What you need to know:

• Lion Chief Growth Officer Anubha Sahasrabuddhe has been handed the remit company-wide tech budgets and strategy, as well as M&A, partnerships, innovation and marketing.
• She sees an irony in marketing being subject to massive scrutiny on budgets delivering growth – but not necessarily IT and tech investments.
• So Sahasrabuddhe’s re-orientating IT around the customer, “crushing” siloes and “bringing these two giant forces together to see how you can create a better outcome in terms of the growth agenda for Lion”.
• IT is now tasked with upstream thinking to solve customer problems – and can no longer think of itself as a service department.
• Asked why a marketer is qualified to oversee IT and tech, she says the same question applies to a CFO or CEO. “But nobody’s ever asked. I guess we did.”
• Because large businesses “can’t chew gum and walk at the same time”, and tend to “choke innovation with the mandate of scale and return” Sahasrabuddhe is hiving off tech innovation from business as usual.
• She’s pulling together an innovation team – called Ventures – with “broad ranging” capability. “They're not marketers that just like innovation, they are genuinely people that come from all walks of what it means to do experimental innovation.”
• Sahasrabuddhe’s given her team 500 days to make the cultural shift work.
• She covers a huge amount of ground in today’s 45-minute podcast. This write-up is part one, with two more to follow this week. Or just get the full download here.

Crushing IT

“I’m tapping my inner nerd as I get my head around the new remit. And it's hurting my brain… in a really good way,” says Lion Chief Growth Officer Anubha Sahasrabuddhe of being handed the IT and tech reins, alongside everything else. There have already been “plenty of WTF moments”, she admits. “But at its heart … the two biggest forces in business are consumer and technology. Lion being a challenger business meant that we could lean in to why it makes sense to bring them together – and we have a pretty fearless boss that enjoys the idea of disrupting and doing things differently,” says Sahasrabuddhe.

“In order to get ourselves back into a winning position, it makes entire sense that you bring these two giant forces together and see how you can actually create a better outcome in terms of the growth agenda for Lion. So that’s a little bit of ‘the why’.”

She says CEO Sam Fischer, former APAC boss at Diageo, is grasping the opportunity to ring changes with both hands.

“Like anyone that comes from a global multinational background, including myself, I think the beauty of having a smaller business allows you great freedom and experimentation to do things differently. Because you know all too well what gets in the way in big companies,” says Sahasrabuddhe.

She acknowledges Lion, a circa $3bn subsidiary of Japanese beverage conglomerate Kirin, ultimately owned by the giant Mitsubishi Group, is hardly a small business. “But it is not a multinational weighed down with a lot of the typical hierarchies and bureaucracies. So it makes total sense to say ‘why not?’ Convention tells you that you need to have these specialised functions. We’re saying no, why don’t we crush them together and actually orientate the entire enterprise around a consumer growth agenda. And that's what we're setting out to do.”

But Sahasrabuddhe admits she did initially question whether the CEO had had a brainwave too far.

“I get data and insights, advanced analytics, that's very normal in marketing functions across the board. But then the extension into core IT and ERP platforms, SAP, that was like, really? Are you sure you know what you mean? And [Sam Fischer] said ‘yep, you’ve got to derive value out of the whole ecosystem, it all needs to be together’.

"Okay, fair call," was her response."Let’s make it work.”

Tech-consumer nexus

Sahasrabuddhe thinks the overhaul is long overdue – for Lion and maybe the broader industry.

“We are absolutely obsessed with understanding marketing performance, how it relates to the CFOs metrics, and how that all works. Yet the enormity of every organisation's technology investments are probably not scrutinised through the lens of how does it help enable growth by better meeting customer or consumer needs?”

Technology investments, she says, must be viewed “through the lens of does it serve our bigger business ambition”, i.e. growth, which means translating those investments from IT-speak into common business language.

“I think for too long marketers have been told that they need to speak the language of the CFO. It's actually quite a boring narrative, because marketers absolutely understand their role in driving the P&L. On the other hand, I think the enormity of IT, CTO, CIOs not actually speaking ‘the language of the consumer’, to solve total addressable market, and therefore, why does that technology enable a sales guy to do his job better; a supply chain person to do their job better; and a marketer to reach consumers better [is a major oversight],” says Sahasrabuddhe.

“So I just think it's a more levelling conversation, to talk about 'what is the common business language that any leader needs to speak?' And in order to do that, you actually need to bring these two things – consumer and technology – together.”

Hitting reset

Plus, the technology investments themselves need to come together – and IT can no longer be seen, or see itself, as a support function, says Sahasrabuddhe.

“You’ll have a supply chain technology function, a sales [technology] function, martech… and they are disaggregated … they have been put into functional silos,” she says. “They are much more disconnected than they should be.”

All of which leads to wasted investment and stunted growth.

“The irony is technology investments have increased exponentially across any organisation, whether Australia or the world. But it doesn’t actually translate to the level of growth you would expect from those investments,” says Sahasrabuddhe. Hence the need for a “common language and lens from which to assess both our consumer and our technology choices, and make sure they're adding up to our growth ambitions,” she says. “So that’s what we’re setting out.”

But how is a CMO qualified to run the rule over IT? Sahasrabuddhe counters that the same question could be levelled at a CFO or CEO – yet nobody does.

“They are the dominant paradigms that have always existed. In much bigger organisations you’ll have either a very separated CTO that reports directory to a CEO, or it’s very common to have technology or IT under a CFO. No one's ever asked why. So I guess we did,” she says.

“At the end of the day, it's about the business. And you need to be dangerous enough to ask the right questions.”

When 'dumb' is smart

Coming at technology from a consumer lens – and without a traditional tech background – she suggests can be a potent weapon.

“Naivety is the single biggest strength that a CMO brings to the table because it is the great leveller. Because we always joke that if you can't explain it to your mother, or your five-year-old kid, then you actually don't know what you're talking about.” Plus, she says just as marketing is told to learn to “speak the language of the CFO and the language of business”, so must tech.

“No-one wants to appear dumb. I am very happy appearing dumb. And I think at both board level and exec levels [there is a tendency to] just trust the IT and the technology people because we’re too stupid. Actually, the art is being able to translate that into ‘so what, now what?’ for a managing director or CEO or supply chain head. Because then you’ve got skin in the game and you’re steering the organisation fully,” says Sahasrabuddhe.

“The complexity is overwhelming. So there is an art to simplifying that without being reductive – because there are incredibly complex things that sit under data and analytics and core ERP platforms. But great leaders are able to simplify in a way that makes sense of the value equation that ultimately everyone's trying to unlock.”

Run, grow, transform

What will Sahasrabuddhe do differently with technology under her watch?

“First of all we have absolutely collapsed the layers and hierarchies and really gone in a model of ‘run, grow, transform’ – because you can't reduce technology down to the word ‘IT’.

Run, she says, is effectively “keeping the lights on”. Grow and transform are where she is hoping to make the magic happen.

“In terms of digital delivery grow and transform have to be linked to valuable consumer problems. So what we’re doing is connecting our strategy teams and our data intelligence teams with those grow technology teams to coalesce around consumer problems. Typically they've been siloed – IT gets an order from a particular function and goes and delivers it without questioning,” says Sahasrabuddhe.

But now they are being tasked with upstream thinking to solve customer problems. Sahasrabuddhe says the early signs are that it is working, “because these are super clever people that bring a whole different perspective to the problems to solve”. But are they not a little bewildered?

“Actually, they completely are. But I keep saying the biggest mindset shift is to stop thinking of yourself as a support function. For years, they've thought about themselves ‘in service of’. Now it's like they are in service of the consumer and the business, not in service of the person whining at the end of the help desk,” she says.

“It’s a little frivolous to say that, but it's actually the mindset shift that I'm trying to drive, by giving them the awareness of how what they do ultimately contributes to that end consumer having a better beer, or a better experience.”

Everyone’s struggling with tech, data

Sahasrabuddhe says the reality is all firms are struggling to make their tech investments deliver.

On accepting the mega remit, she embarked upon “massive listening tours with and spoke with all the clever CIOs and CTOs at some of Australia's biggest organisations”. Funnily enough, “everyone's facing similar problems. No matter how advanced we think someone else is, there is always something. So that was reassuring”.

The one constant counsel was to “chunk everything down”, says Sahasrabuddhe.

“I have a mantra of progress over perfection. So you need to be able to chunk down the progress you want to make, because it's overwhelming. So in some of Australia's best known and largest beloved institutions, quotes like, 'well data is a fucking shit show', and ‘trying to get function x to collaborate with function y around that central view of a customer [is another]’.”

And that’s within organisations – supermarkets and financial services – that own the customer data, let alone a drinks firm disintermediated from the end consumer. “We’re dealing with third party data, all sorts of data sources to sense make and try to get the insight and value out of that. So it was quite reassuring reassuring to hear that they have all of this dysfunction.”

Plus, it gave her hope that Lion can make faster progress precisely because “we're not gigantic, so how can we leverage the fact that we can a bit more fearless, because we don't have to have all that bureaucracy? … So let’s flip the script and make it a positive to see how you can do things differently. Why can’t that be a blueprint?”

Innovation – different talent, models required

Sahasrabuddhe is also tasked with overseeing innovation. But she doesn’t call it that.

“We've deliberately called it ‘Ventures’ not innovation. This is very common in giant global organisations. The reason is that most operating business units actually can't walk and chew gum at the same time. [And yet] innovation is the lifeblood of any organisation.”

The challenge is taking innovation past the drawing board, “to actually be able to have the freedom to experiment, fail and learn before being choked by the mandate of scale and return,” per Sahasrabuddhe. “That's what we're disaggregating and that's why it goes beyond product. It goes into service models, business models – should we acquire, buy, build or borrow, should we partner?”

She’s backing a small Ventures team and Silicon Valley template to make those decisions faster – and ultimately drive more rapid growth.

“The team that were standing up is really small, like five people. It's not about having armies of people, because the very nature of it is experimental and small, and seeing whether it can fulfil enough of the consumer willingness and needs to actually move to test and learn before it goes to scale.”

Which is why the gum chewing capacity has to be hived off from the broader walking function.

“The impatience of weekly sales, monthly sales and yearly sales are never going to allow for that incubation,” she says. “So that's what we're doing. In this part of the world, we should be doing [innovation] better than anyone, because we've got that going for us between Australia and New Zealand. I think it’s an exciting avenue of identification of what future revenue streams could be – and that's really its intent.”

The Ventures team may be lean, but it’s deep, with “broad ranging” capability. Sahasrabuddhe says her head of ventures is still recruiting. What are they looking for?

“I don't want a brand manager that can do the next flavour of said thing, because that's a very different capability,” she says.

“So all of [the people so far recruited] have absolute experience in true venturing. Some from big global multinationals which we've managed to lure home, and some from start-ups. They're not marketers that just like innovation, they are genuinely people that come from all walks of what it means to do experimental innovation. It is an experiment, therefore we need to walk the talk on the capabilities. So that's what we're doing.”​

Move fast, grow things

While the tech titans have created their fair share of trouble, Sahasrabuddhe is aiming to lift their culture of innovation at speed.

“Tech were the masters at this approach. It was pioneered in Silicon Valley in terms of how you iterate and work your way to scale without killing ideas too quickly, because you haven't given them time,” she says. “I think big businesses like ourselves are great at killing ideas fast, because they don't meet financial return thresholds quickly enough. So we are trying to delineate so that we can do both, and really learn from that.”

She sees potentially much faster gains arising from a “DevOps methodology”, i.e. test releases and iterative development.

‘That is so normal in the IT and tech space, [but] just not as advanced in what we would consider our normal innovation space. So you can see the cross functional opportunities, because my Ventures team will absolutely be using our DevOps team to rapidly prototype how we do some of those things differently using technology,” says Sahasrabuddhe.

Growth in, cost out

Lion’s sales and marketing teams have P&L and revenue responsibilities for individual markets – the US, Australia and ANZ.

Sahasrabuddhe’s remit is more focused on incremental revenue from growth initiatives – which she says is clearly quantifiable from aspects such as innovation, acquisition or partnerships. But within IT and technology, cost-out is prized as much as top-line growth.

“One of the biggest areas of value creation, which is nowhere near as sexy to talk about, is actually how you avoid cost through the use of technology. So what I'm saying to my guys is, where do you implement better inventory control technology, or better sales call cycle technology? If you're saving on better planning, less write offs, less waste, that's very quantifiable as value to the business,” she says. “So it's orienting the mindset around value both in terms of top line as well as efficiency in terms of bottom line. All of it has value, and there's plenty of that to be realised through our total value chains. So that's how we're measuring our contribution to growth.”

500 days or bust

Given the range of her new remit, where do the biggest challenges lie?

“That’s an enormous question, but I have to bring it down to very boring answer, which is culture change,” says Sahasrabuddhe.

“People are entrenched in their habits, the expectations, the way we've done things – we are literally in the process of tearing that down and showing a way to do it differently. That takes time … and I don't have a lot of time.”

So how to square that circle?

“I've put a 500-day challenge on my team, because for something this big in terms of culture shift for our organisation, you actually have to put some tension in the progress. Otherwise, everyone throws up their hands and says 'it's too hard, it'll take too long',” she adds.

“So 500 days is around 18 months. And I think if we can't demonstrate sufficient progress, then we can't justify our existence. I'm very clear about that … We need to earn our way to belief, and this is the way to do it. But you have to chunk that down and keep those milestones alive. So that's what we're doing.”

The podcast interview with Anubha Sahasrabuddhe covered acres of rich turf. We’ve lifted her mantra and chunked it down. Parts two and three will follow this week. Or you can get ahead of the curve and listen to the lot here.