Andy Penn

And we committed to never committing that sin again and that if we were ever going to change things, the price or the features, we would do it for everybody.

And the results were remarkable in the sense our NPS went up 20 points.

Costs came down 40%.

We had a 90%, 9-0% reduction in calls to the call center, a 50% reduction in complaints.

And so we had happy customers.

We grew market share.

We made more profit.

And it was just a win-win for everyone.

And at its heart, it was that massive simplification.

And so do not fall into the trap of thinking a digital transformation is just changing your systems unless you do a major business simplification first.

When I took over, we had 80,000 people in the organization, so staff.

And I always used to sort of joke that I could be the last person left in the office at the end of the day and make a decision as the CEO after everybody else has gone home and somehow the company would still reject it.

And I sort of started to ponder this concept around resistance to change because a lot of people sort of talk about resistance

resistance to change or the frozen middle or whatever it may be and i used to say well show it to me where is it how does it manifest itself how do i change it and what i came to conclude was that it is actually the withholding of resources it is the withholding of resources somewhere in the organization so that as a senior team or as a chief executive or whoever it is

You make a decision that you're going to do something and you promulgate that decision in the organization, but somehow the resources that are required to support it are not forthcoming.

By resources, I mean money, so the capital.

I mean the people, so people resources, or I mean the emotional energy.

You think you've announced this thing you're going to implement, but actually when it dissipates into the organisation and it becomes the organisation's responsibility to implement it, actually what really happens is it doesn't get supported in one way, shape or another.

So the key to me was how do I therefore tackle this issue of allocation of resources and this issue around resistance to change?

And one of the things that we did do, which was incredibly powerful in this regard, was we implemented...