Tonight's class is about change and then the opposing force, and it is incredibly strong force. That is culture, workforce culture, company culture, corporate culture, and do not underestimate the power of culture. I attached these two subjects together because if you only talk about change management and don't talk about the headwinds, the severe headwinds that you will face in changing something as difficult as a company culture, you're doomed to fail. We have just a terrific guest speaker tonight who has lived all of this in her most recent experience. I'd like to introduce to you Brynn Watson. She is the vice president of Enterprise Innovation and Digital Transformation Excellence at Lockheed Martin. Look at that title. There's a lot of expectation in that title. Oh, my gosh. There's a lot going on there. Brynn has held many positions at Lockheed Martin, just a couple. She was vice president of the GPS III program after it was awarded to Lockheed Martin. She is an absolute advocate for women in STEM, and she won the corporations highest award for diversity leadership a couple of years ago. She is a mathematician. She's not an engineer but I would call her an applied mathematician for sure. We're going to start out with a video that she supplied. I love that video. Not only makes me proud of what we do, but how we do it and who we do it for. What it also does is it sets a vision for what you're trying to do. Because when you think, I think there was a phrase early on that said, it takes advantage of all that our past history has known. To bring the bottom line upfront, data may be the one discriminator that every organization has unique to them. Absolutely. Yet no one thinks of it as a discriminator. It's a strategic asset. I mean, it really honestly is the foundation and fabric of the language across our portfolio. Kathy, if you could go to the next chart. Absolutely. Thank you, Kathy, for the invitation. I adore joining your classes. We have had such great engaging conversations with your teams in your end. Thank you for the invitation tonight. You were very kind in the introduction. I am lucky to have working on now a 31 year career in aerospace and defense, and my last 25 have been with Lockheed Martin. Just a little chart here to just make sure that you understand as we embark in the conversation around culture and change management, the breadth of what I'm dealing with in my job. My position the last four and a half, five years has been leading the establishment of a strategy around digital transformation and now business wide transformation for the Lockheed Martin Corporation. Just to make sure that you get the ground truth of the breadth, I'm talking about Lockheed is boasting at least 110,000 employees now. Kathy, I think the last metrics I saw before I could give you the charts was up to 115,00. For a very strong business units, we sell planes, we sell the F35, one of the biggest DoD programs that exist today. We sell ships. We sell mission systems. My home is space systems, satellites, ground systems, civil missions, defense intelligence missions, the GAMET. We have over 100 years of success, and incredible performance under our belt. But we're also at a pivot point. We are facing some headwinds. Kathy, you describe culture as a headwind. But when you think about the threat environment, and when you think about what's happening now today with Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, I mean, we're facing unprecedented challenge across the globe. Our customers, whether it's civil customers, defense customers are working with a very challenged physical environment and we've had some very interesting political winds over the last many years. All of this is putting Lockheed in many of our competitors, but absolutely in my home right now, in a position where we can no longer necessarily operate in the same way we have. The success that I mentioned on the last 100 years will not get us to success in this new very interesting and challenging environment of the future, and so our corporation recognized this challenge, and decided that we are going to raise to the occasion and really from the top-down, derived towards this much needed transformation. When you think about, at Lockheed, I think we can solve any problem. We can land satellites on an asteroid, take a sample and return it to Earth. We can do hard stuff. But to truly change behaviors, to change the way you work, think about what you do every day when you sit down at your desk right now or if you sit down in your new home-based desk, if you're working from home, there's a set way of how you approach your work and after 100 years of success, the processes in place are very steeped in our culture. To think about changing how we approach our work is a very daunting task and it's similar to the types of, I think revolutions, I'll call them and Kathy, if you could go to the next chart, that civilization has approached in the past. When you think about the last couple of 100 years, just in the last couple of 100 years. I mean, we as a civilization have had to deal with, and advanced from many couple of key handful industrial revolution. I've got the four key main revolutions identified here. But when you think about what it took for society to move from manual labor to an era of mechanization. In fact, that first industrial revolution was inspired by needing to move into manual mechanized production. For tapestry, for producing fabrics in Great Britain. Think about how the steam engine and steam power affected our society. Moving from horses to steam engine. Significant incredible impact on our society. Moving into the second industrial revolution with mass production. Think of how electricity impacted every human that had access to electricity and the telephone, and then fast-forward until the advent of computers and initial early computers and what that did for us in the '50s, getting us to the moon. Think of the societal impacts that we're talking about, let alone the advancement of the Internet and a computer. When I think about, not that long ago, 1996, Kathy, I think that's when I first got my first cell phone. That's not that long ago, but when I think about that brick and how I didn't know how to use it and I wasn't sure how I could get access to it because my service was terrible back in the day to today. Literally, you can't see well, here you go. Here's my phone. I can't live without it. My behaviors have completely changed because of the advancements with cell phone and the behaviors around a simple cell phone, which I tell you I don't even use it for phone calls anymore. I barely do. I learned from it. I express my opinions on it. I contact people mostly via text and if I'm lucky, my daughter responds to my texts. She's 18 and almost 18 and going to college, but it's like my lifeline to contact with my daughter. But think of every one of these key revolutions in society. We are embarking on what some call the fourth, and I've seen it also referred to as the fifth industrial revolution and that's the blurring of humans and machines. Think about that. When you are introducing artificial intelligence, when you're dealing with the ability of the computing power we have with high-performance computing. When you're putting robotics, and things that really are taking the place of humans on the production floor in many cases, you really are blurring the human and the machine in our work environment, and so that is a significant industrial revolution that is fueling, I would say, the digital transformation that you hear talked about, that I know is fueling what Lockheed Martin is doing in our own internal operations. Kathy, I'll just share, as I was reminding myself of our conversation here from last year, they are now talking about a sixth industrial revolution and can you guess what that's around? No. Life after COVID. The sixth industrial revolution is how corporations and businesses need to change permanently because of the impacts on society and how we think about work coming through the COVID experience. I thought that was really fascinating when I saw that today. Yeah. That makes perfect sense, right? Yeah, it does. It's not necessarily driven by technology, but it's driven by the human interaction. Yeah, absolutely. When I think about just my personal experience now, two years into the COVID experience from where we were March of 2020. The things that I use daily, I like my story about my cell phone. I mean, it is a part of me in such a different way than I would have ever thought of back in 1996 or 1997. But the tools that I use today to interact daily with my team or my boss, whether it's Slack or the instant messaging, it's just very different. It will be interesting to see as we continue to come out of the COVID experience, other changes that aren't necessarily technological, that become just day in, day out, what we're used to and what defines our new culture. Speaking of culture, Kathy, if you could go to the next chart. Hold on. Brinton, you have a question. Hi, how's it going? I'm good. About that fourth, I've been into this fourth industrial revolution and reading about it, and I've read somewhere and I'm interested to hear your take of that. Humans are already evolved into a cyborg of some sort, between the wearable technology, cell phones, that kind of stuff. People think of cyborg, it's like, they're like half robot, but it's like using digital tools is an extension of yourself. Exactly. I know you've been in the industry, I'm wondering if you heard anything about that or do you have any information? Absolutely. In fact, you're an awesome lead up to my next chart, which is about human augmentation. It's not about half human, half robot things. What we're talking about is automation and driving artificial intelligence into the tasks that we don't want humans to focus on anymore. We now have the computing power and the technologies to focus those solutions, machine-learning to the manual. The incredible computing power to do hundreds of thousands of analyses that a human might take to do a 10,000 with a very long timeline. Now, we're putting the machines and the robotics to its best use and allowing the humans to do what is best at, very critical thinking. One of the cultural challenges that we're dealing with at Lockheed Martin is because of some of the misinterpretations people might have with the human augmentation strategy. It's not about reducing the number of humans. This is not a strategy around reducing the workforce by 50 percent for a cost savings exercise. No. It is about leveraging the computing and technology capabilities for cognitive assistance. Things that help speed the design process or the advanced design since its synthesis is all about model-based design. Driving the requirements through the tool sets and the digital thread to allow the humans to do that critical thinking we still need them to do and to be honest with you, we're looking for people with different skill sets than we have done in the past. Yes, we need engineers, yes, we need mechanical, electrical, software engineering. I took my mathematics that Kathy mentioned there I was a math major undergrad and grad school, but I applied them through systems engineering and software engineering. But we're looking for a lot more of social skill sets. We're looking for folks who have that ability for designing systems for future environments. Technology solutions that can meet needs, primarily a defense company. We're looking very much at our civil portfolio as well. It's human augmentation, so great question. But it's allowing us to leverage the power of the digital thread, I'll call it. I think that's the best words I can use to drive the powerful new tool sets, and the important critical data that Kathy mentioned earlier in this discussion into solutions that we can't even imagine today. That truly is the point of what we're trying to achieve on our journey. This is a multiyear journey. At Lockheed Martin, we've started our investments in advanced manufacturing. Gosh, Kathy, I think when I first joined the team, they already had a few years in. So this is 2015, when some really serious investments started to occur at the corporate level, now into what is a full-blown multiyear, multi-billion-dollar investment journey. Lockheed Martin. We're a huge corporation, and actually if you go to the next chart, Kathy, that has a very strong culture from the 100 plus years of success. We are very diverse, and so when you think about putting a strategy together that takes what's happening well in pockets of many subcultures, I had the opportunity to move here. I'm here in Denver now, but I moved from Denver to the headquarters, Bethesda office to the Bay Area in Sunnyvale, California. Now back to Denver, Colorado. There are so many subcultures within the corporation that the scaling strategy around the DNA, the language we use. When you think about what is culture? What's the DNA of your organization? It's how you talk to each other, it is how you reward people, it's how you recognize people, it's how you promote and how you communicate. Cultures have all of these dimensions, and I will also say Lockheed Martin has a culture around risk. We are very risk adverse because of the fear of failure, and that has been a very strong tenant of our culture that is proving to be a challenge. Because to lean forward and do things differently, you need to be willing to take risks and you need to recognize failure and celebrate failure. Calculated failure, yes. But that is something very challenging for us to deal with at Lockheed Martin, and I'm sure the folks from other similar companies are experiencing the same type of culture as well. Culture, and if you can go to the next chart, Kathy, culture can honestly eat a really good initiative for lunch, and it's cute cartoon here. But as we face having people to do things differently, and Kathy your video that you opened with was so great in the context of this conversation because as leaders, as you try to embrace change and help to get your teams to empower your teams around change, you might be quick to making assumptions of your team's ability to accept change. Learning how to understand your teams and their needs, and every employee is different, is something that really is powering our change management strategy because there are a lot of assumptions that could be made, but at the end of the day, you really want to understand the behaviors that you're empowering, and that you're seeking for everybody to move towards. Organizations who don't recognize that need, in many cases those initiatives will fail. In fact, Kathy, I think you had some statistics. You mentioned that early on in this conversation, but that is the hardest thing about what we're doing at Lockheed Martin is the culture aspect. Because again, I think we can solve any hard problem. Technologically, I think that we are just excellent at problem-solving. But driving this culture change is absolutely, I would say 80 percent of the challenge that we face as we embark on this journey. Actually, I think we've talked a lot about your great questions. I've really teased out that you're going to embark on this type of transformation journey or any change management. You're going to have a culture clash. You're likely going to have a very diverse team that you're working with, a variety of experiences, and a variety of potentially biases that you're going to encounter. Knowing that in advance and considering that in your calculus on how you're communicating with your teams and setting your strategy and really listening to your team so that you're understanding the level of acceptance that you have within your team. In my case, I'm talking about a major corporate transformation culture. We're talking about organization-wide different cultures, but it absolutely is something that we are not naive and I wouldn't want anybody to think any change management task at any level wouldn't have to consider some type of a culture clash when you're thinking about trying to pull people through change in any organization. If you go to the next chart, I think what has helped us is really driving to think outside of the box. It's easy to get into group-think, especially if you surround yourself with people who are like you, or surround yourself with people who have had the same experiences that you have. Sometimes it's hard to really inspire the out-of-the-box thinking that you need when you're trying to drive towards a major change, especially the change that I'm talking about with Lockheed Martin. We've brought in an interesting little company called The Ready that has helped us to really think differently about business rhythms and how we bring different ideas to the table. Because at the end of the day it's about collaboration in a very new way for Lockheed Martin. If you go to the next chart, Kathy. Our success is going to be driven by collaboration and having all viewpoints at the seat of the table. I mentioned earlier that we are bringing in a workforce that's very, very different from the workforce that fuels our previous 100 years of success. The different skill sets that were coming in, the different expectations, people want flexible work environments. Put COVID aside, even before COVID, the type of environments and type of work-life balance that is expected by folks coming right out of college is just very, very different. Making sure that when you're thinking about, from a digital transformation perspective, you're laying out that powerful, data-driven digital thread; you need all operating functions to be part of the solution. You need all decision-making with various viewpoints. It is a very different approach and one that's less hierarchical. I guess I grew up in a very org chart type of environment where it tops down to a much flatter type of organization. I would expect decision-making driving towards those more flat organizations going forward. But collaboration is key and making sure that your teams are made up of people who work well in teams. Not only are good leaders, but who can be lead. It's an exciting time. I have been working with our human resources strategic thinkers about different ways of recruiting than we have in the past. Assuming your degrees are required, isn't necessarily where we're headed in this cyber-physical blurring of humans and machines. Because there are likely areas of technology where we're going to be recruiting from different types of associations and different types of certificate programs than I think we're used to. A very exciting change to not only the workforce dynamics but how we recruit and retain, reward, and recognize the folks within our team's going forward. Really exciting time at Lockheed Martin. We have kept you long enough tonight. Thank you so much for your examples and your willingness to share some of your personal experiences for sure. Absolutely. Change management is Job 1 after being a talent manager for a leader, I think. Like I said, anytime you get promoted or moved into a different leadership position, it's usually because the organization wants to change something, and who knows what it'll be? Getting comfortable with this idea of, I'm here to manage change and the first thing I got to know is, what is the culture of this team as well as the organization if you're going to be successful. Maybe not as intuitive as it should be. Absolutely. Thank you, Kathy. Thank you, Brynn. We will say ado.
