Among the most anticipated speakers at Dublin’s Reinvention Summit is Ismail Amla, senior vice-president of Kyndryl Consult.
Kyndryl is the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, serving thousands of enterprise customers – spanning banks, governments and airlines – in more than 60 countries. Its customers include seven out of the 10 largest institutions in the world.
It was spun out of tech giant IBM in 2021. Kyndryl Consult, its consulting arm, helps businesses accelerate their digital journeys, including the adoption of artificial intelligence.
Amla is co-author of From Incremental to Exponential, a book that looks at the opportunities large legacy companies have to create new markets, supercharge growth and reinvent themselves through innovation.
It’s something he knows at first hand, having led global teams and driving innovation and transformation at IBM, NCR and Accenture.
As well as signing Kyndryl up as headline sponsor of the Reinvention Summit and indeed bringing his entire senior team to Dublin, Amla will be participating in a panel discussion entitled “Driving change from within” at the event, which is billed as Davos for Doers.
Though reinvention requires innovation, it is different from the innovation that drives start-ups, not least because the stakes are much higher. With a start-up, there is no legacy, nothing to protect or defend, and no people to retrain, upskill or reposition within the organisation.
If innovation is what got you to where you are today, reinvention is what will get you to where you need to be tomorrow, bringing people on the journey with you, and requiring a much different mindset.
Right now, given the tech-driven pace of change, permanent reinvention is the new status quo, and despite the prevailing narrative that showcases start-ups as the great agents of change, in fact it is large companies that have the advantage, Amla points out.
“Having spent time in the start-up world, and in the big-organisation world, I felt it was the big organisations that had the best chance of success because they already had the customer, the money and a lot of the things you need to innovate,” he explains.
“But what they were missing was the mindset, the culture, while start-ups were missing the channels to market and assets they could leverage. The book was about how organisations can take advantage of all that agile start-ups do, to be able to drive innovation and massive change.”
Corporate history is littered with lost opportunities to do just that, Amla points out, referencing once mighty companies such as Kodak, Blockbuster, Blackberry and Nokia, each of which dominated their respective markets.
By rights Kodak should have pioneered social media. “It had all the assets to be the first Facebook, but complacency around market dominance meant they didn’t think there was any need for them to change,” he says.
Complacency is the enemy of innovation. “It’s about not being aware, not having your radar ready for what’s going on, not looking to see what’s coming down the road which will change your business.”
The dominant car makers in the United States and Europe are a case in point, says Amla, having been too slow to see the headlights of electrification approaching.
“They were in denial about electric vehicles for a long period, yet it was the most obvious thing, given all the other discussion going on with technology and the environment,” he says.
It’s the difference between having short- and long-term vision, but it is challenging, he admits, likening reinvention to having to “fly the plane and change it” at the same time.
“But that is just the nature of the beast right now. The idea that the illiteracy of the 21st century is the inability to invent and reinvent yourself has never been truer,” he says.
For large organisations however, the barrier to such constant change is too often a passive resistance from within. It’s why most transformation projects fail, he says. “We know that change is not just about introducing technology, it’s about getting the people who use the technology to think differently,” he says.
Large household names such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple are masters at ensuring agility is baked into their organisational structures, often by keeping teams small, ensuring everyone within the organisation has a shared sense of purpose and valuing both short-term and long-term goals.
“So it’s not just around what is impacting this month, this quarter, but what is going to change the world,” he says.
It’s also about ensuring a healthy balance between “injecting new blood, which can create a stimulus for change, alongside people who have the institutional knowledge”, a powerful combination when you get it right, in Amla’s view.
Getting it right is now existential. “If you were in the S&P 500 a little while ago, you’d have been in it for, on average, 80 years. That has now fallen to 15 years. So you’ve got 15 years of glory, before you are going to be thrown off and someone else comes in,” he points out.
The Reinvention Summit
The Reinvention Summit is Ireland’s flagship event for transformation and strategy, bringing together world-class thinkers and business leaders. Running April 29th-30th at The Royal Dublin Convention Centre, Golden Lane. Find out more at thereinventionsummit.com
