David Rouls
As a people developer, client leader, sales executive, practice leader, recruiter, connector, financial operator and partner, this is my vision for Slalom Detroit. It’s not a plan. There’s no timelines. Just a vision of what our collective efforts can become and the impact we can make on thousands of Detroit lives.
Our collectively defined purpose specific to Slalom Detroit:
Be the #1 consulting firm in Detroit by living our Values, developing Our People, and delivering Impactful Business Results for our clients.
Imagine the day when Slalom Detroit has created a special home to 500 Change Agents. Collectively we are changing the face of Detroit, one employee, one company, one client and one neighbor in need at a time.
We grow over time to this size not for the sake of growing. We grow to this size over time because our people feel fulfilled, challenged, supported and grow every single day. More people love their work and life, which stays with them when they return home each evening to their families. We grow to an amazing team of 500 learners, experts and leaders; Change Agents for our clients. Our people are celebrated for their accomplishments, regularly receive thoughtful constructive feedback. Our people seek out feedback and career coaching on a routine basis. We have a culture where everyone, regardless of role, provides feedback to those with which they work. “What could I have done better” is spoken after every client, partner and internal session from every role. Imagine the growth of every Change Agent with this powerful combination, all helping one another evolve every single day. Our Change Agent’s expertise grows every day, achieving 200 new certifications a year as just one example of many.
Our Change Agents mirror the community and clients in which we. We embrace and celebrate our incredibly diverse lives. Every Change Agent has the same opportunity to grow as experts and leaders. Our people take the time to understand one another’s perspective. All of our Change Agents view Slalom Detroit as their second family. This diversity of perspective and mutual respect fuels amazingly creative ideas for our clients and our community.
We are 500 recruiters. We are all excited to help bring on hungry, humble and people-smart Change Agents into our special second family. Even when there isn’t an ideal fit, the individuals have a true Slalom experience, advocating for Slalom across the globe.
Every single leader creates a safe environment for our people to bring their authentic self each day. Our Change Agents feel safe to share their struggles at work and even in their personal lives when they need help. Our leaders have our people’s backs to grow in new ways and take on sensible risks. Our leaders work to understand their people’s aspirations. They create opportunities for our Change Agents to explore their passions and grow in new ways. This trust helps instill courage in every single Change Agent with hands-on leader support throughout their entire journey.
This relentless focus on our team is second only to following and living our values. Our leaders and all of our Change Agents use our values to guide them in difficult decisions.
Our Change Agents are working with more than 50 Detroit clients each week and 80 clients over the course of a year. Mobility, Healthcare and Financial Services are our largest industries that we serve with robust thought leadership & expertise. In these industries we go well beyond merely serving clients. We have established creative partnerships to become an integral part of these industries in Detroit. We establish public-private partnerships to advance the agendas of these industries in Detroit and across the globe. In addition to those 3 anchor industries, our expertise spans to Utilities, Retail, Professional Services, Food & Beverage and more. More than 20% of our people are working with mid-market companies ($0.5B-$3B) on C-suite level transformation initiatives.
As we have scaled to 500 Change Agents, the diversity of our talents, the depth of our skills and our rigor of complex programs has enabled Slalom Detroit to evolve our clients’ businesses in dramatic ways. We are helping our clients to accelerate revenue growth and capture new market share. We are helping them customize their services and products to a “market of one.” We are helping them rethink operational efficiencies to change their cost structure on an ongoing basis. We are helping our clients move with speed to seize market opportunities and minimize competitive threats. We are an integral part of our clients’ journeys all the way through to realizing their full business results. We routinely help our clients quantify their results as a feedback loop to help them (and us) grow and evolve. We do this by fully leveraging every aspect of our management consulting, technology consulting and engineering prowess like an amazing orchestra of unique talents all in sync with a common focus.
Our Change Agents have an excellent understanding of all of our major skillsets across Slalom Detroit and our national teams in order to benefit our clients. They look well beyond their own skillsets to search out collaboration opportunities in order to create amazing solutions and programs of major change for their clients. No other company brings this level of cross skill collaboration for their clients. We bring these solutions and programs of change in a manner in which our practices are invisible to our clients. Our practices grow, evolve and morph every year to grow the skills of our Change Agents. This ongoing evolution of our practices reflect continual advances in technologies and consulting approaches in order to maximize the impact we bring to our clients. We combine the technologies of analytics and data science, mobility and cloud, sensors and advanced networks with the next wave of exciting tech such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, quantum computing, virtual reality and distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain. Our programs of change will bring this rapidly evolving technology together with the latest management consulting expertise we develop. These areas include customer journeys, specializing products and services for a “market of one,” readying organizations for the new breakneck speed of market change, evolving leaders to engage a very new workforce, new economic models (e.g., data monetization), enterprise wide agile adoption, customer intimacy and so much more. Imagine the customer stories of innovative success we will write when we harness the power of all of these skills. Imagine the opportunities for all of us to grow and be challenged in ways we’ve not yet identified.
Our Change Agents are masters in delivering these solutions and change programs in a repeatable and highly predictable manner. Our Change Agents are constantly creating and evolving our tools, templates, assets and methodologies to drive this repeatable and predictable client impact. Our practices are stewards of these tools as well as where our skills and services should evolve. Our Change Agents are skilled in listening and learning about our clients’ business, the change they seek as well as the why. They are intensely curious.
Our Change Agents bring more to our clients than other firms. They cultivate multi-year relationships based on trust, delivering on commitments, correcting mistakes and acknowledging challenges. We go deep in building an understanding of our clients one individual at a time. We know their aspirations, concerns, drivers and even their personal passions and hobbies. We are exceptional communicators. We understand where the senior leaders of our clients are taking the company and we use these deep learnings to help guide our clients. We routinely bring new and innovative ideas to our clients. We conduct some 70 proactive and thought-provoking multi-hour workshops with our clients each year. We know how and when to challenge our clients in a respectful manner. We are exceptional at this skill and our clients love and respect us for it. Our Change Agents routinely smile and are fun to work with. Our clients have total confidence in our Change Agent’s ability to help them realize their vision. Together, this customer obsession helps our Detroit clients thrive on a Michigan, US and global level.
Slalom Build & Cross Market are an integral part of Slalom Detroit’s success. They are complete members of the team. We work together in account planning, pipeline management, client workshops, partner planning and vetting critical candidates for hire. Slalom Detroit routinely derives more than 20% of its revenue from Slalom Build and Cross Market.
Our Change Agents deeply understand the products of our partners and how they can help our clients realize their vision. We routinely collaborate to bring together ideas, services and products in unique ways to accelerate our client’s vision.
Our collective 500 Detroit Change Agents are amazing connectors that embrace an insurgent mindset. We connect our clients to one another in meaningful ways, not to sell but to genuinely help them advance their learnings and to network. We annually create forums for over 200 clients in Metro Detroit to connect Developers, Managers, CEOs and everyone in between. Our forums take place all year long with 2 or 3 marque client events each year. Our forums become so well known that our clients look forward to the opportunity to learn and connect each year (or even each quarter for some). They become traditions. Our events span from intimate CEO discussions to large scale ½ day business transformation events to celebrating women in the workplace on International Women’s Day with 150 female clients and Slalom Change Agents. They span from targeted technology learning events to a variety of intimate roundtables on an amazing array of topics. Our insurgent mindset and thought leadership brings both provocative and practical ideas. Our Change Agents are a complete fabric of the business community, using these ideas to shape thought and inspire thousands of change agents inside of our clients’ companies. Our 500 Slalom Detroit Change Agents, having created thousands of client change agents, help create 10,000 new Detroit jobs across our vast set of diverse clients.
Our Change Agent’s impact on our Detroit community will be incredibly visible. Our 5,000 hours a year of time donated, combined with our leadership, consultative and technical skills will not only help in those moments, we’ll also use our unique talents to dramatically change Detroit non-profit’s ability to serve our community. In other words, our Change Agents have an exponential impact for our neighbors in need. Our initiatives and programs attract other organizations to get involved and contribute their unique talents. Slalom Detroit will lead and encourage thousands of others to roll up their sleeves and help. Thousands of Detroit lives are positively impacted because our 500 Slalom Detroit Change Agents roll up their sleeves and use their skills to help think differently in how to serve their neighbors in need.
Imagine the day when Slalom Detroit has created a special home to 500 Change Agents. Collectively we are changing the face of Detroit, one employee, one company, one client and one neighbor in need at a time. Just imagine what fun we’ll have and the Detroit legacy we will all create together!
How will the future 500 Slalom Detroit Change Agents help transform “Z Wear?” Z Wear is my fictional Detroit-based “mid-market” company that sells “clothing as a service” targeted mainly to the Z generation (move over Millennials). Here’s how it might go down……
The Z Wear Fable 4
Coming out of the Golden Ticket event, which was held a few months back where we hosted over 300 incredibly diverse Slalom Change Agents and their guests, we hired a very entrepreneurial machine learning expert. Recently this ML expert was attending one of our weekly micro-training sessions on Slalom Detroit’s latest tool to help organizations quickly assess the degree of change impact from AI/ML/Quantum Computing. As the change impact expert and the entrepreneurial ML expert got to talking, they realized their combined skillset would make for a fascinating roundtable for a variety of leader types such as a Chief Technology Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Leadership Officer and so on. Fast forward a few months, these two Change Agents, collaborating with the Detroit Marketing & Events team, host 25 client leaders for a very engaging discussion and debate.
One of our sales execs hits it off with the CMO from a company called Z Wear. The CMO had already heard of Slalom from their CHRO who is a routine member of ‘Engage Detroit’ (created by Slalom, it’s a local network of client change agent leaders who get together many times a year to discuss trends in their field). The reputation of Engage Detroit being a valuable forum was the reason the CMO agreed to attend this most recent event. Knowing that the CMO would be in attendance, the sales exec had read the most recent quarterly earnings transcript for Z Wear. She read the analyst’s challenging questions regarding the earnings miss for the third quarter in a row. Having done her homework on LinkedIn, our sales exec learned that the CMO had joined Z Wear only 8 months earlier as a change agent. During the session our team was able to connect the CMO with 2 other CMOs from Detroit clients as a way to help her build her Detroit CMO network. With the robust conversation and the knowledge of Z Wear and the CMO’s challenges, the sales exec proposes to the CMO that we bring in a small team of our Change Agents for a ½ day workshop with the leadership from Z Wear to go deeper on these concepts.
Ahead of the workshop, our sales exec and our client lead huddle with the CMO to ask her a series of questions to go deeper in their learning and understanding of the CMO’s and Z Wear’s priorities. They play back what they heard. Our client team clearly sees that Z Wear needs to transform the experience of their customers and so they call on a Change Agent with deep skills in rethinking customer journeys to help lead the workshop.
In the half-day workshop, the Slalom team including the sales exec, client leader, customer journey expert, ML expert and the change impact expert facilitate a robust session of situation exploring, empathy mapping, ideating and high level visioning. The change impact expert, having collected some data ahead of time from Z Wear, used their new tool during the half day session to illustrate the power of their skills and tools in gauging the initial sense on the potential impact and opportunity to the organization. The client is blown away at how quickly Slalom’s new tool and skills are able to represent the potential organizational impacts. Credibility and confidence deepen in Slalom. Once the workshop is over, the team of Slalom Detroit Change Agents, knowing the importance of immediate feedback, had blocked 30 minutes to go around to each person asking, “what could we and I have done better?” They identify that they needed greater clarity of roles before the workshop started and that they should have had the client do a little more homework before the workshop. Great learnings for future workshops which was shared at the next weekly micro-training session.
Coming out of the session, a new and exciting 5-month project is kicked off a few weeks later. The team is made up of a customer journey expert, change impact expert and an overall lead to frame the entire program’s transformation to the business, including a new financial picture on the potential for Z Wear. Included in the project plan is time from Slalom Strategy XM to help highlight the latest models in customized retail experiences from across the globe. Time from experts in Machine Learning and Software Engineers from Slalom Build and the Detroit Change Agents SW Engineers is also included to educate the client (and the project team) on the art of the possible and an idea on the cost to achieve the vision.
A few days before the project kicks off, the Slalom team has a working session to drive complete clarity of roles and expectations between each of the Change Agents. They review the commitments of deliverables and dates and the split of responsibilities between Slalom and Z Wear. The sales exec and client lead share the business of Z Wear along with the drivers and objectives behind this new project. The engagement lead sits down with the Z Wear CMO a few days before the project is to kick off. The engagement lead asks a series of questions of the CMO to understand their expectations of Slalom, going much deeper than simply deliverables, due dates and so on. The engagement leader plays back what they heard to the CMO. The engagement leader also asks the CMO “What would it look like to exceed your expectations?” It takes a little exploration, but the engagement lead learns a deeper understanding from her. “If you can get our CFO to fully embrace all of this new technology and get him on board with the pace of change, you’d really exceed my expectations.” The engagement lead now has an idea of how to bring more value to Z Wear. He puts a request into Chatter to see if there are CFO clients in other markets who have become big converts in advocating technology in their organizations. The engagement lead works with 2 other markets to connect the Z Wear CFO with his CFO peers, laying the groundwork for Slalom to exceed their client’s expectations. The engagement lead sends an email to his primary client with what he heard with regards to the expectations. The client responds elated that she’s been clearly heard. Slalom continues to just feel different than other services companies she’s worked with. The engagement lead uses these bulleted expectations on a monthly basis with the CMO to facilitate a structured manner of soliciting feedback throughout the project.
With this early phase project, the Slalom Change Agents help Z Wear completely rethink how they engage their customers into an exciting new vision: Z Wear will shift and become all about individualized experiences. They will view each of their customers as a “market of one.” Customers may purchase their clothing outright or choose to have “clothing as a service.” Each piece of clothing will have one of the latest RFID tags that’s .05mm x .05mm in size which will uniquely identify the article of clothing and use the micro antenna to send this data into the new app. Through machine learning, the new service, all cloud based, will leverage customer-approved access to their social media data to learn more about their personality. This information will provide insights into the specific clothing sent to the customer. Using their location data, planned vacations, business trips and calendars for events such as weddings, the new service will look at weather forecasts and a series of other inputs to send the proper clothing to their home. The service will learn their clothing preferences based on what they actually wear through the RFID data. Knowing what clothing their customer already has in their possession, the new service will recommend not only which articles of clothing to wear, but also how to mix and match for those fashionably challenged. Customers will set the amount of personal information they wish to share depending on the degree of customization they prefer.
Z Wear realizes they will need to dramatically change the types of jobs involved with choosing the fashions and feeding their expertise into the ML algorithms. Slalom Detroit’s Change Agents, with expertise in job design, is heavily leveraged on the project. They also realize that the ever rapidly changing fashion industry will require a new agile approach to evolving their products and “clothing as a service” if they have any chance of staying current. The Slalom Detroit Change Agents begin the journey of changing the tools, techniques, governance and mindset of Z Wear leaders into an agile organization. There is a handshake between the Slalom Detroit customer experience strategist with the user experience expert as the specific vision of the new app is created. The ML expert, Slalom Build and the Slalom Detroit Change Agent Software Engineers, iterate sprint after sprint to build this new experience. The day-to-day engagement leader, with experience in this sort of digital transformation in a variety of key areas, is the glue that keeps everyone aligned and focused on the Z Wear vision and ultimate business results. This leader understands the role and importance of the organizational change experts, software engineers, customer experience strategists, financial modelers and system and business integration. The leader is a skilled communicator with their client, pointing out areas requiring attention on a daily basis. They are not merely focused on success for the Slalom deliverables but rather the success of the entire effort. In other words, the engagement leader goes beyond any one skillset in delivering a strong solution. They are skilled at knowing how to help Z Wear realize their new business vision and achievement of the associated business benefits (Z Wear’s customer satisfaction, financial uplift, brand evolution and loyalty, evolved culture, etc.). They are acting as Slalom’s “Chief Change Agent” for this critical transformation of Z Wear.
A few weeks into the project, the Job design expert realizes they need to learn more about the Machine Learning technology. Around the same time, the ML expert realizes they don’t entirely understand how one redesigns jobs for a client. The entire team agrees to do Friday weekly lunch and learns in order to help each other learn and broaden their understanding of one another’s skills. They see this as a key expansion of their knowledge in order to address all aspect of how Z Wear will need to change their business.
As the project continues in its early phases, the ML expert blocked 45 minutes on their calendar to look back over their quarterly individual career growth plan which they developed the previous month with their people manager. He recalls that he had set an objective to get up in front of clients much more often. He sees that perhaps an idea is to lead one or two of the large client workshops with Z Wear. The ML expert approaches the engagement lead to explore the possibilities of leading or helping to lead the workshop coming up next week. The engagement lead thinks it’s a great idea. The ML expert sets up a 45 minute prep session with the engagement lead and captures a page of notes on lessons learned when leading a session like this. The workshop goes well and immediately after the session the ML expert asks the engagement lead for their feedback. The engagement lead points out all of the tremendous prep of material. The ML expert clearly understood what Z Wear was wanting to build. In the “What could I have done better” feedback part of the discussion, the ML expert learned that it would be an even stronger session if he talked much less. That he should work to better engage the participants by planning ahead with a list of questions of the client early in the workshop. The ML expert learned a tremendous amount through the prep, execution and feedback surrounding the client workshop and is now confident heading into the next one.
In the middle of the project the CMO approaches the engagement lead with issues related to spend. The T&M project is slightly over spending and Z Wear’s financial performance has added to the spend constraints. The CMO informs the Slalom engagement lead that she wants to cut out a number of the integration points, data feeds and therefore features of the solution. She also wants to cut down on the amount of job design changes. The engagement lead plays back what he heard to the CMO given how important clear communication is on such a critical change to the project. The CMO really appreciates knowing she was heard. Slalom’s phenomenal communication skills keep contributing to strong Customer Love. The engagement lead commiserates with the CMO on how much these changes will reduce the benefits to Z Wear and empathizes on the need to manage spend. The engagement lead asks for 48 hours to confer with the rest of the team on alternative ideas rather than just strictly “following orders” from the client. The engagement lead knows from past experiences that if the job designs are cut there will be confusion inside the business for months following the deployment. And the core features of the MVP that the CMO suggested cutting were so critical in every workshop. Cutting these two things might mean a possible failure of the entire new market approach for Z Wear. The Slalom team huddles to develop ideas on how to address the financial constraints while still delivering the majority of the business impact. They realize this means more than just “protecting the features in the new app.” The engagement lead sits back down with the CMO to discuss an alternative approach to the financial constraints which involve cutting out lesser important features that had a large cost. The CMO didn’t realize how expensive some of these other less mission critical features were that had been added in by someone from another department early in the project. The project team is able to save the more critical application features as well as complete the full set of job designs and still complete everything within the new financial constraints. The CMO is elated to see that she chose a true partner in Slalom and not simply a technology or consulting firm that just takes orders.
Throughout this project there were literally hundreds of feedback moments between Slalom Change Agents in both verbal and written format which reinforced strengths and helped articulate opportunities for growth. The Change Agents gained greater expertise in their own fields and even more valuable, gained a much deeper understanding of the other facets of the program which were so critical to the successful project. They leveraged their own growth plans, looking for opportunities all throughout the project to check off their list. The engagement leader created a safe space for the Change Agents to try new things, had their back along the way and gave insightful feedback for their growth. The Change Agents identified new areas of growth to be tackled on their next project which they captured in their notes for the next career discussion with their people manager.
Towards the end of the project, the engagement lead and one of the Change Agents agree that this tremendous project needed a customer story to be crafted to share with all of Slalom. The engagement lead, sensing a very pleased CEO, asks him to write a quote about Slalom and the project which can be shared with other clients. The Z Wear CEO sends an email with the following quote: “Slalom completely understood the Z Wear vision from beginning to end. They brought innovative ideas, challenged my leadership team along the way and delivered seamlessly all while bringing a tremendous cultural fit. Slalom has helped us change the future trajectory of Z Wear to dominate the ‘clothing as a service’ industry.”
In fact, the team agrees to have a big celebration when they hear that they will be onstage with the Z Wear CEO to co-present at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. During the recent Cultural Calendar review, the engagement lead learned that Ramadan would not end for another ten days. The engagement lead went to schedule the celebratory dinner and unfortunately had an incorrect date for the ending of Ramadan. Fortunately, the recent app, created by Slalom Detroit’s CODE (Celebrating our Diverse Employees), reminded the engagement lead that the event would be during Ramadan. Knowing that the project team’s ML expert was Muslim, the engagement lead reschedules the celebration for the following week so that the individual can fully participate in the fun dinner event. The GM joins the celebration and buys an expensive bottle of wine (Only in the fable!). The engagement lead made sure that the menu accommodated a variety of diets as well as non-alcoholic options. This was just one example of many throughout the year where Slalom Detroiters demonstrated awareness and caring for the variety of cultural differences among our 500 Slalom Detroit Change Agents.
12 months has passed since the new Z Wear personalized experience was brought to market. Our change experts and the client’s new agile adoption allowed them to rapidly collect, understand and put into place an amazing amount of customer feedback in a short period of time. These rapid adjustments and adoption of the exciting new service has grown Z Wear’s market share from 5% to 13% seemingly overnight.
During the quarterly account planning for Z Wear a few months later, the collection of experts in the room, including experts from Slalom Build and Cross Market, identify a new bold idea based on the latest vision from their client’s CEO. The idea is to take advantage of our partner’s new quantum computing platform, reportedly having 300 qubits, in a new cloud platform making this technology newly available and reasonably priced. This would be combined with a new Virtual Reality service, which leverages the recently developed ML service of proposing clothing. With this new technology and business approach idea from the Slalom team, Z Wear’s customers would have the ability to “look in the mirror” in a virtual manner to try on their new clothing before it’s shipped. The team believes this new approach will not only further increase Z Wear’s market share, it will also reduce wasted shipping of unused clothing by a whopping 75%. The Slalom Change Agents are as excited about the benefits to our planet as they are about the savings for their client. Having built an excellent relationship of trust and follow through with the CEO, the client team sends an email that same day with a very intriguing note about getting together to discuss the next transformational idea for Z Wear. The CEO responds right away to schedule the meeting. Our Change Agents, along with our partner, prepare for a successful meeting with the CEO.A few weeks later during one of the micro-training sessions, one of the leaders for Slalom Detroit’s “Neighbors in Need” program learns about this exciting new project for Z Wear. Being the ever-curious person, he asks what Z Wear does with the clothing that is returned that they’re not able to resell. As the two get to talking about the need for clothing for job interviews, they realize a tremendous opportunity to make a bigger impact with their Detroit Neighbors in Need. In tight collaboration with Z Wear, several amazing Detroit Change Agents use their spare time to build a new mobile app. The new app will be leveraged by a variety of entities from the Detroit Public Schools to Mariners Inn and so on whereby clothing for key events such as interviews can be matched to our neighbors in need based on their size, type of event and so on. Just two weeks after the new app goes live, a father from Mariner’s Inn is able to use the new app to get an incredible outfit for his big upcoming interview, landing a new job.
Imagine the day when Slalom Detroit changes the face of Detroit one employee at a time (Z Wear engagement team), one client at a time (CMO of Z Wear), one company at a time (Z Wear) and one neighbor in need at a time (newly employed Mariner’s Inn father) x 500 Slalom Detroit Change Agents! What an exciting journey this is! And what a legacy we will all create together!
Rouls
Excited to keep building towards this vision with all of you!
Direct with DR 