“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.
The industry sharpened its focus on core capabilities, and outsourcing labor-intensive, non-core, administrative and support functions. As AT&T’s Vice President of Global Service Assurance, with responsibility for operations in more than 65 countries, I was front and center for this change as well, helping the industry maintain its core principles of operational excellence while building flexibility and agility to support a range of global customers.
At Abbott, I have seen the healthcare industry benefit from the same channel diversity and operational efficiency enhancements seen in other industries. In addition, information availability has had a unique benefit to all of us as consumers of healthcare.
The broad availability of scientific information has encouraged research and development in a number of small, entrepreneurial organizations. Twenty years ago, information was less broadly available. Scientific exploration was less dispersed; it was more concentrated in pockets and more dependent upon scale. The broad availability of information, and its rapid dissemination, has improved our ability to quickly link discoveries on a global basis, and to have many people in parallel working on how those discoveries can benefit mankind.
Not only does the availability of scientific information speed up the process of turning discoveries into beneficial products, it also allows core knowledge to be used in parallel across multiple environments. Scientific information can be translated in parallel to diagnostic tests and supporting pharmaceutical remedies; medical nutrition can be tailored to complement a particular treatment regimen, enhancing patient recovery.
Q: What advice do you give to those in the audience right now that are experiencing a great deal of change?
Ms. Lillo: Given the realities of the world around us, we’re all leading change – whether that change is a technology migration or whether that change is figuring out how to drive the kids to school and still make a 7:30 meeting. My advice is as follows:
- There are a wealth of resources around you and within you.
- You may need to address your current challenges in new ways, and build or rebuild skills that now lie dormant.
- Everything that is familiar to you today was once new to you. Have courage, creativity and confidence as you face changes, and you will emerge with new insights and capabilities.
Ms. Lillo: Those of you involved in telecommunications will recall the tremendous challenges the industry faced in the wake of the MCI Worldcom fraud. Infrastructure investments had been made at a rate greater than they could be used. Established companies and start ups were affected as business failures caused network links to suddenly go dark.
Technology integrations were a daily fact of life, whether brought on by M&A activity, outsourcing and business partnerships or carrier bankruptcy. That later type of technology integration sometimes occurred without warning. The environment was very demanding; the ultimate in “real time” decision-making on a global basis. At any minute, we would be called on to integrate physical network infrastructure and ensure continuity of diverse services across dissimilar technology bases. I brought with me to Abbott extensive experience in this type of real-time technical integration.
When Abbott acquired Kos Pharmaceuticals in late 2006, I had the opportunity to integrate several pharmaceutical products into Abbott’s commercial organization. Since healthcare is a regulated industry, underlying processes, systems and technologies do not change without regulatory review and approval.
This results in a transition process that has more analytical rigor at the front end of it, because there is limited ability to change things quickly once the integration is underway. I grew my change leadership skills as a consequence, complementing the dynamic and responsive approach that worked in telecom operations with a sensitivity to the review and approval requirements that support regulatory compliance in healthcare.
Q: How do you keep abreast of changes and keep learning? What are you learning now, and what do you want to learn in the future?
Ms. Lillo: The energy and innovation of high tech and the operational focus of telecommunications have provided wonderful foundations for me. I’m now focused on translating what I’ve learned in other environments to the healthcare industry. I’m inspired by the positive impact that Abbott’s products have on people’s lives, and I’m eager to contribute to those positive outcomes.
Information is so readily available. I’m a regular reader of information from a variety of sources, including industry, technology and university publications. I’ve been fortunate to complement my informal learning with formal education. IBM’s sponsorship enabled me to earn my MBA from Kellogg – a program that consistently ranks among the top in the nation.
I’ve just completed another two-year program – this one an internal Abbott program called “Leadership Development for Scientists”. It involved professors from Harvard and Kellogg, as well as internal and external experts from a variety of functional areas.
The program took a dozen people from technical backgrounds and provided us with training ranging from media skills to financial analytics in a healthcare environment; from high level leadership skills to simulations that helped us test our ability to navigate complex changes in the business of science. Complementing the program content, Abbott’s two year investment in me helped build my Abbott network – giving me a platform for gathering applied expertise from trusted sources, and complementing my own skills on an ongoing basis.
Since change is now a constant, you have actively developed a transcendent set of skills that can migrate between industries. Thank you for sharing what you have learned.