The Best Shared Services Quotes You’ll (N)Ever Hear

SSON’s podcast series with Seth Adler veers away from the mundane clap-trap and gets to WHO these people really are, what drove their careers to date (co-incidence, more often than not), what moral compass guides them, and how they combine their personal life stories with the challenge of hitting operational goals.

Here are 10 of my favorite quotes to date – click to hear the full 30-minute podcast.

1. "Wanderlust is one of the powers of shared services. The ability to travel and connect with different passions and cultures." 

Chris Gunning, Global Shared Services Finance Operations Lead, Veon

2. “If there was an optimum word in 20th Century commerce it was ‘strategy.’ The optimal word now is tactical execution.”

Paco Underhill, Author, Why We Buy

3. If you are talk about offshoring as pure cost arbitrage, offshoring is dead. But if you are not bound by geography, technology will enable offshoring to a greater level than ever before.”

Gary Carter, VP, Barclays (formerly Credit Suisse)

4. “Machine Learning can give you a trail to ask the questions you didn’t know to ask.”

Lee Coulter, CEO, Ascension Services Center

5. “Robots are not necessarily about ‘creative destruction.’ Most people look at automation mainly as process improvement and cost removal – as opposed to creating growth.”

Deborah Kops, Managing Principal, Sourcing Change

6. "Millennials are digital natives. And ‘digitalization’ is what’s driving the next wave of shared services.”

Alexander von Thielmann, SVP Siemens Shared Services, Siemens

7. “I try to be outside of political games. I manage my relationships as transparently as possible.”

Ricardo Badillo, Director BPM and Automation at Western Union • Head of the RPA CoE, Western Union

8. “How can we use automation to ultimately close the office so that people can be on the floor doing what they should be doing: facing customers?”

Jorgen Lislerud, MD of the Business Center SIA, Circle K

9. “A High EQ – the ability to connect with and relate to others – is one of the most important things in leadership, especially during hiring.”

Kathleen Bienkowski, Associate VP, Research Administration Shared Services, Emory University

10. “AI needs to be explainable – in other words the work of any machine or deep learning needs to be shown – or explained to humans.”

Ted Graham, Head of Open Innovation, GM