Category: The 10 Most Futuristic Business Leaders To Watch in 2022_Profile

Meet Prof. Martin Curley, the Director of Digital Transformation and Open Innovation at the Health Service Executive (HSE), helping to enable digital transformation in Ireland’s Health Service. Under his leadership, the HSE Digital Transformation group works to build health system-wide digital capability, capacity, and competence.

An electronic engineer by profession, Martin’s career started with Philips Lab in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Later he worked on IoT systems in factories of General Electronics and Intel, well before the term Internet of Things was coined. At that point of time, he specifically focussed on developing and deploying Digital Manufacturing Solutions and realized these could be particularly applicable for the Health Care industry, where variability plays a major role.

He has also lectured and spoken at various global universities and conferences and been in boardrooms across the planet.

Before starting HSE, Martin also served as the Senior Vice President and Group Head for Global Digital Practice at Mastercard.

The Inception Story

Martin started his journey at HSE Digital Transformation to transform Ireland’s healthcare using Digital Technology. Using the Design Practices documented in his book on Open Innovation 2.0, he understood one could use digitization to drive a fundamental change in healthcare, which was at least a decade behind other industries.

Martin states, “I noted and observed that the combination of exponential digital technologies, the information-intensive nature of healthcare – healthcare is an information business and the use of an exponential innovation methodology that I developed (OI2) would and is creating supranormal or 10X returns repeatedly and predictably.”

He explains that it translates into much better outcomes, with lower costs, better experience, and improved life qualities. Starting to become known as the ‘Curleys law,’ the methodology’s application produces breakthrough 10X solutions and outcomes. For example, a digital heart care at home solution has resulted in a 10X reduction of hospitalizations and 10X improvement in monitoring, all of which can be achieved at a rate of 2.5X less than the cost of the current solution. Remote respiratory monitoring solutions can keep respiratory patients out of hospital at a cost which is 30X cheaper than admitting a patient to an acute hospital.

Path Breaking Services

Within Ireland, Martin envisioned a unique new Digital Healthcare system, which can be described as a health and wellness system. He and his colleagues in the Irish Digital Health Leadership Steering Group and ecosystem envisioned a new approach designed to keep people fit and well and detect any chronic disease very early. This kind of health system is unique from  and in contrast to the existing healthcare system/paradigm, which works like an illness system, where chronic diseases account for up to 90% of all costs and 70% of all deaths.

HSE Digital Transformation has also created a ‘health elevator,’ which integrated various products and services from eleven companies to deliver a completely new proactive health and wellness service for the Irish citizens. The health elevator focuses on moving healthcare closer to home, where patients are empowered to improve their self-care and live healthier. It also aims to transition from a reactive care pathway to a proactive approach with ongoing management and preventative health screening by utilizing remote monitoring and real-time information.

“You have to take the opportunity of a lifetime in the lifetime of the opportunity. Dream, Dare, Do!”

Additionally, the ‘Oceans Eleven’ arrangement helps Irish citizens with a rapid 15-minute health assessment, a personal electronic health record, a computer algorithm-assisted medical report, a fitness device like Fitbit, a wellness app, and a holistic digital health therapeutic. Patients can avail all of these at around the cost of a PCR test, which in return provides the much-needed information, therapeutics, and nudges to create a fit and healthy population. The Ocean Eleven arrangement includes HSE Digital Transformation, Careplus Pharmacies, Google, Fitbit, AWS, PatientsKnowBest, Full Health Medical, Eurofins, Roche, Trimedika and Checkpoint.

Keeping the Team Motivated

As the leader of HSE, Martin tries to keep his team motivated by providing them with a compelling vision that entirely aligns with an individual’s values and business skills. He tries to empower and encourage as much as possible rather than commanding and controlling.

However, for Martin, it’s not only about motivating the team, but it’s also about motivating the ecosystem, and he is delighted that the ecosystem HSE Digital Transformation has built has beautifully aligned around the vision and strategy of ‘Stay Left, Shift Left- 10X’.

“Many senior leaders and organizations from across the ecosystem such as Dr John Sheehan, John Shaw,  Prof Richard Costello, Prof. Anthony Staines and Dr Donal Bailey have self-selected into the ecosystem, and we mutually motivate each other as we strive for 10X interventions which compound and mutually reinforce each other.“- he stated. Together they founded the Irish Digital Health Leadership Steering group (IDHLSG) to accelerate the Digital Health transition in Ireland.

Picture of the Future

As an organization, HSE Digital Transformation and the IDHLSG would like to create an entirely new Digital Health and Wellness system that would help extend the lives of every Irish citizen and create a model and a platform that could be adopted and improved by other countries worldwide. Martin and his colleagues aspire to make Ireland a European Health leader by 2025 and one of the top 10 global health systems by 2030.

The organisation believes that data plays a major role in fighting modern-day diseases, and it will set the challenge to add 2.5 years of life for every citizen over the next five years. “Like Moore’s Law, Curley’s Law will ultimately come up against the laws of biology and physics, but adding an extra ten years of quality life to every global citizen over the next two decades would be an amazing accomplishment we could all be proud of.‘- states Martin.

“We plan to achieve this by deploying a digital health platform centered around the patient/citizen, which proves seamless access across the care continuum to citizens, carers, clinicians, and academics alike. Overlayed on this will be a complete and ever-growing portfolio of IoT devices, digital therapeutics, and AI solutions that provide insights, nudges, tools, and diagnoses to help keep people healthy and detect/intervene with early signs of chronic diseases.”

This solution will fully focus on all the factors of health, which include lifestyle, genetics, mental health, environment, and healthcare systems. Eventually, Ireland will have a closed-loop digital health system operating at a national, population, health facility, and individual level to optimize health and wellness strategically and in real-time to create a true health learning system.

Meet Neil Pretty, the Co-founder, and CEO of Aristotle Performance, which works to empower organizations to develop high-performing, resilient cultures to succeed in an increasingly unpredictable environment. As an organizational development firm, Neil and his team at Aristotle Performance focuses on scalable solutions directly impacting leaders and teams. By focusing on a foundation of psychological safety and building team effectiveness from that foundation, Aristotle’s performance is helping teams work together while creating a better sense of belonging for employees.

Aristotle Performance is Neil’s seventh business venture. “With minimal formal training, it was necessary to seek out mentors, read books, and learn through trial and error. You could say the same for my journey as a leader: My first formal leadership position was in Army Cadets at 13 years old. I was posted to my first platoon at 15 and have maintained leadership positions ever since,”- he explains. “This, along with often working in parallel contracting or having varied part-time roles in numerous industries, culminated in my early 30s realizing that I had led over 300 teams.”

As Neil entered the coaching profession and evolved his practice to focus on career and leadership development, his practice slowly evolved to focus on high performers, often labeled as toxic leaders. Eventually, his work evolved into team and organizational development as Neil was asked to take on more complex and wide-scale challenges with his clients.

Founded on 15th April 2020, Aristotle Performance has worked with several leaders, teams, and certified professionals through its partnership with the Fearless Organization. Till date, the organization has directly impacted over 2500 teams, and an innumerable number of teams have been impacted by those the firm has certified. Alongside its certified practitioners, the firm has also worked with several teams and organizations spread across six of the seven continents.

Present Business Environment

Neil believes most leaders and organizations face a challenge from what is commonly referred to as the VUCA world- volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Initially a military term, VUCA describes urban combat situations; it becomes relevant to survival from a business’s perspective is often what is at stake.

On the other hand, the current state of the world offers excellent opportunities. Those organizations that realize connecting with their people and creating team environments that are beneficial to the lives of their people will accelerate their business and separate them from their competitors.

Tackling the Gender Pay Gap

Neil believes the issue of the gender pay gap is a complex ongoing issue. He says, “Pay equity should be our goal, while also asking – “Equity for what?” There are numerous groups that are paid less. A specific group should not get paid more or less because they are an identifying member of any specific group.”

So, Aristotle Performance structures pay by looking at the bigger picture, assessing results, and creating equal opportunities to achieve those results. It is imperative to consider the unconscious bias, which is key to devising strategies to tackle those biases. Instead of having the same answer for everyone, the primary goal should be to create awareness regarding inappropriate gaps and work to fill those gaps. However, the organization’s response is quite simple, it has a rate based on a specific job role, and it pays as per the associated value of that role.

Diversity of thought, education, experience, mindset, process, and background is critical for every organization. If an organization want its employees to share their perspective, then it needs to help them by providing the proper environment, paying them adequately, and offering a sense of direction, connection, and meaning.

Keeping the Team Motivated

Neil keeps his team motivated in several ways. Firstly by connecting their effort and Aristotle Performance’s common mission. Secondly is by creating a team environment that offers the best personal and professional growth. And third, by working to share and nurture gratitude.

Everyone at Aristotle Performance knows the fact that Neil will support them in every aspect of their lives, as they feel willing to share with him. He says, “The greatest gift I’ve had as a leader is to see the potential someone else has before they see it in themselves- and working alongside them to help them achieve what they previously thought was impossible. As a result, I do not even question if they are motivated.”

Aristotle Performance is a culture-obsessed organization regarding re-learning and continuous education. It successfully incorporated and learned more than any other team or organization that Neil has ever been a part of.

“The result is a fast pace without being “fast-paced”: we have a lot of fun, we innovate, we accomplish a lot, and very importantly, we can look at each other and know that it is together that those outcomes were achieved.”- explains Neil.

Preparing for the Future

Having laid the foundation through its work at several global organizations, Aristotle Performance will soon start working with even more Fortune 500 companies to tackle the uncertainties our world is going through. In the future, Aristotle Performance’s goal is to become a global leader in developing psychological safety and learning by using a scalable, systemic, and repeatable process.

Neil says, “If we are successful, we will be changing the nature of work for an untold amount of employees and their families. We feel that our mission is to help people and organizations win together – and the world is abundant enough that we believe it is possible.”

Meet Hiren Kotak, the CEO of Hyper-Botz, helping clients adopt intelligent business process automation, so their employees don’t have to work on repetitive manual tasks, which their digital assistants can do.

After completing his Computer Science and Electronics Engineering, Hiren started his career as an IT programmer. Within a few years, he was promoted to Technical Lead and Manager. He eventually found his true calling in his managerial responsibilities and completed his MBA, and started working on developing business strategies using statistics and data analytics. In this role, Hiren successfully managed a team of developers, architects, operations analysts, project managers, process engineers, and product managers, which helped him deliver business value worth millions of dollars through revenue growth, cost efficiency, and customer service improvements.

Nearly half a decade ago, Hiren decided to explore Robotic Process Automation (RPA), to help a commercial bank grow efficiently. RPA enables faster, low-cost, high-return, non-invasive, low-code no-code automation and offered his organization the much-needed ability to quickly automate tasks that were resistant to automation via the traditional technology for several reasons.

As an RPA Evangelist, Hiren decided to help others achieve their automation dreams and manage the technology effectively to realize their desired results. For that, initially, he joined some well-known global technology service providers. With his MBA training, strategic mindset, and business background, he contributed significantly to the overall business performance of these companies and their clients.

After building significant experience as an automation consultant in the professional services industry, he finally decided to create his own company to help companies of every shape and size reap all the benefits of RPA.

“Having worked on two sides of customer and vendor relationships, I witnessed some opportunities that prevent clients from fully utilizing the vendor capabilities and some challenges that prevent vendors from being effective partners for their clients. At Hyper-Botz, we fully align our goals to our clients’ goals to maximize our contribution to their success.” – states Hiren.  

Increasing Productivity

Hyper-Botz’s primary mission is to boost global productivity using Intelligent Business Process Automation. Even after making such huge progress with digital technologies and computers, there’s still a lot of non-value-adding manual work in several sectors. Many of those administrative, tedious, repetitive, and transactional work is usually performed in business operations and horizontal services organizations like Finance and Accounting, HR, Procurement, IT, and Customer Service, which results in a loss of human intellect, productivity, and creativity. So, Hyper-Botz’s vision is to empower all humans to work like humans, not robots.

Using AI and RPA, Hyper-Botz enables its clients to attain greater speed, efficiency, and growth irrespective of their business domain.

“This type of automation, irrespective of your business processes and systems, can help you empower your employees, strengthen your customer relationships, and open new ways to innovate and expand your business.“- Says Hiren.

Hyper-Botz’s experienced practitioners partner with clients to maximize their automation potential and ROI. It helps its clients develop their automation strategy and roadmap, establish governance and operating model, identify automation opportunities, and develop, test, implement, and maintain bots. Under Hiren’s leadership, Hyper-Botz also provides Automation-as-a-Service to minimize upfront investment from its clients and eliminate their ongoing maintenance and support headaches.

Present Business Environment

“The current business environment is very interesting. During the Covid-19 shutdown, the US government pumped billions of dollars into the economy to keep it going. Once the vaccines became available, we became more comfortable living our normal lives,” Hiren explained, “as a result, business and consumer demand spiked. However, production and supply chains have not kept up with the resulting demand and inflation, leading to the Fed’s decision to raise interest rates again to contain the inflation. In the last couple of years, we have seen major swings up and down, and now most economists agree on one thing – economic uncertainty in the near term!”

For digital transformation and automation businesses, the situation is much more interesting. Thanks to the pandemic-induced shutdown, businesses worldwide realized the value and importance of automation and went for it, creating massive demands. However, with rising interest rates, inflation, and economic uncertainty, businesses are playing cautious with new investments and sometimes slowing some of their IT initiatives. Hyper-Botz has worked with several organizations to mitigate this issue in various ways. Thankfully as Business Process Automation requires very less upfront investment and provides huge ROI within the same quarter, Hyper-Botz hasn’t witnessed a major impact in this sector. Additionally, with its managed service offerings, Hyper-Botz eliminates any upfront capital expenditure and makes it easier for its customers to adopt intelligent automation throughout their companies.

Keeping the Team Motivated

Hiren believes in hiring talented people with good work ethics and can-do attitudes and then letting them do their jobs. His team members have the full autonomy to perform their jobs and deliver the output they are chosen to deliver.

Hiren encourages his team to take charge of their professional development and support them financially. He has also started a quarterly reward program to recognize their exceptional achievement, value delivery, and teamwork.

Tackling the Gender Pay Gap

Hiren believes there are two types of gender pay gaps; the first gap comes from women taking low-income jobs in low-income industries, government entities, and the service sector. While this could be a matter of choice as many women opt for stability, flexibility, or convenient hours for better work-life balance. These, in most cases, are personal choices without any external or negative pressure.

On the other hand, the second type of gap comes from women not being promoted or paid equally even after doing the same job as their male peers, which is a widespread problem that also affects people of color and needs immediate attention fixing. However, Hiren and his colleagues at Hyper-Botz encourage ‘women in technology’ during and after recruitment. With its diverse employees, Hyper-Botz has a strong culture of equality, transparency, and inclusiveness. It values the unique ideas, perspectives, and qualities women employees bring to the table.

Picture of the Future

At Hyper-Botz, Hiren and his team continue training their employees on the latest technological innovations and practical applications. He believes the world now needs its smartest people focused on solving problems like climate change, food and water issues, infrastructure and transportation hurdles, and growing health & safety concerns.

In the long run, Hiren would like his company to contribute to solving these global challenges.

He says, “We could simply use AI to maximize crop output, find efficient ways to generate, distribute, and store power, or explore optimal ways to utilize water and other natural resources. AI could help us be better prepared for containing the next pandemic or help us eliminate many fatal diseases. I think of this as – we all rent or lease a place in this world for a few years during our lifetime and it is our duty to leave it nice and clean, fully stocked, for the next set of tenants. My future goal is to help raise awareness and drive some of the restoration efforts in any way I can.“