Changing Organizational Behavior at American Express - The First CPM Summit

We just concluded our first ever two-day Investment Optimization summit at American Express which my team in Corporate Planning & Analysis put together. And I'm happy to report it was a resounding success. As I've previously discussed, enabling CPM within any organization is as much about process as it is about organizational behavior.

And the summit was an attempt at impacting organizational behavior. Some of the highlights of the summit are as follows:

• Although the CPM effort at American Express is largely managed by the finance organization, we required that our business unit finance partners invite those from the business to the summit as it is the business people who are initiating and managing these investments. And so it is important to ensure that the initiative owners understand why we engage in CPM. As a result, attendees at the summit were 65% finance and 35% business.
• In an effort to not have the 2 days solely comprised of one speaker after another, there was a CPM simulation done over both days where the participants were given a fictitious company and different roles and had to determine how to allocate finite resources amongst competing investments. This drove home why CPM was important to the attendees and was cited as one of the highlights of the summit.
• Of course, there were several speakers including myself, a video address from the company's CFO, Gary Crittenden, and opening remarks by the SVP of Corporate Planning & Analysis. Additionally, individual business unit CPM practitioners shared their best practices on a variety of topics.
• Beyond the internal speakers, there were several external speakers including Professor Clark Gilbert of Harvard and the author of From Resource Allocation to Strategy who discussed the inherent link between a company's portfolio and strategy. We also had Professor Sunil Gupta of Columbia Business School who discussed valuing marketing investments and finally Steve Berez, a partner at Bain, who covered IT Portfolio Management.
• There was also an awards ceremony where we recognized those who have made CPM at American Express so successful.

Beyond the content and simulation, the company's investment in the summit was perhaps the greatest indication of the organization's serious interest in CPM's success. The other intangible benefit from the summit was the networking it enabled amongst the many CPM practitioners within the company.

If anyone is interested in learning more about American Express' CPM summit, please do drop me a line as I'd be happy to tell you more. Additionally, if others have found interesting and effective ways to impact organizational behavior when enabling a CPM discipline, please leave your thoughts and ideas with others reading this.