 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent Executive Summit 2020 sponsored by Accenture and AWS. Welcome everyone to theCUBE virtual and our coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit part of AWS re-invent 2020. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we are talking about the power of three and what happens when you bring together the scientific know-how of a global bio-pharmaceutical powerhouse in Takeda, a leading cloud services provider in AWS and Accenture's ability to innovate, execute and deliver innovation. Joining me to talk about these things, we have Aaron, sorry, Arjun Beatty. He is the Senior Managing Director and Chairman of Accenture's Diamond Leadership Council. Welcome Arjun. Thank you. Carl Hick, he is the Chief Digital and Information Officer at Takeda. Pleasure to be here. Thank you, Rebecca. And Brian Bohan, Global Director and Head of the Accenture AWS Business Group at Amazon Web Services. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks Rebecca, good to see you. Thank you. So as I said, we're talking today about this relationship between your three organizations. Carl, I want to talk with you. I know you're at the beginning of your cloud journey. What was the compelling reason? Why move to the cloud and why now? Yeah, no, thank you for the question. So as a biopharmaceutical leader, we're committed to bringing better health and a brighter future to our patients. We're doing that by translating science into some really innovative and life-transporting therapies. But throughout, we believe that there's a responsible use of technology, of data, and of innovation. And those three ingredients are really key to helping us deliver on that promise. And so while I think I'll call it this cloud journey, it's always been a part of our strategy. And we've made some pretty steady progress over the last years with a number of local diverse approaches to the digital and AI. We just weren't seeing the impact at scale that we wanted to see. And I think that there's a need ultimately to accelerate and broaden that shift. And we were commenting on this earlier, but it's been highlighted by a number of factors. One of those has been certainly the number of the large acquisitions we've made, Shire being the most pressing example. But also the global pandemic, both of those highlight the need for us to move faster at the speed of cloud ultimately. And so we started thinking outside of the box because it was taking us too long and we decided to leverage the strategic partner model. And it's giving us a chance to think about our challenges very differently. We call this the power of three. And ultimately our focus is singularly on our patients. I mean, they're waiting for us. We need to get there faster. It can't take years. And so I think that there is a focus on innovation at a rapid speed so we can move ultimately from treating conditions to keeping people healthy. So as you are embarking on this journey, what are some of the insights you want to share about what you're seeing so far? Yeah, no, it's a great question. So I mean, look, maybe right before I highlight some of the key insights, I would say that with cloud now as the launchpad for innovation, our vision all along has been that in less than 10 years we want every single to kid associate or employee to be empowered by an AI assistant. And I think that that's going to help us make faster, better decisions that'll help us fundamentally deliver transformative therapies and better experiences to that ecosystem, to our patients, to physicians, to payers, et cetera, much faster than we previously thought possible. And I think that technologies like cloud and edge computing together with a very powerful I'll call it data fabric is going to help us to create this real-time, I'll call it the digital ecosystem. The data has to flow ultimately, seamlessly between our patients and providers or partners or researchers, et cetera. And so we've been thinking about this, I'll call it, we call it sort of this pyramid that helps us describe our vision. And a lot of it has to do with ultimately modernizing the foundation, modernizing and re-architecting the platforms that drive the company, heightening our focus on data, which means that there's an accelerated shift towards enterprise data platforms and digital products. And then ultimately, really an engine for innovation sitting at the very top. And so I think with that, there's a few different, I'll call it insights that are quickly kind of zooming into focus, I would say. One is this need to collaborate very differently. Not only internally, but how do we define ultimately and build a connected digital ecosystem with the right partners and technologies externally? I think the second component that maybe people don't think as much about, but I find critically important is for us to find ways of really transforming our culture. We have to unlock talent and shift the culture certainly as a large biopharmaceutical very differently. And then lastly, you've touched on it already, which is innovation at the speed of cloud. How do we reimagine that? How do ideas go from getting tested in months to kind of getting tested in days? How do we collaborate very differently? And so I think those are three, perhaps of the larger, I'll call it insights that the three of us are spending a lot of time thinking about right now. So Arjun, I want to bring you into this conversation a little bit, let's delve into those a bit. Talk first about the collaboration that Carl was referencing there. How have you seen that it is enabling colleagues and teams to communicate differently and interact in new and different ways, both internally and externally, as Carl said. No, thank you for that. And I've got to give Carl a lot of credit because as we started to think about this journey, it was clear it was a bold ambition. It was something that we had all to do differently. And so the concept of the power of three that Carl has constructed has become a label for us as a way to think about what are we going to do to collectively drive this journey forward? And to me, the unique ways of collaboration means three things. The first one is that what is expected is that the three parties are going to come together and it's more than just the sum of our resources. And by that I mean that we have to bring all of ourselves, all of our collective capabilities. As an example, Amazon has amazing supply chain capabilities. They are one of the best at supply chain. So in addition to resources, when we have supply chain innovations, that's something that they're bringing in addition to just talent and assets. Similarly for Accenture, right? We do a lot in the talent space. So how do we bring our thinking as to how we apply best practices for talent to this partnership? So as we think about this, so that's the first one. The second one is about shared success. Very early on in this partnership, we started to build some foundations and actually developed seven principles that all of us would look at as the basis for this shared success model. And we continue to hold that sort of in the forefront as we think about this collaboration. And maybe the third thing I would say is this one team mindset. So whether it's the three of our CEOs that get together every couple of months to think about this partnership or it is the governance model that Carl has put together which has all three parties in the governance and every level of leadership. We always think about this as a collective group so that we can keep that front and center. And what this I think ultimately has enabled us to do is it's allowed us to move at speed, be more flexible and ultimately all be looking at the target the same way, the North side the same way. Ryan, what about you? What have you observed and what are you thinking about in terms of how this is helping teams collaborate differently? Yeah, absolutely. And Arjun made some great points there. And I think if you really think about what he's talking about, it's that diversity of talent, diversity of skill and viewpoint and even culture. And so we see that in the power of three. And then I think if we drill down into what we see at Takeda and frankly, Takeda was really, I think pretty visionary and on their way here in taking this kind of cross functional approach and applying it to how they operate day to day. So moving from a more functional view of the world to more of a product oriented view of the world. So when you think about we're going to be organized around a product or a service or a capability that we're going to provide to our customers or our patients or donors in this case, it implies a different structure all together in a different way of thinking, right? Because now you've got technical people and business experts and marketing experts all working together in this sort of cross collaboration. And what's great about that is it's really the only way to succeed with cloud, right? Because the old ways of thinking where you've got application people and infrastructure people and business people is suboptimal, right? Because we can all access this tools and these capabilities and the best way to do that is in a cross kind of a, you know, cross collaborative way. And so this is product oriented mindset and Takeda was already on, I think has allowed us to move faster in those areas. Carl, I want to go back to this idea of unlocking talent and culture. And this is something that both Brian and Arjun have talked about too. People are an essential part they're at the heart of your organization. How will their experience of work change and how are you helping reimagine and reinforce a strong organizational culture? Particularly at this time when so many people are working remotely? Yeah, it's a great question. And it's something that, you know, I think we all have to think a lot about. I mean, I think, you know, driving this, this color, this digital and data kind of capability, building takes a lot of thinking. So, I mean, there's a few different elements in terms of how we're tackling this. One is we're recognizing and it's not just for the technology organization or for those actors that we're innovating with but it's really across, you know, all of Takeda. We're working through ways of raising what I'll call the overall digital literacy of the organization. You know, what are the, you know, what are the skills that are needed almost at a baseline level even for a global biopharmaceutical company? And how do we deploy? I'll call it those learning resources very broadly. And then secondly, I think that, you know, we're very clear that there's a number of areas where there are very specialized skills that are needed. My organization is one of those. And so, you know, we're fostering ways in which, you know, we're very kind of quickly kind of creating avenues, excitement for associates in that space. So one example specifically is we use, you know, during these very much sort of remote sort of days, we use what we call global IT me days. And we set a day aside every single month. And this last Friday, you know, we create during that time, it's time for personal development. And we provide active seminars and training on things like, you know, for robotic process automation, data analytics, cloud. And this last month, we've been doing this for months and months now, but in this last month, more than 50% of my organization participated. And there's this huge positive shift, both in terms of access and excitement about really harnessing those new skills and being able to apply them. And so I think that that's, you know, one element that can be considered. And then thirdly, of course, every organization has to work on, how do you prioritize talent acquisition and management and competencies that you can't reskill? I mean, there are just some new capabilities that we don't have. And so there's a large focus that I had with our executive team and our CEO and thinking through those critical roles that we need to activate in order to kind of to build on this business led cloud transformation. And lastly, probably the hardest one, but the one that I'm most jazzed about is really this focus on changing the mindsets and behaviors. And I think there, you know, this is where the power of three is really kind of coming together nicely. I mean, we're working on things like, you know, how do we create this patient obsessed curiosity and really kind of unlock innovation with a real kind of a growth mindset? And the level of curiosity that's needed, not to just continue to do the same things, but to really challenge the status quo. So that's one big area of focus. We're having the agility to act just faster. I mean, to worry less, I guess I would say about kind of the standard chain of command, but how do you make more speedy, more courageous decisions? And this is places where we can emulate the way that a partner like AWS works, or how do we collaborate across the number of boundaries? You know, and I think Arjun spoke eloquently to a number of partnerships that we can build so we can break down some of these barriers and use these networks, whether it's within our own internal ecosystem or externally to help to create value faster. So a lot of energy around ways of working, and we'll have to check back in, but I mean, we're early in on this mindset and behavioral shift, but a lot of good early momentum. Carl, you've given me a good segue to talk to Brian about innovation because you said a lot of the things that I was the customer obsession and this idea of innovating much more quickly. Obviously now the world has its eyes on drug development and we've all learned a lot about it in the past few months and accelerating drug development is of great interest to all of us. Brian, how does a transformation like this help a company's ability to become more agile and more innovative at quicker speed too? Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think some of the things that Carl talked about just now are critical to that, right? I think where sometimes folks fall short is they think, you know, we're going to roll out the technology and the technology is going to be the silver bullet or in fact, it is the culture. It is the talent and it's the focus on that that's going to be the determinant of success. And I will say, you know, in this power of three arrangement, Carl talked a little bit about the pyramid, talent and culture and that change and the kind of thinking about that has been a first class citizen since the very beginning, right? That absolutely is critical for being there. And so that's been key. And so we think about innovation at Amazon and AWS and Carl mentioned some of the things that, you know, partner like AWS can bring to the table is we talk a lot about builders, right? So we're kind of obsessive about builders. And what we mean by that is we at Amazon, we hire for builders, we cultivate builders and we like to talk to our customers about it as well. And it also implies a different mindset, right? When you're a builder, you have that curiosity, you have that ownership, you have that stake and whatever I'm creating, I'm going to be a co-owner of this product or the service, right? Getting back to that kind of product oriented mindset. And it's not just the technical people or the IT people who are builders, it is also the business people as Carl talked about, right? So when we start thinking about innovation, again, where we see folks kind of get into a little bit of a innovation pilot paralysis is that you can focus on the technology, but if you're not focusing on the talent and the culture and the processes and the mechanisms, you're going to be putting out technology, but you're not going to have an organization that's ready to take it and scale it and accelerate it, right? And so that's been absolutely critical. So just a couple of things we've been doing with Takeda and Takeda's really been leading the way is think about a mechanism and a process and it's really been working backward from the customer, right? In this case, again, the patient and the donor. And that was an easy one because the key value of Takeda is to be a patient focused biopharmaceutical, right? So that was embedded in their DNA. So that working back from that patient, that donor was a key part of that process. And that's really deep in our DNA as well and eccentric. And so we're able to bring that together. The other one is getting used to experimenting and even perhaps failing, right? And being able to iterate and fail fast and experiment and understanding that, you know, some decisions, what we call it at Amazon are two-way doors, meaning you can go through that door, not like what you see and turn around and go back. And cloud really helps there because the cost of experimenting and the cost of failure is so much lower than it's ever been. You can do it much faster and the implications are so much less. So just a couple of things that we've been really driving with Takeda around innovation that's been really critical. Carl, where are you already seeing signs of success? Yeah, no, it's a great question. And so we chose, you know, with our focus on innovation to try to unleash maybe the power of data digital in focusing on what I call sort of a maven. So we chose our plasma-derived therapy business. And, you know, the plasma-derived therapy business unit, it develops critical life-saving therapies for patients with rare and complex diseases. But what we're doing is by bringing kind of our energy together, we're focusing on creating, I'll call it state-of-the-art, digitally connected donation centers. And we're really modernizing, you know, the donor experience right now. We're trying to improve also, I'll call it the overall plasma collection process. And so we've selected a number of, I'll call it very high-speed pilots that we're working through right now, specifically in this area. And we're seeing really great results already. And so that's one specific area of focus. Arjun, I want you to close this out here. Any ideas, any best practices, advice you would have for other pharmaceutical companies that are at the early stage of their cloud journey? Sorry, was that for me? Yes, sorry, Arjun. Yeah, no, I was breaking up a bit. No, I think the key is what's sort of been great for me to see is that when people think about cloud, you know, you always think about infrastructure technology. The reality is that the cloud is really the true enabler for innovation at innovating at scale. And if you think about that, right, and all the components that you need, ultimately, that's where the value is for the company, right? Because yes, you're going to get some cost synergies and that's great. But the true value is in how do we transform the organization in the case of Takeda and our life sciences clients, right? We're trying to take a 14-year process of research and development that takes billions of dollars and compress that, right? Tremendous amounts of innovation opportunity. You think about the commercial aspect, lots of innovation can come there. The plasma derived therapy is a great example of how we're going to really innovate to change the trajectory of that business. So I think innovation is at the heart of what most organizations need to do and the formula, the cocktail that Takeda has constructed with this Fuji program really has all the ingredients that are required for that success. Great, well, thank you so much. Arjun, Brian, and Carl was really an enlightening conversation. Thank you, it's been a lot of fun. Thank you. It's been fun. Thanks, Rebecca. And thank you for tuning in to the Cube Virtual's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit.