Expanding Innovation is Less About Fortune-More About a Company's Inherent Characteristics
In the world of technology and innovation, Rosalba Carandente, the Technology Director at Baker Hughes for Climate Technology Solutions, stands out for her unique approach to leadership. Drawing inspiration from the intricacies of DNA, Carandente has developed a framework for leadership that is as complex as it is effective.
This framework, which she refers to as DNA-level leadership, includes five key strands: mapping dependencies, engineering for mutation, instilling self-replication, designing for the ecosystem, and protecting the culture's rhythm.
In high-stakes initiatives, Carandente relies on these strands to co-design the physical genome, making data useful, not just smart. She maintains discipline as a cultural immune system, ensuring clear roles, weekly operations reviews, leadership check-ins, designated decision-makers, and a steering committee that provides a forum for early issue identification and necessary pivots.
In the realm of Apple, this disciplined approach to design has proven invaluable, reinforcing the lesson that in high-stakes environments, clarity beats heroics.
Carandente's innovative leadership style has been honed over years of experience. Before her current role, she led companies such as Maire Tecnimont Group and GE Oil & Gas. Her leadership has led to the successful implementation of new product programs, ranging from predictive maintenance to digital innovation and first-of-a-kind (FOAK) clean energy systems.
One truth that has become clear to Carandente is that even the best ideas won't scale unless the organisation itself is built to evolve with them. This is why she emphasises the importance of strategic alignment, a lesson illustrated by the Vasa warship, a 17th-century engineering marvel that sank on its maiden voyage due to poor communication, unclear authority, and design changes made without accountability.
Carandente's approach also extends to data management. Making data useful requires co-designing the user experience with field engineers, service teams, and commercial leads. This collaborative approach ensures that data is not just smart, but usable and effective in driving decision-making and innovation.
Moreover, Carandente believes in designing for uncertainty, not against it. This involves embedding systems engineering and risk analysis into the design phase, defining trade-offs and capacity buffers with logic that gives flexibility along the way.
In an aftermarket program, this approach improved lead times, financial predictability, and responsiveness to end-of-quarter demand swings. It also allowed for the redesign of production flow to preserve a semi-finished, high-margin product.
Carandente's innovative leadership style has not gone unnoticed. She is a member of the Forbes Technology Council, an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs, and technology executives.
NVIDIA's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) succeeded by being designed to replicate, evolving from a workaround into a blueprint, much like Carandente's DNA-level leadership framework.
In a world where adaptability is key, Carandente's DNA-level leadership offers a blueprint for designing organisations that can grow, evolve, and innovate, building not just products, but blueprints across industries and at different scales.
