- Welcome to The Shiproom, you're on the air.
- He looks like he needs help. - Yeah, I got that too.
- (Spanish: We can talk in Spanish if you want.)
(Spanish: And let's do it during the interview.)
- (Spanish: Perfect.) No problem. Okay!
- In 1922, the Campbells company
added Soup as its middle name.
My guest's middle name today is Jose.
And so with that, please welcome Francisco Fraga,
who is the CIO of the Campbell Soup company,
to The Shiproom.
- Thank you Brad. - Thank you for being here.
- Thank you for having me.
- Yeah (Spanish: Charmed, it's a pleasure.)
(Spanish: Pleasure.)
I've read about how Campbells
looked around the industry,
and you were seeing these smaller competitors
who kinda nipping at Campbells
and trying to take market share.
When you've got this incredible supply chain, big company,
how do you use technology to stay nimble when you're so big?
- Well I think that's the key word,
is being as agile as those smaller companies.
Collaboration plays a big role.
Making sure that people are able to collaborate seamlessly,
share information, share knowledge as soon as possible.
- And you work faster, that's one of the things
is collaborating at speed now.
- Correct, that plays a key role.
Definitely the Office 365 Stack plays a key role for us.
- Key role yeah.
- We have actually proven it.
I mean if you put a team working collaboratively
on a set of documents just co-editing online,
and you put that same team working on the traditional way of
here is the last version, take a look
and then you get another version and
God forbid you need five people,
I mean it just slows your process
slows your process, slows your process down.
So that collaboration aspect is critical for us to be agile.
- So you work in New Jersey right now.
- That's right
- But you grew up in Venezuela speaking Spanish
- Yes
- So I got some cards here that have
some Spanish sayings on them.
And these are actually from Venezuela, we did our homework.
- Okay
- If you can give me the literal translation
of what the sentence is,
and then what the actual meaning is.
- Okay.
- So here's the first one.
"Mucho chicle pero poca bomba."
- The translation would be lot of bubblegum,
but little pop, and it really means say,
a lot of talk, but not a lot of action.
- Okay, next
"Mas peligroso que mono con hojilla."
- So the translation is,
more dangerous than a monkey with a razor blade,
and it basically describes a situation
that is very dangerous but is also unpredictable,
so you don't know how it is gonna end.
- Es bueno el cilantro pero no tanto.
- Okay, yeah.
So cilantro is good but not too much of it,
which basically means sometimes you can have
too much of a good thing.
- Are these sayings that you grew up hearing?
- Oh all the time, yeah absolutely.
I find myself many times with my leadership team
especially trying to use one of these phrases.
- Oh so this comes into your mind?
- Yeah, and I translate it just like I just did,
literally and they are looking at me
really completely lost about it.
- You and I were talking about your usage
of the Microsoft 365 services.
Have you ever seen resistance in your team
in terms of moving to the cloud?
And if you've seen resistance,
how do you help organizations, your individuals
understand their jobs are actually gonna be more impactful?
- Early on there was a bit of concern
mostly because of the newness of the platforms
certainly when it came to the security of the cloud.
I have to say those concerns are pretty much gone.
Actually we see moving to the cloud
as a way to improve our security.
- To be more secure.
- And we also see it as a way to be more agile.
One of the key things that I really focus on Campbells
is how do we make this 150 year old company
a very agile large company.
And the cloud plays a critical role in that.
- That is someone calling us on our Teams' phone.
Check this out.
- Wow, that's state of the art right there.
- Alright, hey, welcome to The Shiproom with Francisco Fraga
who's on the Teams' phone here?
- Hello, this is Professor Tiberius Waynesworth
from the Society for the Preservation
and Research of Hot Liquid Meals.
- This voice is familiar, I thought you were
a beer historian.
- I had a double major.
And I have a couple of questions for Francisco.
- Oh, got it, okay alright.
- As a soup historian, I'm in the process of writing a book
about the entire back catalog of Campbells soup flavors,
and I'm curious if I could conduct some research
while we're conversing.
- Sure, absolutely.
- I'm going to read you some soup names
and you tell me if these are real flavors made by Campbell's
over the last 150 years, or if they are fakes.
I call this challenge Soup or Dupe.
Are you ready?
Cream of Shrimp.
- Soup. - This one's real.
Chunky Goldfish cracker.
- Dupe. - This one's fake.
Chili cheeseburger quesadilla.
- Dupe.
- Also fake.
Cream of cheese.
- Dupe.
- Wish it were real, but fake.
- That's called nachos.
- Slow kettle style kickin' crab and sweet corn chowder.
- I don't think the can is big enough
to hold all of that description.
Dupe.
- It's real.
Turkey noodle stroganoff.
- Soup.
- Fake.
- Oh sounds good though I'll bring it to the R&D department.
- Chicago style hotdog gumbo.
- Soup.
- Fake as the day is long.
- I'm gonna have to iron out my knowledge on old flavors.
- Disney Princess Jasmine soup.
- We do collaborate with Disney quite a bit, soup.
- Thank you for your participation Francisco.
Your input will prove useful in my upcoming book.
Soup, The Untold Truth.
- One of the things I noticed about your organization is
you do push the limits again
just looking kinda how broadly you use the cloud.
Talk to me about how the modern desktop
or the modern workplace changes the culture
of what your employees are capable of doing.
- I think it's in general collaborative technologies.
Right, collaboration technologies.
The technology is great but you really cannot run a meeting
that is virtual in nature the same way
you would run a meeting where everybody is sitting
around the table.
So it did require some business transformation,
it was not all about bring in the technology
and forget about it, it really required us understanding
how people run meetings, what works well,
what doesn't work well, and then translate that
into a virtual setting
and really help the organization at large
through training and education.
I always joke that we may have
the most cool artificial intelligence technology
nobody is gonna be talking with us about it
if the email is down.
Once again leveraging the cloud,
leveraging Office 365,
making sure that we have the right resiliency in place,
making sure that we are very clear on
what are our critical business processes
and those critical business processes
have the proper technologies stacked,
ensure business continuity.
And then that gives you a platform
that then you can leverage to innovate.
- As you transition from doing things
in the traditional way on-prem to coming up in the cloud,
you also have to transform the way you do it
to take advantage of all the new capabilities.
- Completely, yes.
- So how do you train your users on how they transform
or change the way they work?
- We really help them through first,
understanding the technology.
The worst thing that you can do
is when somebody starts to feel inadequate
in leveraging the technology.
- That's confidence then, yeah.
- Correct.
Most of the times you will see that
they just abandon the technology
because they feel incompetent.
- Intimidated. - Correct, exactly.
And early successes and making a big deal of those successes
- Publish those and celebrate those.
- As examples are a big contributor
to start creating the energy
around adopting different ways of working.
- That's such great advice for all of us to understand.
- You probably don't know this,
but the whole time we've been talking
we've actually had a machine learning algorithm
listening to us, analyzing it,
and it's actually now developed
the 10 or 12 most pertinent questions
based upon our discussion.
But to make it a little more interesting,
what I have here is two bowls of Campbells Alphabet Soup.
- Oh that's outstanding.
- So while we are answering questions here
we're both gonna see if we can spell out our names.
- I have a little bit of a disadvantage then.
- What's the best sandwich to eat with tomato soup?
- Well actually I like to put Goldfish in my tomato soup
and you know a nice cheese sandwich.
- How many times do you hit snooze in the morning?
- None.
- What's your favorite Venezuelan snack?
- This flatbread made with cassava.
- Sounds like a great soup flavor too.
This is hard.
- It is very hard, I'm still in the Rs
so you are really way ahead of me here.
- Is it gross to put fruit on pizza?
- I don't judge personal choices whatsoever
it's all about providing the right ingredients
so that people can express themselves and be creative.
- If you look at it scientifically is cereal a soup?
- No!
No no no no!
- If someone asked to borrow $5 would you do it?
- Yeah for sure, especially if it's a good cause.
- Can I have $5?
And how many spiders is too many spiders?
- One.
- I almost got my name, I got Brad A-er-so.
- Well, you have all the Rs, I have F.
- This has been awesome, I gotta tell you
it's been fun to learn more about Campbells Soup
and more about the change that you're driving.
So people wanna learn more about Campbells
and more about you, where can they go?
- They can go to our website at CampbellsKitchen.com
and they can also reach out to me on LinkedIn.
- Again, Francisco Fraga, who is the CIO
of Campbells Soup company, been with us here
on The Shiproom today.
Francisco, thank you very much.
- Brad, thank you very much for having me, I appreciate it.
- My pleasure.
- Good?
Perfect! - That was awesome, right
- Brad, thank you very much, it was great meeting you.
- Mark.