Controller, Chief Accounting Officer & Principal Accounting Officer, GANNETT CO INC
Cindy Gallagher: WWWWWH | aiia.net
The key to a smooth transition into the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the ability to seamlessly upskill and reskill the workforce.
About Cindy Gallagher
Cindy Gallagher, Controller, Chief Accounting Officer & Principal Accounting Officer at Gannett, has shared her perspectives on the future of global business services (GBS) in several podcast appearances. In a 2022 interview, Gallagher stated that robotic process automation (RPA) in its current form "will be dead" within ten years, predicting it will become a commodity similar to a Microsoft Office product. She also said that physical service centers will be "more dead than alive" but that a hybrid model will persist, and she expressed the view that artificial intelligence has not yet proven to be all it was hyped to be but has not been given a long enough runway. Gallagher emphasized that GBS leaders must challenge their teams to explore new service offerings and adapt delivery models to keep the centralized model alive as the "backbone of the organization." In earlier appearances, Gallagher discussed the importance of upskilling and reskilling the workforce for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, arguing that traditional learning and development platforms are necessary but insufficient. She advocated for C-level leadership dedicated to learning and development separate from traditional HR. Gallagher also described her approach at Discovery Communications, where she said the organization needed to listen more to customers and stakeholders, and she changed recruiting practices to seek people with a mindset of change and transformation rather than purely transactional skills. She noted that humans remain essential for cultural empathy, problem solving, and decision making, even as automation advances.
Transcript (10 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
Okay, it's Practitioner CEO with Cindy Gallagher. Cindy, thank you so much for doing this as always. Anytime. So you and I figured it might be a good idea to take a moment and go through the who, what, where, when, why, and how of upskilling and reskilling in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We do a lot of talking about the talent and how we are absolutely putting them in a position to upskill and reskill and be just better and more. So this is the opportunity to kind of take it down piece by piece to see what they might be missing and what we might be missing. So the who is the talent, right? The who is all of our people, right? All people across the world, right? Whether they are current employees, future employees, our children even. All right, so global enterprise, current and prospective talent. So that's the who. The what is upskilling and reskilling absolutely. The short of that: the what is how are we going to... So answering a what question with a how is a little interesting, but so what is getting all of our employees and future employees to have the skills that are needed to survive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. There we go. The where is at your enterprise, you being the person that's watching this. The when is of course now or yesterday, right? Better. Who, what, where, when... So we're already through to why. Well, and the why: you and I talk about this often and in our network every time we're at an event, we talk a lot about the why: race to gain efficiencies, to be relevant, we want our employees to stay involved, we want to make sure we're delivering the right product or service to all of our consumers and stakeholders. That's the why.
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Cindy Gallagher2:14
Yeah, and so here we are within this conversation. This all feels familiar, and we're all on board. It's the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the bots were coming, and so there was all sorts of fear up and down the organization from the C-suite level through top management through to the frontlines. And that initial fear, now we can see some results. We're getting some results from automation. You know, folks have installed RPA, whether they've gone into it with their processes or not, that's up to them. But we know that we see value here, we know that we see a path to upskilling and reskilling, and some already have upskilled and reskilled. However, that does bring us to that final question, which is who, what, where, when, why, and how. How much have we been talking about how we actually reskill the folks that we've got? We have been talking about it at all, but also afraid of the why and the what that we haven't even addressed the how. There was so much fear about the robots are coming and what are people going to do in the age of new robots, new technology. Okay, let's move on past that. And I feel like for the most part we have. I feel like for the most part people have processed that fear, they've moved forward with it. They've said the bots are here, and almost not quite everyone but almost everyone is now saying there's still a place for the humans, right? I never wanted to say that the bots are going to take over every human process. We still need people. We still have cultural empathy tasks that we need to perform. Problem solving, decision making still needs to be there. I'm hearing more and more about that now from my peers and broader network as well. But the one thing I'm not hearing yet is how. How are we going to transform our skills, all of our skills included, particularly those of our teammates though? How are we reskilling people? How are we thinking about the tasks that they'll need to do? I think traditional schooling is something that people always default to. And within any corporate enterprise, we just default to our traditional learning and development platform. Even at Liberty Source, we rolled out a new Learning and Development platform this year, which is absolutely needed and absolutely can provide the foundation skills that are needed, but it's not enough. So I would question all other leaders, all other practitioners to say, and then what? Once you have that foundation, how are you continuing to evolve your team? How are you continuing to engage them in the education components that they need? More than you're doing for on-the-job training? Are you opening up the opportunity for your teammates, your employees, to take risks in their learning? By learning itself. Anytime I talk to anyone in an academic setting, learning is changing. The way people learn, the way they engage is completely changing, and we need to make sure we're doing that from a practitioner perspective as well.
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Interviewer5:23
Yeah, and this all goes back to stuff that we've done before. So we thought okay, maybe no more humans. We also thought no more retail shops when Amazon hit the scene. But now of course Amazon is opening up physical retail shops. So in that kind of cycle, when we say okay, here's what we can automate, here's what we need to automate, but here's what we want to do with the humans, here's what we see, you know, our carbon-based talent. Sure, there's the traditional training path, but then it's now relooking at what we do from a C-suite level to a top level management capacity on bringing that talent forward. Now there's the Google principle of the 10% of time being focused on completely entrepreneurial type of, you know, how can we innovate activities. Is this a good place for that? You know, whether we can do 10% or 5% or even 2%, call it an hour a quarter or whatever it is, where maybe some of the answers are here. Yes, there needs to be active engagement. There needs to be requirement from the leadership team to say everyone within the organization needs to spend X percent of their time, and it could be a different answer for different parts of the organization, it could be a different answer for different people. But you need to set that X percent of your time is expected to be spent learning, developing, enhancing your skills in a different way.
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Cindy Gallagher6:57
I also think this is an opportunity for us to revisit and reopen the conversation around human strengths versus weaknesses. In a prior to audit world, we could hide weaknesses with really good process documentation, right? You just follow this set of steps and you'll get it all done no matter what your weaknesses may be. We really need to make sure that we're understanding where people's strengths are and exploiting those strengths, and pointing them in a training direction that will help build upon those, so that they can be more successful in this next Fourth Industrial Revolution that's happening now.
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Interviewer7:36
Yeah, and this brings up a theme that I've been hearing as I talk with folks like you. Which is, you know, some liken it to a football team, a soccer team, which is each player on the field has their own skill set, and that's what we're looking for from each of those players. Maybe in the past we've said everybody kind of has to be X, whereas in the future it's no, no, we only need you to be. Whatever a football, you know, interact right. Go deep for me.
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Cindy Gallagher8:11
That's a perfect analogy. I was a goaltender, right, growing up playing soccer. I was going to cry if they put me on the lineup and kick a ball for me. Have a ball kicked at me. I'm in front of that ball every single time. Three different stuff. Maybe what kind of balls kicked at me. So we have our... and that is absolutely the case in the environment of a professional environment. You could take a process, even accounts payable processing of an invoice, right. Someone is going to be really fast, really great at key typing, and someone else is going to be really great on the phone. We need to know those, and we need to know those now, and we need to not only know what those functions are as we speak, but 6, 12, 24, 72 months down the line, this is where we want to be as an enterprise from a top level.
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Interviewer9:04
Yeah, this is not a one-time thing. In fact, I was reading an article just yesterday related to, is now the time for us to have C-suite level Learning and Development leadership separate from your traditional HR leadership? Right. Your people management, your culture. Do we now need a separate line, C-suite line for L&D? And I tend to agree, because we need to put so much focus and emphasis on... here you need to have an emphasis on culture, you need to have even more emphasis today on learning, development, and reskilling.
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Cindy Gallagher9:41
So you know, you're bringing up a concept which I'm just going to term here for the first time, which is it's maybe not a revolution, it's the Fourth Industrial Evolution. Evolution. That's what happened here on the Practitioner CEO right now, right now.
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Interviewer10:00
All right. So there you have it. The who, what, where, when, why, and please don't forget the how. You know, let's work on the how right now. Cindy, very much appreciate your time as always. Already can't wait for the next one, anytime.
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Cindy Gallagher10:12
That I love speaking with you as well. Let's be good.