Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz On The Transformative Power Of Digital Technology


Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz On The Transformative Power Of Digital Technology

Nigel Vaz is in the business of digital transformation. He is the CEO of Publicis Sapient the digital consulting company, founded as Sapient in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1990 by Jerry Greenberg and J. Stuart Moore. Sapient became a fully owned division of French advertising giant Publicis in a deal valued at $3.7bn in 2015. Vaz recently spoke with me about his journey to becoming CEO and the lessons he’s learned along the way.

Named by Consulting Magazine as a Top 25 Global Leader, Vaz advises some of the world’s largest businesses on their transformation initiatives. He has a unique perspective on humanity-driven technology born of his childhood experience with the transformative power of technology.

“I grew up with a disability of dyspraxia, which affects the fine motor skills, which made it very difficult for me to hold a pen or pencil as a kid. So, technology, for me was always a bit of a superpower because I could use it to type and communicate what I wanted to say, in words in that way. And so, I built this very early relationship with the fact that this is something that can be transformational to my life, and people’s lives,” says Vaz. As a child, Vaz was inspired by the superheros of his beloved comic books, who themselves often overcame a disability through technology.

This drove home to Vaz the understanding that technology and inclusion go hand in hand and that talent exists in many places, but the opportunity for that talent to be deployed isn’t always available. He believed early on that technology could be a real “superpower,” not only to economically transform individuals, but also businesses.

This perspective led Vaz to co-found Internet Solutions while still in college.The company delivered online connections to schools in sub-Saharan Africa. He eventually took the company public and along the way met Nelson Mandela who encouraged Vaz in his efforts, further supporting his belief that technology can transform people’s lives for good. As that company was being acquired, he met Sapient founders Greenberg and More.

“I got really interested in the fact that here’s a bunch of guys whose vision for the world was bigger than themselves, ie, they wanted to leave a very lasting imprint in the world,” says Vaz. As an entrepreneur, he decided to join the company to learn from the founders how to build a company and culture that scales while maintaining its purpose and mission with the intent to use the experience to start another company. Yet, over twenty years later, he remained at Sapient having taking over the CEO role in 2019 because he felt he could best further his own vision for creating technology to improve people’s lives within Sapient.

Today Sapient has over 20,000 employees in 53 offices across the globe, helping companies like Tesco, Carrefour, JPMorgan, Marriott and Walmart digitally transform. Under Vaz’s leadership, the company attained its highest revenue growth last year since it was acquired by Publicis Groupe, making it the best-performing business in Publicis Groupe’s portfolio, according to the company’s latest earning’s reports. Vaz attributes the company’s growth and success to both its culture and its entrepreneurial mindset.

“No doubt in my mind Publicis Sapient feels much more like my company than even the company I founded ever did. And I feel like the reason for that is because the cultural dynamic was very much about creating a company that allows people to take ownership of its destiny at every level of the company. And that’s still something today, that I’m very proud about,” says Vaz.

What advice does Vaz have for other CEO’s who want to instil an entrepreneurial culture? Define the culture, then celebrate it.

I think there’s two ideas that are linked to this. The first is the belief system and the value system that means that you value entrepreneurial behaviors. Many companies can see that that’s what they want to do. The hard part is being that and doing that. The second is creating the systems, the processes, the rituals, the behaviors that reinforce that,” says Vaz.

He provides an example within his company. When his teams were thinking about how to best apply digital transformation in the context of sustainability for their clients, the strategy didn’t come from on high. Instead, they allowed teams to experiment on different ways for how they could try to tackle it.

The company had people working on CPG companies in London, energy companies in Houston, and throughout the entire enterprise, looking for the best solutions they could then scale and replicate elsewhere. When they found the best solutions, they put the teams responsible on a pedestal and shared the best practices. The same process holds for “failures.”

“We do the same thing in situations where teams have failed. So, we basically say, ‘Look, we tried to do this thing, and it didn’t work. And here are all the lessons learned around this idea of why it didn’t work.’ This way everyone knows that while we’re okay with you making a different mistake, you shouldn’t make the same mistake.” Says Vaz.

Entrepreneurs have no choice but to iterate until they find the right solution or market fit, or else they go out of business. But according to Vaz, CEOs too often pull back such entrepreneurial experiments too soon after a few failures and return to centralised decision-making. Vaz suggests developing a portfolio approach to creating an innovation pipeline to help avoid this.

To promote such thinking at Publicis Sapient, the company created its Aspire Awards to celebrate and recognize purpose-driven innovation within the company through a crowd-sourced process. Vaz also points to the company’s hackathon events as another source of its innovation pipeline. “We ran global hackathons where people are asked to solve big complex problems to deal with many of the issues that I’m talking about. And we pick winners from there,” says Vaz.

Why do 70% of digital transformation programs fail?

As Vaz sees it, most transformation initiatives fail because they are viewed as projects with a beginning and an end, rather than a continuous journey. “A much better way to think about this is to say, ‘How do I create a culture of continuous evolution or continuous change, where my business is constantly evolving, in order to stay relevant?’,” says Vaz.

Vaz also views speed of action as key to transformation success. He uses the acronym SPEED to define this process where the “S” stands for Strategy: developing and testing your hypothesis on priority value pools. “P” is for Product: evolving at pace and speed. “E” is for Experience: how can you enable value for customers. The second “E” stands for Engineering: delivering on your promise. “D” stand for Data: validating your hypotheses and uncovering insights for constant iteration.

“I’ll hear from CEOs and boards, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re agile.’ And what they mean by agile is they have some software development practices which use the word agile in their company. My question is, do you have business agility? Are you able to respond to competitive threats and challenges, because the cycle time to do that is becoming ever smaller? And the inability to that could potentially be fatal,” says Vaz.

Vaz also points to the idea that the context within which companies embark on a digital transformation journey is key. It’s not just about moving fast, engineering talent or even creating a culture of innovation and entrepreneurialism. It’s about using the transformative power of digital tools to improve people’s lives.

“And for me, this goes to the core of what I am trying to accomplish today, but certainly also where I began my journey, which is if we can leave things significantly better than we found them, for consumers, for citizens, for individuals and groups of people that in turn will benefit the companies that are forging the path ahead on that journey,” concludes Vaz.


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