Accenture Innovation Forum 2018
Accenture Innovation Forum 2018
Accenture’s Innovation Forum for Financial Services executives in New York was held March 12th to 14th. This series collects my notes on different matters from this event.
Poetic Voice, Sekou Andrews
The event was kicked off by the “Poetic Voice” Sekou Andrews. Poetic voice is a new speaking category that fuses inspirational speaking with spoken word poetry to make messages more moving and memorable. “Here” is an example of what poetic voice looks like when the subject is LinkedIn.
Sure enough Sekou has integrated all the present day challenges and trends of technology executives in to his very motivating speech that was delivered with great force. He encouraged the listeners to question themselves to see if they may be the cause of the blocks on the road to innovation. He invited everyone to instigate their own personal disruption first if they want to take part in creating a business disruption.
Blockchain & Digital ID @ Accenture Innovation Forum
Highlights of a roundtable led by Simon Whitehouse and David Treat of Accenture (Global Blockchain Lead)
- Formation of ecosystems is what is going to be dominating the next 12 months. Efforts should be made to at least to put together a “minimum viable ecosystem” in order to take advantage of blockchain.
- This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to change 60 year old business models and define new ones.
- Blockchain relieves the burden of regulatory change. Because it is a platform. A platform is audited once and every participant in the network will abide by the rules & regulations of the platform that have already been audited.
- You either join an ecosystem in the beginning and set the rules (that is play a role in its governance) or join later and abide by the rules that were set before by others.
- In a blockchain network a digital identity implementation will be necessary to identify the parties, namely; humans, machines and entities.
- As we scan around the globe we observe an interesting competition between the regulators of forward looking countries about who can modernize their markets faster; thus attracting investment and talent to their markets.
- “Building an ecosystem is an art, not a science” Todd McDonald, R3
Highlights of the Digital ID on Blockchain panel moderated by David Treat, Accenture
Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger Executive Director
- A lot of blockchain use cases can not be implemented without digital id and a lot of digital id use cases can not be implemented without blockchain.
- When setting up an ecosystem for blockchain the group needs to focus on defining the minimum viable governance. With the minimum rules in place the stakeholders can use the platform to address their needs.
- Blockchain is a shared network but it does not divulge private information. What is kept and published in the network are signatures, hashes, and pointers for the information. Private data is kept off chain and only shared between authorized parties once the transacting users initiate the exchange.
Dakota Gruener, ID2020 Executive Director
- In order to provide personal privacy (and protection from state intrusion) a well designed digital id solution needs to be architected to allow the individual user to create and keep their own keys.
General attributes of a Digital ID system
- Personal: unique to you and only you
- Portable: accessible anywhere you happen to be
- Private: you decide what data is shared, with whom and for how long
- Persistent: your identity is yours no matter what challenges you face
The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek, Business Author
Simon Sinek is a New York Times best selling author, writing about job motivation. His new book which is to be published soon is named “the Infinite Game”.
Simon explained what it means to be in a “finite game” and in an “infinite game” in the business world. In business you may win sometimes and lose sometimes, but survival comes with the understanding that business is an infinite game. It never ends.
Simon provided this checklist to survive in an infinite game. According to him all these five attributes must be present to last forever;
- Just cause: A company must know what it stands for (eg: US declaration of independence; this country is founded…all man created equal),
- Courageous leader: a leader who will stand for his people,
- Trusting teams: a workforce with a capability to say “I made a mistake” or ask for help with no fear to be laid off.
- Worthy adversary: to set the pace
- Flexible playbook: changeable strategy
While responding to a question Sinek explained how the elite “Seal 6” hired members to its team. Candidates are plotted on two criteria; “performance” and “trust” (that is to be trustworthy by team mates.
A “high trust — medium performance” candidate is preferred over “high performance — low trust” candidate. Why? Because a low trust person brings down the morale and the performance of the rest of the team, whereas a high trust member is dependable and enhances the team performance, even if they are personally mediocre in performance.
As a bonus; “here” is an excellent explanation by Simon Sinek on millennials in the workplace.
Read “Accenture Innovation Forum 2018” on a larger screen, or in the Medium app!
