisis, Telemedicine has emerged as a silent hero that is making a difference every day by helping people stay home and stay healthy. In this episode of the Zinnov Podcast, Kali Durgampudi, Chief Technology & Innovation Officer at Greenway Health shares his insights on how Telemedicine services have evolved in this current crisis and how we will continue to see the long term effects of this evolution even in a post-COVID era.