For Pitney Bowes, like most companies the last few decades has been pretty interesting in terms of the transformation in the markets that we participate in and it's only accelerating, right? As new digital technologies come in line, we see it happening faster and faster over time. So probably the biggest and most important thing is the shift from mailing to digital technologies so Pitney Bowes is rooted in the mailing industry. We've been in that business for almost 100 years and while we still believe mailing isn't going away, it's certainly not growing and we know it's going to continue to decline over time. As consumers and businesses get more and more used to using digital as a way to transact whether that be through invoices or statements. All of us are getting more comfortable with that and that will only further lead to the decline of male. So while we were committed to that business is important to us, we needed to figure out what do we shift to. Because if you think about being a modern company that's growing, the best place to be is you have to be in growth markets, right? You have to be in a portfolio of businesses where the underlying market dynamics are growing. And so for Pitney Bowes, that shift has been from mailing to shipping and so in particular really focused on shipping. And E-commerce markets that are naturally growing and being transformed by digital in a way that benefits Pitney Bowes, right. So we participate in the physical aspect with a lot of digital technology E-commerce and shipping is a great example of that. You need a lot of technology, but at the end of the day there's a physical good that has to arrive, right? You're buying something online, you want that physical good to appear on your doorstep, and so shipping any commerce was sort of a natural trajectory for us. At the same time, we're thinking about our legacy mailing businesses and trying to infuse them with the kinds of technology that are important. We think today and more important, going forward, things like internet of things and using the internet of things to bring our hardware businesses into the modern environment. Using IOT devices to collect data and then using that data to create more value and services for our clients. So for me it's really about thinking about the competitive landscape in the market and how do you move from a declining space to a growing space in a pivot that's natural. And for Pitney Bowes, that was about, you know, mailing to shipping, but also from hardware to digital and using internet of things as a mechanism to get there. One of the things that I think is really interesting about transformation in general, but certainly digital transformation is. In order to succeed in the world you're going to, you have to build on what you're already great at. And so a Pitney Bowes if you think about what we've done for almost a 100 years, we've been really good at taking complexity out of the mail. So we don't originate the mail, we don't deliver the mail, but we take the complexity out of the process of mailing. We make it easier for a business to utilize mail as a channel to reach their clients. And we thought about shipping and we moved into this E-commerce space, we've basically taken that ideology. And that skill set and moved it into this new world of shipping and E-commerce, so E-commerce is such a fast paced market, right? There are new startups literally every day that are coming in and competing with us, I feel like a new one pops up almost every week. And what's crazy about it is they're building unique technology, they're probably innovating in ways that we aren't even imagining. And so if we try to compete with that, we generally will fall on the wrong side where we've been successful, as we've taken what we're really good at. Which is, we understand complexity and we understand how to take complexity out of the process, and shipping is incredibly complex, particularly for a company that is a small retailer. Midsize retailer and just wants to sell their goods, they're focused on their products, their customers, figuring out how to do shipping is not top of mind every day, but it's critical for their customer base. And so where we found success is taking that ability to understand a complex process, figure it out and then use the technology to bring that into their digital processes. That's where we found success is understanding the client, understanding the complexity and trying to solve for that. And that really comes from our heritage and what we've always been good at doing, but we're now applying it into a new and growing space. Technology is always moving really fast regardless of what industry you're in when we were thinking about our E-commerce business it is a space that moves fast. And actually we start with a consumer, interestingly we're a b2b business, but we start with the consumer. And one of the things that I love is consumer expectations are rising almost faster than we can keep up collectively as an industry, right? As consumers, we want our goods, they're fast, we want them shipped for free we expect to be able to track them door to door we don't care that that's hard. We don't care that there's a lot of complexity underneath that our expectations continue to rise. And so as I think about that from a business perspective, it's on us to meet and exceed those consumer expectations. And there's no way to do that without moving forward with technology so for example, data is incredibly important to our business, right? We use transactional data, but we also use tracking data and delivery data to be able to predict. When a parcel is likely to land on your doorstep so that if we don't have perfect tracking events along the way right? Because you can't always get the carrier the individual who's supposed to scan that parcel might have missed it etcetera. If we're missing a tracking event we want to use the data to predict when that parcel will be there, so as a consumer you still feel like you've got information about that. We want to create better delivery experiences by using data and at the same time we want to use data about what consumers are buying, what's important to them. To help shift the technology that we're using so that our retailers can best reach the consumers that they're trying to bring into their brand and bring into their experience. So data is such an important part of all businesses today but we really see it coming from consumers and consumer demand and then how you use the data to meet those expectations. One of the challenges that I think a lot of companies face is as you're building more and more digital products. This combination of your product management organization, your engineering development team and your tech ops or your IT function. Need to work together in a very different way than what they have historically. So one of the challenges that we've had is as we look at a more legacy IT organization and how it was structured. How do we bring the product components of that IT organization more in line with the pace of change and the day to day operations of the development. And so recently we actually we recognize the issues, we moved into a new operating model, we call them the pods sort of a funny name for it. But the idea is and it's a concept we're now applying across other areas as well. The idea is to bring together at a more junior level in the organization all of the folks responsible for a product, whether they be in product management engineering and IT. And so to release them from the constraint of the silo that they belong to and say your first priority is your pod you belong to this pod. And as a pod you own the operations of this product and and you own the core metrics around revenue, around profitability, a round up time around reliability. And so what it's done and we're in the early days but what it's done is it's given our teams, it's empowered our teams to say I now own this end to end. So we're having already less issues with handoffs from one to the next or no one looking across the whole system and it's very different than the way our structure worked in the past. Because without the digital component it worked that way and it worked really well in our new world where it's a live 24 7 Kind of product that needs to be managed that way. We needed to reinvent the way we think about our development and operations and so moving into that, it's beginning to work. We've got a long way to go, but I think that's one key area of challenges. How do you get these different groups who are used to living in different parts of the organization working together behind a common purpose?
