Kramer is also a part of a monthly meeting where IBM iX’s geographic leaders share what’s going in their territory.
“One person will say, ‘Oh, so and so in Japan is doing XYZ, which relates to ABC that we’re doing in North America,’ and we start cross-referencing each other’s work in those kinds of conversations,” she says. “At the end of the day, it’s about communication, and it’s about personal relationships, and it’s about building trust in that relationship, which has always been the case.”
Be a disrupter
Throughout her career, Kramer has found it important to invest heavily in thought leadership to be in front of trends. Her staff needs to help companies meet and solve their challenges — whatever those challenges might be and however fast those may be occurring. That’s how a digital agency based in Columbus can compete.
“There’s not a client that I’m talking to, not an institution or an organization that I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with over the last couple of years, that I haven’t seen going through a major disruption,” she says.
Today, organizations that want to be a disrupter, not the disrupted, must digitally reinvent their businesses in a broad way. Kramer says it’s not a strategy that goes to one silo like the marketing department. It’s an expansive C-suite conversation, and the Columbus studio would not have had the opportunity for many of those discussions prior to becoming part of IBM.
Kramer and her business partner, Kelly Mooney, the chief experience officer of IBM iX North America, were in the infancy of some thought leadership around the future of brands. After the two joined IBM, IBM helped them create a global study around brand belonging.
“Again, prior to IBM, we would have never been able to invest the time and the resources that we were able to invest, and now we have this very comprehensive study that we can use to talk to clients about and how this is impacting their customers and how they need to rethink their brand,” Kramer says.
Kramer has always been aligned with technology. Apple was her company’s first client and she says for the first 15 years, the business worked exclusively with technology brands.
Because of its familiarity with technology, the staff at Resource and now IBM iX often find themselves ahead of their clients.
That focus on the future is also why Kramer, and through her, IBM, is heavily involved in Smart Columbus, which is exploring the future of transportation, how to keep the quality of life consistent and create more inclusive opportunities that go deeper into the community.
“It’s very much aligned with a lot of the things that we’re doing at IBM, and it’s very much about how the city is going to operate as it continues to grow,” she says.
Takeaways:
- Carefully vet the cultural fit before a merger or sale.
- Team building takes work just like any other relationship.
- Focus on the future to be the disrupter, not the disrupted.
Incumbents Strike Back: Insights from the Global C-suite Study
In February, IBM came out with a study focused on incumbents and digital transformation, which fits many companies based in Columbus, Kramer says. Businesses like L Brands, Cardinal Health, Nationwide or Huntington Bank aren’t new digital startups, but they are using their data to create a platform that will enable them to compete more fiercely in the future.
Explore the 19th edition of the IBM Global C-suite Study, which is based on conversations with more than 12,500 executives worldwide, to understand four imperatives critical to every business leader — the power of innovative incumbents, new standards for customer-centricity, the case for platform business models and strategies for forming your own agile enterprise — at http://bit.ly/IBM_IncumbentsStrikeBank.
