Cathy Bessant on why standardization and personalization do not compete

What this conversation is about

Cathy Bessant ran global technology and operations for Bank of America, a job that covered business continuity and information security for a workforce spread across dozens of countries. She joined Glenn Llopis on Personalization Outbreak in the spring of 2021, when most organizations were still deciding what to keep from the pandemic.

Glenn had asked her beforehand what she wanted to talk about. Her answer was the hard stuff, the complex problems. She is the kind of executive who keeps a sticker on her bathroom mirror with the elevation of Kilimanjaro on it, corrected by hand, because the last foot was the hardest foot of all. Easy things bore her, and she says she is simply more effective when she is deeply engaged.

"our impact is not so much about the years we're here. Although that's important. It's what remains after that." — Cathy Bessant · 00:02:39

The pandemic was the easy part

Her first argument is counterintuitive. The work of the pandemic was not ending, she said; it was only beginning. In a crisis, what to do is clear: save lives, get vaccines out, handle what is visible today. Absorbing the lessons and deciding what the future of work and of societal interaction should look like is far harder and far less obvious.

She also wants leaders to stop hiding behind probability. A global shutdown for a health crisis was the thing everyone filed under low probability and high impact, and it happened. Her conclusion is to take probability out of the discussion and prepare for what could happen, without pretending risk can be driven to zero. There is one sure way to be safe from cyber attacks, she notes: stay off the network, which is not going to happen.

Process is what sets people free

Glenn framed standardization and personalization as two forces pulling against each other. Bessant pushed back, and it is the heart of the episode:

"I don't think standardization and personalization compete." — Cathy Bessant · 00:09:09

She has long thought in terms of what she calls the segment of one. Your physician has many patients, but in the room with you, they are your only doctor. The way you get there at scale, she argues, is not less process but better process:

"a standardized methodology sets the creativity free." — Cathy Bessant · 00:11:05

Her own example is routine. She runs the same performance review process with every direct report, at the same length, on the same cadence. Because the routine is settled, she never has to think about how she will do it, and all of her attention goes to what she delivers. No two conversations are alike.

She is careful about the limit. Standardization taken to an extreme will beat the heck out of personalization. The test is what the designers of a system fall in love with: its elegance, or what it lets people do for a customer. Which brings her to the line at the top of this page, about a mortgage loan and a family buying a house.

The only shiny object that matters

Bessant has no patience for technology treated as a destination. Big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain: tools, not places to arrive. Nobody buys a shiny app, she says; they want it to help them buy the home. The mindset she wants is customer and client backwards into the technology.

That leads straight into what digitization does to a workforce, and she rejects the usual framing:

"do I think digitization decimates a workforce? I say, no, it changes the skills our workforce needs." — Cathy Bessant · 00:16:25

If it does decimate the workforce, she adds, that is on the people deploying it. Then she reframes a phrase most leaders have used for twenty years:

"It's not a war for talent, it's a war for skills." — Cathy Bessant · 00:16:25

The skills she names are data science, modeling and analytics, statistical work and the separate discipline of statistical interpretation, plus the critical thinking to turn all of it into a decision. She can code in COBOL, she points out, and there is not much demand for that now. A technical skill has to keep transcending into what you do with what the technology produces.

Staying in touch, and what leaders are actually for

Seniority works against knowing what is going on. Bessant describes the express elevator that does not stop on any floor, and the fact that she could spend a whole day in the office without running into another human being. Staying in touch has to be deliberate: creating a culture where things get escalated from inside and outside the company, and working to hear more than what people want to tell her. She quotes an observation she credits to Satya Nadella, who was borrowing it himself, that the further up you go, the more you need to know and the less people want to tell you.

Her advice to anyone early in their career is one word: learning. Seek it out, expect a zig-zaggy path rather than a straight climb, and treat continuous learning as the currency of the leader of the future. Glenn put a bigger frame on it:

"we're moving from a knowledge based to wisdom based economy. That it's no longer just about what you know, but what you do with what you know" — Glenn Llopis · 00:25:13

Bessant called that brilliantly said, a phrase she claims to use sparingly, and answered with the story of her own turn:

"it isn't all the facts you can cram into your brain. It's what you do with them." — Cathy Bessant · 00:25:55

Early in her career, she says, she was a fact machine, and her standard of accountability for herself was how much she knew. She came into her own as a leader when she figured out that the job is deciding which two of the ten things matter, and which shiny one is a distraction.