Back from the “Future”…inspired!

In June, I interrupted my vacation for five days for an educational experience in the San Francisco Bay Area and it has been an eye-opening experience. Don’t get me wrong, I am well aware that Fin-tech and Insure-tech Start-Ups exist in Europe and are disrupting our industry as well. But having witnessed the entrepreneurial energy of Silicon Valley, their risk and failure culture, I feel like having had the opportunity to ride a modern high-speed train and I really don’t feel like going back to riding a regular train again.

Here are four questions I will dedicate myself even more to in the future when thinking about digitalization.

Does it make our customers’ lives simpler?

“The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles" by Oren Harari

As an incumbent, we cannot be a start-up again. But that mustn’t keep us from taking a close look at our customers’ and business partners’ journey when doing business with us (or others). The Fin-tech and Insure-tech Start-Ups that are keeping us on the edge of our seats are also making us look in the mirror: “We are seeing things in your customer’s journey that can be done better, simpler, faster - and we are doing it.” We can see it too, if we leave our comfort zone, try to understand our customer’s journey and are ready to break with what has worked in the past.

Is it speeding up our processes and slimming them down?

With just five days in Silicon Valley I came back with half a dozen ideas to improve our processes, making them leaner and very likely even helping us with the never ending stream of new regulations in Europe. And an idea for me means that there is actually already a ready to use solution available in the market.

So far, I have only shared one of those ideas with my colleagues at work - if I had dumped all of them at once, they would have rolled their eyes and said, “that’s it, boss, no more vacations for you!”

But the one I shared created excitement throughout the team. People started to take initiative, began to think about how we could make it work for us. In August, the company I got to know in San Francisco, will come to Liechtenstein and present their solution to everyone and I am convinced, the energy will only get stronger.

When I informed my superiors that I was going to do a pilot, they were immediately interested and just accepted my decision.

Is it bold?

The previous paragraph also shows that something we have heard over and over again in our Silicon Valley Experience is important: Be bold!

Venture capitalists invest in ideas and potential. When you present to them, you have to believe in your idea 1000%. You have to believe it is ten times better, faster, cheaper than what exists in the market or it opens a completely new market. You might have to present your idea 50 times. 80 times. 100 times. And with each presentation, you will improve it, rewrite your slides, fine-tune your pitch. In that respect our European modesty can be a handicap. We want our solution to be perfect before we show it to the world. In Silicon Valley there is agreement that the most successful companies might not always have been the perfect ones, but the ones that were there first and sold themselves most successfully.

Do the things you do, because you believe in them, because you believe it will benefit your customers, your partners and your organization. Do it, even though, or maybe because no one else is doing it.

Can others help me achieve it faster?

Another story we heard quite often in Silicon Valley was that as a start-up founder, you can go to any bar in the Valley and hook up with other founders and talk about your ideas or the obstacles you are facing. Often, you will walk out of the bar with your idea more concrete or a possible solution for your obstacle.

In a fast changing world, working diligently on something in secret without looking beyond one’s own nose. can have you miss the fact that someone beat you to the punch. Through networking you can receive valuable information on what else is going in the world, if you are on target with your direction or need to make course corrections midway and if what you are working on is better than what others are doing.

And finally to close: A big THANK YOU to the Rochester-Bern Executive Programs for organizing this inspiring Silicon Valley Experience.