Keynote: Steve Towers: The Biggest challenge to business success in 2023

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[00:00:07] Okay, thank you. Good morning everybody. I hope we are all suitably caffeine, new fused. So ready for the next session. I'm gonna start off, I always like to start off with a quote, so from, you'll gather through my accent. I'm originally from England. I actually live in Colorado now and I've done so for 25 years.
[00:00:24] But even I can still quote people like Winston Churchill. And one of these quotes that always stands out for me is difficulties mastered are opportunities one. So what I wanna share with you this morning is not so much the story of ApaNova, but there are other companies like Veolia transforming the planet as we speak.
[00:00:44] What are the key ingredients for that success? That's my role. And then Christie will follow on after me and deep. Into App Nova made what I'm gonna be talking about a reality over the last few years. Of course, several other speakers already mentioned that [00:01:00] yesterday. The book was published here in Romania.
[00:01:03] As you can see, the book was a signing that we did in Florida four weeks ago, where it was released to the world. And, of course, we were delighted to say that it's the number one best seller on Amazon across three categories. Business, process engineering, change management. And project management.
[00:01:19] So that of itself is an achievement. But what I wanna acknowledge before I start is that when we talked as the panel, we were doing this morning about the Romanian disposition to be self-effacing, not to be out there and so on with Apa Nova, you have a global leading. That set the standard by winning an award on the world stage in 2019.
[00:01:46] So it's something you should all be very rightly proud of. So I'm going to go through some of the ingredients that helped to make that sort of thing a success. And one of the key things I want to start with is how does business transformation get done? What is
[00:02:00] today's reality about it? Cause so often I'll talk to CEOs.
[00:02:03] Their first pitch is when we're talking about successful business transformation, one of the first things those CEOs will say to me is, Steve, you must realize we're not an Amazon. And my response always is, why are you not an Amazon? And they go; obviously, Amazon have got magic pixie dust sprinkled all over them to be able to change and do what they do.
[00:02:22] But at the end of the day, it comes down to several fundamentals, which I'll discuss. Towards the end of this, and they're common ingredients for success for all these organizations. You could probably gather what I'd like to think about for a minute or two: I'm the oldest guy in the room here.
[00:02:36] I've been in, in sort of business for 40 odd years. I started out as an industrial engineer, so I've always looked for science in how things get done. and transformation has gone through a transformation in the last 20 years, whereas the things that you could see on that screen if you like, an academic interpretation about where to focus if you wanted to get better 20 years ago.
[00:02:58] So some of those companies featured on [00:03:00] that diagram there, they achieved success using these various ingredients. But if we think about what's happened in the world, not just here in Romania over the last sort of 30 years, but in the last couple of decades, , everything seems to have changed....