Naresh Shanker is a pivot expert. He has been the Chief Information Officer of companies like Palm after its lead in personal digital assistants had fallen. He joined HP as CIO, and led the separation of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) from HP in record time with remarkably few hiccups along the way.
In May of 2019, Shanker joined Xerox as Chief Technology Officer. The 100 year old company has been a legend of innovation, but you could be forgiven if your perception is that its best days are behind the company. In fact, since the beginning of 2019, the company’s stock is up roughly 75 percent. Shanker notes that he was attracted to Xerox because of its history as an innovator, and he recognized that the culture of innovation remained in the company. He also saw an opportunity to work on some of the most innovative technologies such as 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things.
As CTO, Shanker has a lot of say in the innovation agenda, as he leads research and development, among other areas. He describes his purview, his plans going forward, and more about his journey in this conversation.
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(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 33rd interview in my board-level CIO series. To read the prior interviews with the CIOs of companies such as General Motors, Workday, PepsiCo, Dow, and United Airlines, please click this link.To read future articles in the series, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: You are the Chief Technology Officer of Xerox. How did the opportunity to work at Xerox attract you enough to make the leap over?
Naresh Shanker: Xerox has had an incredibly rich year, and in its 100 years of existence, both in invention and innovation, it has had an amazing run. What intrigued me was that I have the unique opportunity to transform and revitalize the brand and business from a business operating model and a digital transformation perspective so that it is easy for customers to engage. What was likewise exciting was the opportunity to transform the product portfolio across the workplace solution landscape, the graphics landscape, and all of the new sciences that will help us transcend the print franchise. At many different levels, this role and opportunity are quite unique, so I had to give it a shot. Xerox is a marquee brand that is highly respected in the industry. I see the next three to five years being extremely exciting. We will get to pivot and transform the brand at many different levels.
High: You have alluded to some of your objectives, such as transcending the print franchise, getting into workplace solutions, and leveraging new sciences. Could you elaborate on a few of those examples. What will be the sources of innovation and what complexion will they take?
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Shanker: When you look at the print franchise, which is our core business, and workplace solutions and graphics, we now see ourselves moving into a whole new range of sciences. This will allow us to take advantage of a $55 billion-plus market opportunity that is ahead of us in all of these new sciences. If I look beyond the core business in the areas of packaging, there are new sciences around direct object printing, in-line marking, and the digital print and packaging side that are adjacencies to the core business.
The next set of businesses that we have launched is starting with the 3D printing / additive manufacturing business, which is predominantly focused on liquid metal. That is an extremely interesting technology, it is highly disruptive, and it fundamentally revolutionizes manufacturing around speed, cost, and reliability. In the liquid metal space, we have built technology where we can absorb the low-cost input intake of metal alloys that are commoditized, and we can produce high-quality production parts that have tremendous integrity and density in terms of the materials that we print. It is a huge value proposition, so that is a classic example in terms of how unique this is in the additive space. You couple that with artificial intelligence [AI]-based 3D software that now allows us to design predictive models and test and validate the composition and the quality of those models before they even get printed. The 3D AI software that is going to be coupled with the hardware creates a unique value proposition. The parts that we are able to print are denser, faster, and cheaper compared to those made from metal powders, which is typically where the industry has invested in. Further, many of the other technologies around metal powders have long post-production processes for curing and depowdering, but we do not have that complexity that comes with that post-production process. Overall, our technology is faster, cheaper, and it preserves the integrity and the density of the materials that we use.
Our goal is to produce a complete 360 experience to address what I call the on-demand nature of manufacturing since we live in an on-demand instant-on economy. You pay for what you consume, and you pay when you consume it. We believe the entire world of manufacturing is going to move into what I call an on-demand economy, and I believe that we will be front and center of leading the charge in this space, which is exciting.
In the Internet of Things [IoT] space, we are building a range of sensors. You are going to hear more about the technology in the sensor space, predominantly around what we have done, which is the detection of hazardous gases and food and drug spoilage. Further, we have developed a hyperspectral camera, which can do a decomposition of color that detects the changes in materials or the changes in preservatives. I believe that IoT and sensors are going to be another range of technology that you are going to hear more about.
The third category is in artificial intelligence, which is predominantly in an area that is focused on the intelligent knowledge worker. We are looking to launch our first set of products in that space. We have got some other areas of science that we are focused on, but you are going to hear more about many of these new sciences, such as 3D and AI, that we are launching in 2020 that is beyond the print franchise.
We strongly believe that we are well-positioned to introduce new science to the market and commercialize this because of our R&D ecosystem. This includes [Palo Alto Research Center] PARC, the Xerox Research Centre of Canada [XRCC], and the R&D centers and the Webster acceleration centers that we have in Rochester, New York. If you couple together all the power between the R&D, engineering, and the research and development centers we have, we have a long history that goes from the 50-year history of PARC to the 100-year history of Xerox that has produced a tremendous portfolio of patents in all of these white spaces of science. We believe we are well-positioned to move the science into both productization and commercialization. This makes it extraordinarily exciting for us to broaden our portfolio beyond the print franchise into all of the new sciences that we think we can effectively get to market and go to market with in 2020.
High: Given the number of new innovative areas you anticipate the organization getting involved in, I can only imagine that there has been some change necessary from an IT perspective. Can you talk a bit about some of the cultural attributes that have been in need of refreshment as you began your tenure at Xerox?
Shanker: The notable change is that we have got an amazing leadership team, which comes from a tremendous collective experience across many domains of the industry. These experiences are additionally extremely diverse, both on the private equity side of the world, as well as those coming from an industry perspective. The strong, compelling, and driven leadership team makes all this exciting.
The second aspect is the culture. We have a strong culture of invention and innovation. We bring the big company feel in terms of our ability to rapidly scale to market, which we couple with the mental muscle of a startup. We are starting to build out the ecosystems around operating and org models that couple our ability to scale rapidly and fast with the models of a startup in terms of agility, speed, and focus. This means that we have had to take many of our historical learnings and bring that together with learnings from the outside. From the outside, we need to learn about building the franchise in a manner where we can meet the objectives of not just the core portfolio of our products that we want to bring to market, but additionally the new science that we want to accelerate and go to market with. In bringing these two worlds together, we likewise have to bring people, process, and technology together.
In IT, we have built a new organization called Xerox Digital Experience. The focus of this is how we design the capability around an instant on-demand economy. This involves what customers and partners expect from us on the outside and what our employees expect from us on the inside. To do this, we are fundamentally building and transforming. We have developed a strategy that over the next three to five years, we are going to be transforming the company at many different levels. This is similar to what we have done in all of our previous companies where Xerox had to develop a playbook around what we do across the whole infrastructure stack and what we do across the entire wide and local area networks to create more mobile-centric experiences. Then, we started looking at all the layers of the stack, which began with all of the customer-facing solutions and processes. This includes everything from how our customers interact with us, all of the sales experiences, and all of the back-office operations, such as supply chain operations, financial flows, procurement flows, and human capital management activities. We have to completely deconstruct and reconstruct the strategy in terms of our transformation work. We are looking to run a digital playbook over the next three to five years to fundamentally transform the company to be able to create that digital experience for both our partners and customers. Our employees will get to enjoy the same set of experiences so that they can be highly productive and efficient on the inside. We have completely rebuilt the IT organization this year. We are now moving to the next level, which is about getting the innovation and transformation engine in gear to start executing in the next three to five years.
High: You have been through several transformations in your career. You have been a CIO or CTO for 13 or 14 years now across multiple organizations from Palm to HP. You now embark on your next interesting set of challenges with another organization that is reinventing itself and transforming itself in such interesting ways. What is it about these types of experiences that you find so interesting?
Shanker: As we have gone through these transformations from company to company, I would say there are three aspects that matter.
- Bold leadership that has grit, which I always find to be the most exciting ingredient. This is my eighth company pivot, so in many ways, this is mission eight for me.
- Culture, which is immensely instrumental in terms of how we design for the future because in all of our companies, designing for the future means you are constantly designing for the next generation. The next generation matters because how they run our companies in the future will differ greatly in terms of how we run our companies today and how we have run our companies in the past. You are constantly having to design new playbooks from company to company because the future is changing extremely fast. You have to instill a culture where you can take the experiences of the past, which you are extremely good at, and bridge that with the new generation’s culture to accelerate and go forward. The experiences of the past include being able to build and sustain companies at scale, while the next-generation culture has the mental muscle of the startup.
- The team. On many different levels, having a team that is passionate, driven, energized, and is exceedingly mission-focused is crucial.
When I think about what is ahead of us, my collective experiences in all of the companies I have [worked for] helped me continuously learn, unlearn, and relearn from every company pivot I have been through. Being able to adapt and be agile, nimble, and humble every step of the way has mattered. I have had to take that to heart and think carefully about what matters, how we go forward, and putting together the right playbooks and the right ingredients.
I have had R&D and IT leadership experiences in many of our companies, and the Xerox opportunity helps me bring all that together. On any given day, I have to think of everything from an outside-in perspective and an inside-out perspective to try to bridge these worlds around how we optimize, help, and transform our businesses to be productive and efficient while creating great user experiences internally for employees. I have to bridge that with the experiences that our customers and partners are going to expect by ensuring that we can take our products and new sciences to the market effectively.
As a company and leadership team, I believe it is essential that we are mission-based. We have to be extremely thoughtful about how we think about what lasting impacts we will have on the planet and society. That is a huge passion of mine. One area I am extremely excited about is the 3D Printing space. In an instant-on on-demand economy, the whole world of 3D printing is well beyond revolutionizing manufacturing. You have a significant impact of reducing your carbon footprint. 3D printing is going to have a huge impact on the planet and society, logistics, transportation, and managing massive inventories in distribution centers and locations. If we get the 3D printing ecosystem right and if we fundamentally revolutionize manufacturing to serve an on-demand instant-on economy, you can just imagine what overwhelming impact we will have on reducing our carbon footprint. With everything we touch, we have to start thinking about how we can be more mission-based and mission-focused.
High: There is a people component to everything you just mentioned. Even for a technology organization, it is only as good as its people.
Shanker: Technology is always interesting, and problem-solving is always exciting. If I get the leadership, culture, and team correct, which is always where I put a great deal of my energy, I always find we can problem-solve effectively. We can go in exciting directions with technology and experiences that customers, partners, and employees would love to have. If I solve the three-legged stool around leadership, people, and culture, I always find that we can come up with a winning formula that is exciting for everyone.
High: One of the interesting developments for you has been joining the board of advisors or board of directors for multiple organizations. How has your experience as a CIO or CTO lent itself well to you joining these organizations as a critical member of their boards?
Shanker: Some of the companies are in what I call the clean-tech space and areas much more focused around the reduction of carbon emissions. The other companies are pure tech companies that are predominantly in the software and analytics spaces. There are several aspects I have looked at.
- There is a common thread in all of these that I find. When you visit with customers in terms of what you are trying to do and get to market, it is about the user experience. This involves how you design solutions and your go-to-market motion from an experience point of view. That in itself is an art and a science. In the industry, we tend to do little to focus in those areas, which I believe is paramount because when engaging with customers and partners, it is always critical to get their points of view. If you can run a great deal of the modeling work from an experience point of view, you can quickly thread to what truly matters, which is focus. This entails how you get to the minimum set of capabilities that they are looking for and how you create a great experience around those capabilities. Threading it to the minimum viable product that matters and then growing and scaling the capabilities as needed over time is something I have learned. This is similar to a startup mentality. You want to start small, deliver a good experience, and then grow and scale rapidly.
- Around how you make it simple and easy for them to consume, which is around a complete digital native experience. That is likewise extremely important.
- Operational excellence. Many of these companies are focused on determining the greatest accelerated value they can get with the minimum spend. It is about working smart.
The other part I learned from these companies is how rapidly you are able to resolve a problem is critical. It is not the fact that you have a problem, it is how quickly you can get to the root cause and the corrective actions, how operationally sound and disciplined the team is, and how they value every dollar of spend for the returns they get in their execution. The other aspect of it is this whole notion of a cost and capability accounting in terms of what it takes to deploy capabilities, which is an area I have learned a great deal about.
It is fascinating to work with and advise some of these startups because you get much deeper into the transparency around what makes these companies tick and the levels that you must focus on to drive the greatest value. I have been intrigued by thinking about how you design products more holistically and how you take them to market more effectively and have a much more speed, focus, and accountability-driven thought process so we can drive the right behaviors.
It is much more fascinating to be operating in many of these startups and advising them because you know you can move the needle fairly rapidly. The challenge is figuring out how to bring that thought process into a heritage company that is rapidly looking to grow, scale, and operate similar to a start-up.
Originally posted on: Forbes.com
