Dreamforce 2018 - how ABB went from 'inside-out' to 'outside-in'
- Summary:
- AI, robotics, engineering, corporate values and diversity - ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer's worldview.
ABB is one of those ‘best kept secrets’ that really shouldn’t be. The Swiss firm is one of the world’s leading industrial technology companies, operating in 100 countries with more than 147,000 employees. It’s gone from being a copper-and-wire engineering company through a shift to electronics and now to pushing ahead with transformation into a digital, AI and robotics thoughtleader.
It’s also a big Salesforce user and this week announced a significant expansion of its use of the company’s tech, including unifying CRM worldwide, deploying Einstein, Salesforce IoT, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud and Success Cloud advisory services. According to the formal announcement:
Einstein will enable ABB to drive smarter sales and service with artificial intelligence. For example, ABB will use Sales Cloud Einstein for intelligence-driven decision making, automated data entry, identification of potential opportunities and predictive forecasting. Einstein Vision, used with Service Cloud Field Service Lightning, will be used to give ABB’s 15,000 field service technicians the ability to take a photo of an ABB product or component when they arrive onsite to automatically surface information about the product on their screens, resulting in faster, more accurate service.
Salesforce IoT will allow ABB to make data from its connected devices actionable and measurable. The company’s vision is to combine Salesforce IoT with ABB Ability so that its installed base of 70 million connected devices can use predictive intelligence, powered by Einstein, to generate and trigger actions directly into Salesforce. With Salesforce IoT and ABB Ability together, ABB will be able to improve customer experiences by getting ahead of performance and maintenance needs.
Leadership
Following the announcement, ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer participated in a ‘fireside chat’ with his Salesforce counterpart Marc Benioff during which he expanded on his views on a variety of topics, beginning with the subject of corporate identity and values:
For me the identity of the company is not only what we do, it’s also how we run the business…we set up five value pillars…anybody in ABB at any time carries them around [on a business card]. That’s basically part of our identity in today’s very fast changing world.
Those five pillars are clearly intended to be a constant in that world - innovation, speed, performance, collaboration and trust - and they’re all forward-facing. Spiesshofer recalled:
When I was appointed as CEO we sat down and said, ‘Let’s forget about where we’ve come from; let’s talk about what we stand for for our customers in the future’…in times like today, we need to encourage our people to lead and to really stand up. One of the things that we said in terms of ownership and performance is that everybody needs to know what you stand for and then we want to see how you stand up for it. To stand up is sometimes the hardest thing to do. It’s part of the Swiss culture, where you want to be very democratic, you want to be nice to everybody.
But despite this Swiss heritage influence, diversity plays a large part in the ABB culture. Eight of the top ten executives in the company are not Swiss.
I have Americans, Indians, Chinese. About 70% of the top 100 executives are not Swiss or of Swiss heritage. But we’ve still kept a lot of the [Swiss] culture….in our headquarters we have around 500 people and 60 or 70 nationalities. It’s like the United Nations of ABB when you walk in.
Innovation is a key corporate characteristic, he added:
What ABB is all about is pioneering, trying things out for the first time. We were the first to introduce industrial robots into the industrial world.
Changing perspective
But this pioneering spirit wasn’t always directed in the most productive manner within an engineering culture that set its own agenda. Spiesshofer explained:
We were a company that was inside-out. We had R&D people who would sit in their labs, inventing something that they’d then try to launch into the market and then the customer didn’t like it, so then the customer was stupid. We had to change that to an outside-in company. Today when we allocate capital and resources, outside-in [thinking] is very important…it was hard, really hard, to change around an engineering culture that was inside-out and take people on the journey with us, to say that whatever we do will always come with customer-driven marketing.
A good case in point is the expansion of ABB’s push into providing digital capabilities for its customers operational needs. Next up, AI. Spiesshofer said:
We need to help our customers to automate their operations, now that we are moving towards autonomous operations. To lead in autonomous, you need to be leading in AI in industry, at a device level, at a plant level.
Mention of automation does inevitably provoke the longstanding debate around whether this trend results in the elimination of jobs? It’s a subject on which Spiesshofer has some clearly-articulated views:
As the world leader in robot innovation, we are clearly facing the challenge that a lot of people are concerned. I’ll give you some facts. In 1990, one third of mankind lived below the extreme poverty line; today, it’s 8% and we have the ambition in the United Nations to get it to zero. If you look at the dynamic over the last close-to-30 years, the countries that have embraced technology have moved millions of people from below the extreme poverty line, because all of a sudden they could provide industrial output, quality and productivity which was competitive.
Take India and China. What they have done since the 1990s is to move 400 million people from below the extreme poverty line up. Take Africa. Africa has not embraced technology…there are now more people under the extreme poverty line. Technology is really a good thing if used wisely.
The rise of the robot revolution is also to be seen to be a boon, he argued:
The countries with the highest robot density - Germany, Japan, South Korea and Singapore - all of them have more than 300 robots per 10,000 workers and have among the lowest unemployment rates. What we need to learn is, technology and humans combined in the right way will drive prosperity and growth, will drive employment and will drive demand. That means, all together, that if we embrace technology in a responsible way, then we can really get there.
My take
At a conference hard-wired to celebrate and recognise so-called Trailblazers, Spiesshofer was an excellent exemplar of such a figure at CEO-level. The work that ABB has done in robotics is just one of many proof points of a company that is engaged in potentially world-changing activities. It was the first time I’ve seen Spiesshofer speak; I very much hope that it won’t be the last.