To start day number three, we had a virtual get-together with students from the Athena School of Management to exchange about different topics with each other.
Next up, Anand Pazhenkottil represented SICC and gave insights about their well-established young professional network. Later, Andrea Gasser-Burri introduced her work and the activities which are executed by the NGO Dignity Freedom. Also, we had the pleasure to meet Joel Kistler, former project team member of Focus India, and Syed Shad from BBC online, who shared their success story in India.
It was an honour to welcome His Excellency Ambassador Sanjay Bhattacharyya in the afternoon who enriched our seminar with his perspectives and outlooks for India to Switzerland.
Afterward, the focus was set on a part of this year’s main topic: Trust. Lukas Widmer, responsible for lead brand and communication strategy at Swisscom introduced the relationship between trust and reputation. Finally, Thomas Mosel Principal Product and Solution Security Officer Smart Infrastructure at Siemens explained to us the importance of trust-building and learning from failures.
Anand Pazhenkottil, SICC-YPN – Insights into SICC
SICC (Swiss Indian chamber of commerce) is a bi-national Non-Profit organisation. It was founded in Switzerland in the year 1985. They are present in Zurich, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Pune. There are 400 active members in India and Switzerland (each country around 200). The chairman of SICC is Mr. Philippe M. Reich.
The goal of SICC is to open doors for their members when they are looking out for business partners. They navigate their members and provide them a platform for exchanging information, experience, and knowledge about technology. SICC is partners with the government of both nations, embassies, and consultants. Through these partners, the SICC creates networking opportunities for its members to maintain meaningful relationships with stakeholders, private companies, and the public. The SICC promotes companies’ cooperation in order to foster bilateral business relationships. As a politically neutral association, they mediate between politics, authorities, and businesses and strive to safeguard the interests of their members doing business in Switzerland and India.
SICC believes that there are many opportunities for working people to build connections with companies on their own. Whereas for graduates it’s usually not that easy to find the right path or a way to connect with bigger companies. Therefore, the SICC focuses especially on young professionals in Switzerland, that are looking for opportunities to work with Indian companies or would like to start their own business and need help. The young professional’s Network from the SICCis placed in Zurich and is a support for many start-ups.
– Written by Edin Milanovic and Sneka Sugumaran
Anand Pazhenkottil, ISCC-YPN
Joel Kistler and Syed Shad, BBC – Business in Asia
The BBC Group offers interesting and innovative solutions for different sectors. They have various manufacturing facilities in Asia, east-and central Europe, North America as well their own distribution companies for the most significant markets. Through that, they have a solid and broad international presence which is essential in today’s interconnected world.
The BBC Bircher Smart Access Company belonging to the group was founded in 1957 in Schaffhausen and joined the Group in 2003. They focus on automated access systems mainly for the public transport segment but also door technology/infrastructure and physical access solutions for various buildings and parking. With the products they offer as well as their work environment, the research and development department must always be up to date and work sustainably in order to be able to provide future-oriented and market-oriented solutions. BBC Bircher Smart Access sees huge potential in India and the surrounding area, at the moment they have a sales team consisting of Syed Shad and Ayush Rai, while Joel Kistler is responsible for Business Development in Asia and the Pacific region. They are also planning to have staff for technical support in the near future.
The work environment in Indiaposed a lot of challenges that the company had to face. One of them being the legal form of the company in India. Due to the situation, they have a legal entity as well as collaboration with channel partners to conduct their business. They also experienced that Swiss-made is not always effective because many customers want the best solution but also the cheapest price which can be difficult to address. Therefore, they try to really focus and communicate their value proposition, in order to show the quality and benefits of their products and by that trying to convince some potential customers that are rather focused on the price. Nevertheless, India is seen as a huge opportunity with big market potential for sensors and other smart access solutions. The pandemic also influenced the demand for door sensors mainly for hygiene areas positively since touchless doors got more popular, especially for toilets.
BBC Bircher Smart Access has to face competition from Europe, India as well as China which makes it even more important to put their focus on the value proposition in order to compete with them. In the next few years, BBC Bircher Smart Access plans to expand and grow consistently.
– Written by Alessandro Pace and Martin Pupic
Joel Kistler and Syed Shad, BBC
Lukas Widmer, Swisscom – Reputation and Trust
Lukas Widmer, Swisscom with the project team and staff 2021/2022
Lukas Widmer has a long working life behind him. He has worked in the banking sector, in administration, and for the last nine years as a mediator and Deputy Head of Brand Strategy & Experience at Swisscom. However, he may not judge only by his career. Besides he is also an avid hiker, as well as trained in self-defense, and loves to meditate. Lukas Widmer gave us in his presentation an understanding of trust and reputation with the example of Swisscom.
Trust is the will to rely on another party. Mostly this is on an action that happens in the future. The party relinquishes control, and it is unclear what the outcome will be. A good example here is the hairdresser. The customer trusts the hairdresser to cut a better hairstyle. Beyond the definition, trust is also an issue that depends on culture. The Nordic countries tend to have more trust than the southern countries. Due to the pandemic, the general trust of people has reduced. In addition, the telecommunications industry tends to be less trusted than other industries. Despite the low level of trust in telecommunications, Swisscom has one of the highest trust rates of all telecommunications companies in Europe.
Swisscom has gained this trust through the wide range of services it offers. In addition to traditional telephony, Swisscom offers Ultra-Broadband & 5G, Diversified Entertainment, Internet of Things, Cyber Security, and whatnot. Access to the network is another reason for the high level of trust. There is a network almost everywhere in Switzerland. Therefore, the company has already received several awards. The 24-hour hotline service only increases trust in Swisscom. Swisscom wants to remain a reliable partner in the future, so you are constantly evolving. Internet of Things is a big topic. Swisscom can also gain trust from its 16,000 employees and 900training places. The various projects such as Ready for the environment or Ready for people will continue to strengthen trust in the future. They want to become greener with the projects and support access to the digital world.
The topic of trust is the cornerstone for the second topic of reputation. With the many surveys, Swisscom was able to set up a reputation management system specific to the needs of its customers. They have found that Performance, Product/Services, Innovation, Workplace, Governance, Citizenship, and Leadership are necessary factors for a positive reputation. Swisscom used this data to create specific surveys on these topics for General Public, Residential Customers, and Employees. The results can then be used to map the issues. This information allows Swisscom to see where the performance and the importance are the best. Through this mapping, Swisscom can create various strategies regarding reputation. Swisscom observes that the employees tend to respond more positively than customers. This situation is due to a lack of information.
The most important thing Lukas Widmer wanted to give us is the tweet from Dalai Lama: “We need friends and friendship is based on trust. To earn trust, money and power aren’t enough; you have to show some concern for others. You can’t buy trust in the supermarket”.
– Written by Dario Blum and Flor Soukup
Thomas Mosel, Siemens – Build Trust and learn from Failure
Just culture is a culture of trust, learning, and accountability. Therefore, it is essential that when an error occurs, the people involved understand how to respond to minimize the negative impact and maximize learning from failures. The primary purpose of just culture is to gain confidence to report cybersecurity safety issues and learn from such incidents and how people can stay accountable for undesirable performance.
The first distinction is retribution versus restoration. In retribution, the focus is on the failure, for example, what rule was broken, who is responsible, and how bad the violation was. It tries to investigate if it was an honest mistake, done by a-risk behavior, or due to negligence. On the other hand, restoration focuses on the needs and supporting people, such as who has been impacted, what their needs are, and whose obligation is to meet them. It investigates the first victims (customers or the company), secondary victims (the user who did the failure), and the organization communities to understand who has been impacted by such failure.
The second distinction is humans versus systems. We learned about the Swiss Cheese Model, where we look through the whole chain and not at the individual layers. One single layer can be a failure and generate more cybersecurity failures. The main takeaway is that systems can succeed but can also fail, is not that human fails.
The third topic is types of rule-breaking, where three main reasons are identified. Control, where people bypass since there are no consequences. Subculture, where people define their own rules, and bad apples might be malicious or incompetent practitioners by not being adequately trained.
Some of the causes of failure can be social pressure, such as inexperienced engineers might follow experienced coworkers› poor strategies. Stress, such as the pressure to deliver within a short time, might lead to skipping some cybersecurity safety measures. Overconfidence, for instance, a software engineer with some experience might try to implement new codes without taking security measures.
In addition, an important measure to monitor and learn from failure is to report such failures to the relevant department. Nevertheless, this causes anxiety since people might believe this could cause trouble. Therefore, a voluntary protected reporting tool is necessary to ensure confidentiality and help maximize accessibility and minimize anxiety. In addition, this reporting could allow companies to learn from use case scenarios and prevent similar incidents in the future.
Furthermore, leadership is crucial to prevent cybersecurity incidents. Companies should not rely on one person but a team to solve cybersecurity incidents. Leaders should incentivize their employees to suggest new ways of doing things, so there is not only one solution in place. Keep reviewing critical cybersecurity results and implementing processes, tools, and automation for additional cybersecurity checks to allow people to work faster.
Last, psychological cybersecurity is vital to learn from incidents, keep the employees responsible, and let employees know that failures are allowed. Therefore it is essential to keep good communication with employees to create risk awareness and adaptability.
– Written by Flor Soukup and Dario Blum
Thomas Mosel, Siemens