Transforming Culture

In his talk on entrepreneurship, Bob Cancalosi discusses how to go about pushing boundaries in large scale proportions at a company like GE. The speaker has been with the $150 billion organization for 28 years and explores how they are going about a major leadership DNA reinvention by moving the company towards entrepreneurial thinking.

He notes that any time you want to push boundaries anywhere, it has a tipping point. He explains the need for a cultural transformation in his talk on entrepreneurship. He recognizes that with a big company complexity creeps in everywhere, it gets embedded in processes and makes you less fast and responsive. In an effort to increase speed for competitive advantage, General Electric spoke to entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and realized they maniacally focused on things they need to work on, didn't waste time on peripherals, experimented and learned from their mistakes.

Ge launched a new philosophy called Fast Works, which takes the key essentials of a lean startup and marries it with the essentials of Lean Six Sigma to create a framework to teach employees.