How Monsanto encourages risk-taking within IT

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We sat down with Jim Swanson, the CIO of Monsanto, to ask him about how he encourages risk-taking within IT.

Watch the video or read the transcript below to learn more.

 

The Enterprisers Project (TEP): How do you encourage risk-taking within IT?

Swanson:  Monsanto is a big company. We're a sixteen billion dollar company. We are in over 67 countries around the world. We have 22,000 thousand employees. And we try to do some amazing things, but it's moving at times like the QE2. It's a big ship, and so you have to take it in pieces, and you have to iterate over ideas and get value out of those ideas and continue to shape the direction as you go.

So fail fast, fail small, build on that knowledge and learn and grow.

And that's kinda mantra that we've taken up, but again every quarter I want to see results even if it's a three to four year supply chain transformation.

We have got a big goal at the end, but here's where we are going to measure, so if we get it wrong, we can shift and adjust, if we get it right we could scale and we can we can accelerate it. And so that mindset is making its way through the IT function.

Nano Serwich is Editor of The Enterprisers Project and Global Awareness Content Manager at Red Hat.

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