“There are a wealth of resources around you and within you.”
- Bets Lillo, Project Director, Abbott Transition Organization

On May 1st, WITI’s Chicago chapter hosted an exciting half day session with the theme of “Women Leading Change.” Bets Lillo, a featured panelist, is a Project Director in Abbott’s Transition Organization, and clearly has made a career of successfully leading change in large organizations such as IBM, AT&T and Abbott. The availability of information and resources 24/7 has created a fast-paced, global workplace. It has changed many aspects of our daily lives across all industries. Ms. Lillo has been involved in leading change in three Fortune 100 companies in three different industries during her career. She takes time from her busy schedule to discuss trends and opportunities in a changing world.

Q: What trends have you seen in the business environment, and how has that impacted your career?

Ms. Lillo: The interacting trends of information availability and global communication capabilities have greatly increased the pace of change across industries. This has led to companies’ focusing on their core opportunities for differentiation in increasingly competitive markets. Accordingly, companies moved away from standalone, vertically integrated business models in which they performed all functional and support roles for their business. Instead, across industries, companies have realized increasing value in external alliances and expertise that would be difficult to develop and maintain in house.

IBM was among those early responders, and its moves included challenging the historic success of its captive sales channel. Although IBM’s move from “products” to “services” caught most of the headlines, it also diversified in the mid-1990s from selling finished product to selling OEM components. OEM products are global commodities, with a need for flexible and responsive pricing and logistics. Correspondingly, an OEM sales model presented a number of structural challenges to IBM’s country-centric sales model, in which each country maintained its own inventory and made its own pricing decisions. As the re-engineering project lead for an IBM Storage Systems Division initiative, I had the opportunity to develop and launch a set of business processes and systems to support the company’s move into OEM sales for hard disk drives and other technology components. It was an exciting time, building a fast-paced entrepreneurial venture within an established high tech icon.

Leveraging the capabilities of other firms also played out in global telecommunications, as the industry moved from its monopoly heritage into an environment with a plethora of competing technologies. Accompanying the diversification of transport technology, opportunities for differentiation increasingly occurred outside the bounds of traditional transport. Companies such as AT&T, with a heritage of operational excellence, were challenged to reduce the cost of their infrastructures and to respond to parallel opportunities emerging in multiple technology platforms.