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EdIT
ed nair
ednair@cybermedia.co.in

Are You Ready to be the

Next CEO?

ometime mid last year, Mark Fields was ousted as the CEO at Ford
Motors, because the company’s board believed that it did not want an
S executive who saw the company’s future as an auto company.
Bill Ford, Ford’s chairman and great grandson of the company’s founder,
wanted “transformational leadership”, and thus Jim Hackett was hired as the
CEO. Jim has promised to deliver a self-driving car from Ford by 2021.
This is a telling example of how technology and digital disruption is changing
the models in corporate strategy and leadership. The CEO of the future is one
who can out-think and out-pace its competition and transform the industries
they are in.
I got to see a few glimpses of such thinking recently when I met two
executives, both from life insurance companies, who are using technology to
drive and define their business. I am free to name them: Martijn de Jong, CDO
and CMO, Aegon Life Insurance and Mohit Rochlani, Director- Operations and
IT, IndiaFirst Life Insurance. There are similarities and dissimilarities between
them, but the common thread is that both are new generation life insurance
companies and they are using technology as the differentiator. Here are some
observations:
n Martijn said that the insurance industry has always been a reactive industry
in that ‘it comes into play after something untoward has happened’. He is trying
to turn this logic on its head by making insurance more proactive and predictive
using tech. Aegon is working on a slew of healthtech initiatives that use data for
preventive health management.
n IndiaFirst used tech to achieve nationwide scale despite its lack of physical
presence in the country. It is the most recent entrant into the business but
used mobility technology to build a salesforce of nearly 900 who sell insurance
digitally without manual intervention.
n Both companies are incubating projects in latest technologies like AI, IoT,
machine learning, and robotic automation.

Ed Nair
Group Editor-ICT Business

6 | January, 2018 www.dqindia.com A CyberMedia Publication |