How Kimberly-Clark’s Zack Hicks heeds the call for innovation

Zack Hicks is a transformational leader known for helping businesses leverage technology’s full potential to accelerate business growth. A 2019 inductee into the CIO Hall of Fame, Hicks leads technology operations at Kimberly-Clark as chief digital and technology officer and was previously founder, CEO, and president of Toyota Connected North America (TCNA) and EVP and chief digital officer of Toyota Motor North America (TMNA).

On a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast, we unpacked Hicks’ leadership playbook with a focus on many of the “answer the call” moments that have set him apart as an industry innovator. After the show, we spent time discussing how he drives digital innovation, inspires an innovative culture, and equips people across the company with the capabilities to thrive in a digital world. What follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Dan Roberts: What can you tell us about your mission for Digital Technology Solutions, and the strategy that’s laying the foundation for transformation at Kimberly-Clark?

Zack Hicks: DTS is a strategic function for our company, and in recent years, we’ve concentrated on moving towards a product and platform strategy that allows us to achieve economies of scale. Kimberly-Clark operates in more than 50 countries, and DTS has IT leaders in our business offices and manufacturing plants, which are typically located near our consumers. We also have several global digital and technology centers in strategic locations, including multiple sites in the United States, as well as Brazil, Argentina, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Poland, the UK, and India. So we truly are a global company, with team members around the world. While we do have people that are regionally focused, the remainder of my roughly 1,400 direct team members are working on a global scope, for global programs.

Part of our DTS strategy has involved realignment, with about 200 members of my central team re-focusing to be more aligned with the business functions. Most of those are Data and Insights professionals, to ensure our business can leverage analytics as fast as they need to, particularly around consumer, competitive, and internal data insights.

We’re also hyper-focused on modernizing and leapfrogging our supply chain capabilities, with an eye toward potentially extending our supply chain into our commercial partners. That is a game changer in the CPG industry.

There are lots of opportunities as well in digital sales and marketing to engage and interact with consumers in a much more meaningful way at scale. Customer sentiment and preferences are changing rapidly now. But with social media, there are lots of places to get real-time consumer insights into the types of products they want or don’t want. Being able iterate quickly and deliver on those customer expectations, the opportunity is there for the taking. These are just some of the areas we’re focused on right now.

It’s no secret that digital transformation is hard and wrought with failure. What capabilities are you putting in place to move the needle?

With digital transformation, it’s important to deliver value incrementally. Big bets often don’t pay off, and getting real-time feedback from the business keeps you focused on the right areas. For us, having that global insight and real-time data about what’s happening in every market really makes a difference. Putting that foundation in on our global data lake and self-service was a big unlock, and that gave us a step change to do more advanced AI, start our way into ML, and take it even further.

For example, how we do digital marketing in China, where we have a large presence, is different than how we do digital marketing in Argentina. Building the platforms allowed us to scale quickly, but focusing on key capabilities locally is the combination that allows us to win in each market.

We talked a lot in the podcast about people. What are you doing to unleash the power of people in your organization?

As a leader, I am passionate about unlocking the potential of our people, and at K-C we’re approaching this from multiple angles. One initiative I am deeply proud of is the creation of our in-house Digital University, a program designed to equip our teams in the key technical skills we want to enable in our entire workforce. A lot of companies that did outsourcing have found themselves in a situation where they have a lot of vendor managers versus technologists. And now with low- or no-code technology and some of the new AI tools, it’s important that they have a base understanding of some of these technologies. So, building that foundation and developing capabilities at scale is important.

We also run mentoring programs and place a strong emphasis on providing real-time feedback. It’s an ongoing focus for us, and it’s a differentiator. When I arrived a couple of years ago, my focus was on making sure we had the right people in the right roles and that they were positioned for success. I think a big unlock, too, is I’ve always believed that the most important thing I can do in my role is remove the obstacles in front of the team. That’s a big focus for me.

Another significant change since I joined Kimberly-Clark is the shift in our reporting structure. Previously, the CIO reported to the CFO. Now, as part of the enterprise executive leadership team, I can represent my team on a larger stage.

You have a passion and talent for innovation. What are you doing around AI to set the company up to win?

We’re making Kimberly-Clark future-ready by integrating advanced digital solutions that enhance and accelerate growth, profitability, and the consumer experience. And yes, we bet big on pioneering innovation as a force multiplier for growth.

Currently, we’ve got about 80 later-stage innovations going on. One of the first to pay off was putting AI on top of our procurement data. Because we operate in so many countries, this allowed us to query information such as spending with different vendors or product expenditures in any language. That alone took out several million dollars of other tools that we could remove.

With some of these big manufacturing machines, you takes a long time to learn how to work them and understand all the nuances. So we took our process knowledge, captured all that data, and developed an AI tool called Violet. Now, any employee starting new on the line can query, in any language, any question they have about how to improve quality or what the operations are about, and it’ll answer it.

We also have something called Dora, an AI tool that consolidates our R&D data. That has been super powerful. We’re doing real-time shelf analytics, which is interesting. Understanding price sensitivity, elasticity, and the price pack architecture, is driving new levels of performance. We are seeing a huge net improvement in sales based on leveraging real-time shelf analytics with consumers.

Another thing that’s important in the CPG industry is to engage a consumer the first time they’re interacting with a brand. We refer to this as POBA, or point of brand awareness. Predicting when a customer is going to buy a diaper before they’ve actually bought a diaper is challenging. However, by using AI to understand when a customer is likely to enter in the market, we’re seeing a 60x higher performance in our engagement.

This is just the beginning. I am super excited about the possibilities.

With all the things you can do with AI, data, and the cloud, how do you get your team to focus in on the areas that impact the bottom line?

A big part of it is allowing the innovation to occur — creating some small, walled gardens where employees can get inspired and experiment. But it’s important to have guardrails, to say you’ve got a period to experiment for X amount of time or with X amount of dollars, and knowing that at a certain point we’re going to move on. What you say yes to, but also what you say no to is important so you can refocus those initiatives effectively.

I just came back from India, where we did our first big hackathon, and it was exciting. We had 130 entries, we got it down to the seven finalists and then we awarded and funded the top three. People were excited about getting recognized for their innovation, but I think they’re equally excited about the funding to see that project come to fruition.

You’re known for your amazing hackathons. How do you orchestrate these? What excites you about them?

When I was first at Toyota, I felt like with everything I was working on, I was never going to get through it. So, to imagine what a “transformative shift” could look like, I had the business leaders as the judges during one of the first hackathons, and they were excited about everything they saw. They said, ‘I don’t want to just pick three winners. I want to vote for all of them.’ And I said, ‘Well you can. You can vote with your budget.’ That experience really began to reshape our portfolio. It also gave me an opportunity to see where the real talent was emerging in the organization versus just the ones that had exposure to me.

On this last trip to K-C’s global tech hub in India, a month before we locked in our travel, I said, ‘I want to do a hackathon,’ and they said, ‘We only have a month.’ Despite time concerns, we got our teams excited and ended up with 130 entries. It really changes the conversation. Some of the winning entries blew me away. They weren’t just demos or prototypes — they were working applications, because now with AI, they were able to build them fully as a robust application.

It’s transformative what you see when you unlock people’s potential, and the innovations around marketing and sales were built by people that weren’t in marketing or sales or supporting those functions. So you give people a chance to bust out of their silos.

How do you spot trends early and translate them into opportunities for business growth?

There are always emerging technologies, and I think we all do our best to read and stay on top of it. I try to engage with my peers a lot through industry groups like the CIO Strategy Exchange where I learn a lot from others. I also try to keep an open mind when I’m meeting with suppliers and vendors to ask them those same questions about what’s happening. And I try to bring it back into the organization in new ways.

For example, I had to present my new strategy to our executive leadership team last month, and I kicked it off with a video avatar of myself that was created using an AI tool. It wasn’t me talking, it sounded like me talking. I spoke in Chinese and Portuguese — just to show the power of what AI can do now. So it’s bringing to life stuff people had read about actually showing them.

Last May, we took our leadership team to Silicon Valley, and not only did we bring in some AI and other technology startups, but we also brought some other startups that were unique to our space. Connecting innovation with the business in new ways is also exciting to me.

Another of your highly refined leadership skills is your ability to ask different questions that get people thinking differently. Where does that instinct come from?

I think it’s probably a function of my dysfunction. I get really bored with the traditional operations. I think if I had to just focus on doing my next SAP upgrade, or the core running of the business, it’s not what gets me out of bed in the morning. What gets me out of bed is when technology and business come together in new ways. And I don’t have the answers, but our team does. Finding those opportunities to be inspired by them is what gets me excited.

For more from Zack Hicks’ innovation and leadership playbook, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.