During the 2013 edition of AWS re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas, attendees had the chance to witness one of the best Keynotes ever, courtesy of Jeff Smith, the CEO of Suncorp Business Services (Suncorp). Smith is responsible for the Group’s technology, real estate and procurement portfolios. With over thirty years corporate experience and several senior executive roles in a number of world class companies, Smith was entrusted with the Group’s technology transformation and the achievement of significant improvements in quality, cycle time and cost reduction.

Smith’s presentation was short, but very powerful and inspiring. He began with a quick snapshot of the company and a couple of words about their vision: “Our primary mission in life and purpose is to price and manage risk on behalf of our customers. Therefore, our frame of reference is that ‘lots of things go wrong’. Naturally, when you combine that with our overall business model it’s quite complex. We have multiple brands, multiple products, lots of systems, different technologies – and when you combine complexity with ‘lots of things that go wrong’ it generates an awful lot of noise that makes it difficult to see opportunity.”

Not the type to shy away from challenges, Smith persuaded his team to start sifting through the noise, looking for opportunities and striving for great achievements. “History has a lot of great examples that demonstrate how people overcome great, big problems,” he said.

There are three characteristics that Smith perceives as important:

1) there’s no substitute for a good congestion of talent
2) there’s typically some technological achievement to overcome
3) The most important thing is a leadership culture that combines clarity of purpose, where you really understand the problem that you’re going to solve, along with passion or curiosity, where you look beyond your own frame of reference, and you overcome the obstacles and solve the problems.

In support of his narrative, Smith recalled the times when automobiles were painted by hand, a laborious process that took 37 days just for one car. Charles Kettering, a visionary man “guilty” of several inventions including the electric starter, was aghast at the wait. One day he discovered lacquer dishes in a jewelry shop and he paired the lacquer manufacturer with the paint manufacturer, helping the “birth” of the first glossy enamel finish that could dry in a matter of hours. He then took the engineer responsible with the painting process to lunch and asked him for his best time. The engineer said he couldn’t do it under 30 days. While they were out to lunch, Kettering had the engineer’s car painted lime. The man was clearly surprised, claiming such a thing was impossible.” Your job is to make the impossible possible,” replied Kettering.

In a newspaper article, Kettering said that ‘preconception is a trap’ and “theories are just a summary of our past experiences, not the limits of our possibilities.”

Jeff Smith has a similar saying: ‘The windscreen is a lot bigger than the rear view mirror’. It means we shouldn’t make future judgements based on our past decisions. We should instead stretch the limits of possibility and reimage the IT landscape. When they first started flirting with the idea of moving to the cloud, they decided to move everything. They needed to focus on what went first and how to accelerate the process. “The lesson we learned is that the broader the vision, the clearer the purpose,” said Smith.

The technology breakthrough was trusted to AWS, but they still had to find the talent and leadership.

Hacking the way to success

“We have a fantastic culture with great principles: clarity over certainty, course-correction over perfection, self-directed teams over command and control,” confessed Smith. He started to shake things up in the company adopting the hackaton model. Rightfully branded “FedEx Day”, the events had the goal of obtaining working code at the end of 24 hours. Smith upped the ante when he encouraged the competition between 42 teams comprised of 450 people from four countries and 10 locations. These people have produced some phenomenal solutions in the course of one day.

“We currently understate our capabilities to solve problems. The biggest constraint is neither time, nor money; it’s the constraint of thought. The key thing is to reset our aspirations to get past that constraint,” advised Smith. “Any problem can be solved.”

Smith relayed the challenge from Andy Jassy of AWS: “Have a working virtual private cloud and virtual data center in under 3 months.” Without false modesty, he bragged about his success.

His advice for the audience was “Aim for success, not perfection, otherwise you’ll lose the opportunity to learn new things in life.”