Michael Kanazawa / EY
Excellence in Technology
Michael Kanazawa says the absolute best thing about consulting is learning something new every day from peers, clients, team members and new hires. "We are exposed to so many new situations, business challenges, leadership styles, cultures and individual points of view that it stretches me to expand and reframe."
Safe to say that Kanazawa has been learning his entire career, but perhaps even more since EY acquired Bedrock Consultants, a firm he founded focused on a blend of strategy and design thinking approaches centered on customer-driven innovation. In fact, he counts that day as a high point of his career.
"And now, bringing scale to the vision of delivering innovation through blended strategy, design and advanced technology at EY is a significant confirmation of the ideas that were first imagined over 10 years ago," he says. "The key has been to continuously explore how to combine and integrate diverse thinking and experiences to solve tough enduring problems in new ways. This started in product management, with collaboration across engineers, sales people, customer service agents and field operations."
Today, this means putting blended teams together from strategy, design, advanced technology, business process, tax and others to generate innovative growth paths—and to blend aspects of leading and learning on every engagement, he says.
Kanazawa is a Global Innovation Realized Leader at EY and an expert in corporate strategy and corporate transformation. His experience is in working with business leaders in generating growth through customer-driven innovation, new product development, corporate strategy and company-wide transformations. He has worked with many global corporations and market leaders, with a specific focus on technology-driven consumer and B2B companies as well as retail.
He is also the co-author of Big Ideas to Big Results (now in its second printing) with Dr. Robert Miles , which was also a major achievement. "It's been my life's passion to help leaders tap into the full strength of human ingenuity and creativity to drive strategic growth and transformation," Kanazawa says.
At three clients this year, EY's key sponsoring executives have received breakthrough funding and organizational alignment to implement innovation concepts the firm helped clients generate. "In all cases, these innovation programs drove optimism and aspiration towards new growth for both the companies and the individuals involved," he says. "It's been tremendously gratifying to see EY become a strategic transformation partner for innovation as we have established Innovation Realized as a scalable global offer and methodology."
Q&A: What motivates you to excel?
Kanazawa: "My first major corporate job was in a large regulated telco company, where so many talented, creative people appeared defeated. This seemed an unintended consequence of how the business operated. But I saw no reason large corporations had to turn into bureaucratic, soulless places. The intent of our work is to spark innovation and growth. It's extremely rewarding to watch previously stuck organizations generate breakthrough strategies and see their innovations succeed in bringing amazing new value to customers, partners and employees. It makes me want to do even more."
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