The key things I learned in 2019.

2019. What a year.

It’s crazy to think that 2019 is drawing to a close. My organization has seen a radical amount of transformation occurring, as advancements in digital technology have spurred on an incredible rate of innovation for us as a business.

2019 marked a new era for Daimler, which has openly transitioned to what CEO, Ola K?llenius has characterized as a change “Form product to customer experience centric.”I am proud to say that my IT organization has been a relentless force in fulfilling our CEO’s vision. We’ve been rapidly driving a significant shift within the company, resulting in the role of IT coming to the fore in an unprecedented way.

These are some of the key things my team and I have learned on this incredible journey through 2019 …

 Radical simplification has led to brilliant results.

In 2019, my team has focused strongly on the principle, mindset, and practice of Radical Simplification. This has resulted in our adoption and development of FOSS systems and practices (now anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change our software in any way, as the source code is openly shared). And, through Robotic Process Automation (RPA), we use Artificial Intelligence to radically simplify and automate processes and eradicate previously onerous and manual tasks. We have significantly reduced complexity in our work, resulting in lower costs to the business and a renewed focus on ‘the things that really matter’.

 We derived Full Digital Value by shifting the way we work.

When we changed the way we worked to agile (and moved from a project-basis to product-oriented perspective) we began to derive Full Digital Value. We took a product-based approach where the product owner acts almost as a ‘mini-CEO’. Teams are completely cross-functional, multidisciplinary, collaborative, agile, and work across the entire end-to-end of the product’s development. The delivery is iterative, which allows for ongoing sense-checks of results against reality, always completing the work in order of ‘what’s the most valuable thing to do next? This shift has been invaluable to us as a unit in driving optimum delivery at speed.

We became Fearless, and subsequently flourished.

This year, I became committed to ensuring that a culture of fearlessness is enabled, enforced, and practiced by myself and my fellow leaders. In my IT team, we foster fearlessness in how we work together by providing our people with the freedom to question decisions, make mistakes, give candid feedback (no matter the level), and to share ideas and support the ideas of others. This has allowed new ideas and innovative thinking to flourish like never before.

Mentorship helped us up-skill even further.

At Daimler, one of our core Leadership 2020 values is leadership and development. So in the spirit of this value, leaders like myself partnered up with highly skilled colleagues in a reverse mentoring program, where mentors learn from mentee and vice-versa. Digital natives, in this case the mentors, share digital knowledge with experienced leaders from the Top Management, their mentees. This helped to bring together passion for digital technologies and methods across all levels of our organization successfully.

Collaboration has brought us closer to sustainable mobility.

Collaboration, both internally and cross-functionally, as well as externally, we’ve learned is absolutely critical to the future of sustainable mobility. As I mentioned previously, my IT organization is playing a key role to bring technology across the entire business, and collaboration with other teams is what is fuelling this drive. Likewise, Mercedes-Benz has struck multiple partnerships with innovative startups from all across the globe, as we work together with a single purpose to move the world via sustainable mobility. I’d personally like to see even further collaborations with industry, government and tech in 2020 and beyond.

I am thankful to my team, colleagues and management at Mercedes-Benz for making this year an incredible end to a decade. What we’ve learned and implemented in the last 12 months has been nothing short of phenomenal, and I can only imagine what the ensuing decade will bring.

Sabine Scheunert

I would love to hear your insights, thoughts and learnings on this topic. If you’d like to share what’s on your mind, please leave a comment on this post.