Podcasts about Accenture

Robert Ross, CEO and Co-Founder at FireHydrant, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how being an on-call engineer fighting incidents inspired him to start his own company. Robert explains how FireHydrant does more than just notify engineers of an incident, but also helps them to be able to effectively put out the fire. Robert tells the story of how he “accidentally” started a company as a result of a particularly critical late-night incident, and why his end goal at FireHydrant has been and will continue to be solving the problem, not simply choosing an exit strategy. Corey and Robert also discuss the value and pricing models of other incident-reporting solutions and Robert shares why he feels surprised that nobody else has taken the same approach FireHydrant has. About RobertRobert Ross is a recovering on-call engineer, and the CEO and co-founder at FireHydrant. As the co-founder of FireHydrant, Robert plays a central role in optimizing incident response and ensuring software system reliability for customers. Prior to founding FireHydrant, Robert previously contributed his expertise to renowned companies like Namely and Digital Ocean. Links Referenced: FireHydrant: https://firehydrant.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/bobbytables TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code they write, but also the containers and cloud infrastructure their apps run on. And a big part of that responsibility is app security — from code to cloud. That's where Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets teams where they are, automating application security controls across their existing tools, workflows, and the AWS application stack — including seamless integrations with AWS CodePipeline, Amazon EKS, Amazon Inspector and several others. I'm a customer myself. Deploy on AWS. Secure with Snyk. Learn more at snyk.co/scream. That's S-N-Y-K-dot-C-O/scream.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. And this featured guest episode is brought to us by our friends at FireHydrant and for better or worse, they've also brought us their CEO and co-founder, Robert Ross, better known online as Bobby Tables. Robert, thank you for joining us.Robert: Super happy to be here. Thanks for having me.Corey: Now, this is the problem that I tend to have when I've been tracking companies for a while, where you were one of the only people that I knew of at FireHydrant. And you kind of still are, so it's easy for me to imagine that, oh, it's basically your own side project that turned into a real job, sort of, side hustle that's basically you and maybe a virtual assistant or someone. I have it on good authority—and it was also signaled by your Series B—that there might be more than just you over there now.Robert: Yes, that's true. There's a little over 60 people now at the company, which is a little mind-boggling for me, starting from side projects, building this in Starbucks to actually having people using the thing and being on payroll. So, a little bit of a crazy thing for me. But yes, over 60.Corey: So, I have to ask, what is it you folks do? When you say ‘fire hydrant,' the first thing that I think I was when I was a kid getting yelled at by the firefighter for messing around with something I probably shouldn't have been messing around with.Robert: So, it's actually very similar where I started it because I was messing around with software in ways I probably shouldn't have and needed a fire hydrant to help put out all the fires that I was fighting as an on-call engineer. So, the name kind of comes from what do you need when you're putting out a fire? A fire hydrant. So, what we do is we help people respond to incidents really quickly, manage them from ring to retro. So, the moment you declare an incident, we'll do all the timeline tracking and eventually help you create a retrospective at the very end. And it's been a labor of love because all of that was really painful for me as an engineer.Corey: One of the things that I used to believe was that every company did something like this—and maybe they do, maybe they don't—I'm noticing these days an increasing number of public companies will never admit to an incident that very clearly ruined things for their customers. I'm not sure if they're going to talk privately to customers under NDAs and whatnot, but it feels like we're leaving an era where it was an expectation that when you had a big issue, you would do an entire public postmortem explaining what had happened. Is that just because I'm not paying attention to the right folks anymore, or are you seeing a downturn in that?Robert: I think that people are skittish of talking about how much reliability they—or issues they may have because we're having this weird moment where people want to open more incidents like the engineers actually want to say we have more incidents and officially declare those, and in the past, we had these, like, shadow incidents that we weren't officially going to say it was an incident, but was a pretty big deal, but we're not going to have a retro on it so it's like it didn't happen. And kind of splitting the line between what's a SEV1, when should we actually talk about this publicly, I think companies are still trying to figure that out. And then I think there's also opposing forces. We talk to folks and it's, you know, public relations will sometimes get involved. My general advice is, like, you should be probably talking about it no matter what. That's how you build trust.It's trust, with incidences, lost in buckets and gained back in drops, so you should be more public about it. And I think my favorite example is a major CDN had a major incident and it took down, like, the UK government website. And folks can probably figure out who I'm talking about, but their stock went up the next day. You would think that a major incident taking down a large portion of the internet would cause your stock to go down. Not the case. They were on it like crazy, they communicated about it like crazy, and lo and behold, you know, people were actually pretty okay with it as far as they could be at the end of the day.Corey: The honest thing that really struck me about that was I didn't realize that CDN that you're referencing was as broadly deployed as it was. Amazon.com took some downtime as a result of this.Robert: Yeah.Corey: It's, “Oh, wow. If they're in that many places, I should be taking them more seriously,” was my takeaway. And again, I don't tend to shame folks for incidents because as soon as you do that, they stopped talking about them. They still have them, but then we all lose the ability to learn from them. I couldn't help but notice that the week that we're recording this, so there was an incident report put out by AWS for a Lambda service event in Northern Virginia.It happened back in June, we're recording this late in October. So, it took them a little bit of time to wind up getting it out the door, but it's very thorough, very interesting as far as what it talks about as far as their own approach to things. Because otherwise, I have to say, it is easy as a spectator slash frustrated customer to assume the absolute worst. Like, you're sitting around there and like, “Well, we have a 15-minute SLA on this, so I'm going to sit around for 12 minutes and finish my game of solitaire before I answer the phone.” No, it does not work that way. People are scrambling behind the scenes because as systems get more complicated, understanding the interdependencies of your own system becomes monstrous.I still remember some of the very early production engineering jobs that I had where—to what you said a few minutes ago—oh, yeah, we'll just open an incident for every alert that goes off. Then we dropped a [core switch 00:05:47] and Nagio sent something like 8000 messages inside of two minutes. And we would still, 15 years later, not be done working through that incident backlog had we done such a thing. All of this stuff gets way harder than you would expect as soon as your application or environment becomes somewhat complicated. And that happens before you realize it.Robert: Yeah, much faster. I think that, in my experience, there's a moment that happens for companies where maybe it's the number of customers you have, number of servers you're running in production, that you have this, like, “Oh, we're running a big workload right now in a very complex system that impacts people's lives, frankly.” And the moment that companies realize that is when you start to see, like, oh, process change, you build it, you own it, now we have an SRE team. Like, there's this catalyst that happens in all of these companies that triggers this. And it's—I don't know, from my perspective, it's coming at a faster rate than people probably realize.Corey: From my perspective, I have to ask you this question, and my apologies in advance if it's one of those irreverent ones, but do you consider yourself to be an observability company?Robert: Oh, great question. No. No, actually. We think that we are the baton handoff between an observability tool and our platform. So, for example, we think that that's a good way to kind of, you know, as they say, monitor the system, give reports on that system, and we are the tool that based on that monitor may be going off, you need to do something about it.So, for example, I think of it as like a smoke detector in some cases. Like, in our world, like that's—the smoke detector is the thing that's kind of watching the system and if something's wrong, it's going to tell you. But at that point, it doesn't really do anything that's going to help you in the next phase, which is managing the incident, calling 911, driving to the scene of the fire, whatever analogies you want to use. But I think the value-add for the observability tools and what they're delivering for businesses is different than ours, but we touch each other, like, very much so.Corey: Managing an incident when something happens and diagnosing what is the actual root cause of it, so to speak—quote-unquote, “Root cause.” I know people have very strong opinions on—Robert: Yeah, say the word [laugh].Corey: —that phrase—exactly—it just doesn't sound that hard. It is not that complicated. It's, more or less, a bunch of engineers who don't know what they're actually doing, and why are they running around chasing this stuff down is often the philosophy of a lot of folks who have never been in the trenches dealing with these incidents themselves. I know this because before I was exposed to scale, that's what I thought and then, oh, this is way harder than you would believe. Now, for better or worse, an awful lot of your customers and the executives at those customers did, for some strange reason, not come up through production engineering as the thing that they've done. They are executives, so it feels like it would be a challenging conversation to have with them, but one thing that you've got in your back pocket, which I always love talking to folks about, is before this, you were an engineer and then you became a CEO of a reasonably-sized company. That is a very difficult transition. Tell me about it.Robert: Yeah. Yeah, so a little of that background. I mean, I started writing code—I've been writing code for two-thirds of my life. So, I'm 32 now; I'm relatively young. And my first job out of high school—skipping college entirely—was writing code. I was 18, I was working in a web dev shop, I was making good enough money and I said, you know what? I don't want to go to college. That sounds—I'm making money. Why would I go to college?And I think it was a good decision because I got to be able—I was right kind of in the centerpiece of when a lot of really cool software things were happening. Like, DevOps was becoming a really cool term and we were seeing the cloud kind of emerge at this time and become much more popular. And it was a good opportunity to see all this confluence of technology and people and processes emerge into what is, kind of like, the base plate for a lot of how we build software today, starting in 2008 and 2009. And because I was an on-call engineer during a lot of that, and building the systems as well, that I was on call for, it meant that I had a front-row seat to being an engineer that was building things that was then breaking, and then literally merging on GitHub and then five minutes later [laugh], seeing my phone light up with an alert from our alerting tool. Like, I got to feel the entire process.And I think that that was nice because eventually one day, I snapped. And it was after a major incident, I snapped and I said, “There's no tool that helps me during this incident. There's no tool that kind of helps me run a process for me.” Because the only thing I care about in the middle of the night is going back to bed. I don't have any other priority [laugh] at 2 a.m.So, I wanted to solve the problem of getting to the fire faster and extinguishing it by automating as much as I possibly could. The process that was given to me in an outdated Confluence page or Google Doc, whatever it was, I wanted to automate that part so I could do the thing that I was good at as an engineer: put out the fire, take some notes, and then go back to bed, and then do a retrospective sometime next day or in that week. And it was a good way to kind of feel the problem, try to build a solution for it, tweak a little bit, and then it kind of became a company. I joke and I say on accident, actually.Corey: I'll never forget one of the first big, hairy incidents that I had to deal with in 2009, where my coworker had just finished migrating the production environment over to LDAP on a Thursday afternoon and then stepped out for a three-day weekend, and half an hour later, everything started exploding because LDAP will do that. And I only had the vaguest idea of how LDAP worked at all. This was a year into my first Linux admin job; I'd been a Unix admin before that. And I suddenly have the literal CEO of the company breathing down my neck behind me trying to figure out what's going on and I have no freaking idea of myself. And it was… feels like there's got to be a better way to handle these things.We got through. We wound up getting it back online, no one lost their job over it, but it was definitely a touch-and-go series of hours there. And that was a painful thing. And you and I went in very different directions based upon experiences like that. I took a few more jobs where I had even worse on-call schedules than I would have believed possible until I started this place, which very intentionally is centered around a business problem that only exists during business hours. There is no 2 a.m. AWS billing emergency.There might be a security issue masquerading as one of those, but you don't need to reach me out of business hours because anything that is a billing problem will be solved in Seattle's timeline over a period of weeks. You leaned into it and decided, oh, I'm going to start a company to fix all of this. And okay, on some level, some wit that used to work here, wound up once remarking that when an SRE doesn't have a better idea, they start a monitoring company.Robert: [laugh].Corey: And, on some level, there's some validity to it because this is the problem that I know, and I want to fix it. But you've differentiated yourself in a few key ways. As you said earlier, you're not an observability company. Good for you.Robert: Yeah. That's a funny quote.Corey: Pete Cheslock. He has a certain way with words.Robert: Yeah [laugh]. I think that when we started the company, it was—we kind of accidentally secured funding five years ago. And it was because this genuinely was something I just, I bought a laptop for because I wanted to own the IP. I always made sure I was on a different network, if I was going to work on the company and the tool. And I was just writing code because I just wanted to solve the problem.And then some crazy situation happened where, like, an investor somehow found FireHydrant because they were like, “Oh, this SRE thing is a big space and incidents is a big part of it.” And we got to talking and they were like, “Hey, we think what you're building is valuable and we think you should build a company here.” And I was—like, you know, the Jim Carrey movie, Yes Man? Like, that was kind of me in that moment. I was like, “Sure.” And here we are five years later. But I think the way that we approached the problem was let's just solve our own problem and let's just build a company that we want to work at.And you know, I had two co-founders join me in late 2018 and that's what we told ourselves. We said, like, “Let's build a company that we want to work for, that solves problems that we have had, that we care about solving.” And I think it's worked out, you know? We work with amazing companies that use our tool—much to their chagrin [laugh]—multiple times a day. It's kind of a problem when you build an incident response tool is that it's a good thing when people are using it, but a bad thing for them.Corey: I have to ask of all of the different angles to approach this from, you went with incident management as opposed to focusing on something that is more purely technical. And I don't say that in any way that is intended to be sounding insulting, but it's easier from an engineering mind to—having been one myself—to come up with, “Here's how I make one computer talk to his other computer when the following event happens.” That's a much easier problem by orders of magnitude than here's how I corral the humans interacting with that computer's failure to talk to another computer in just the right way. How did you get onto this path?Robert: Yeah. The problem that we were trying to solve for it was the getting the right people in the room problem. We think that building services that people own is the right way to build applications that are reliable and stable and easier to iterate on. Put the right people that build that software, give them, like, the skin in the game of also being on call. And what that meant for us is that we could build a tool that allowed people to do that a lot easier where allowing people to corral the right people by saying, “This service is broken, which powers this functionality, which means that these are the people that should get involved in this incident as fast as possible.”And the way we approached that is we just built up part of our functionality called Runbooks, where you can say, “When this happens, do this.” And it's catered for incidents. So, there's other tools out there, you can kind of think of as, like, we're a workflow tool, like Zapier, or just things that, like, fire webhooks at services you build and that ends up being your incident process. But for us, we wanted to make it, like, a really easy way that a project manager could help define the process in our tool. And when you click the button and say, “Declare Incident: LDAP is Broken,” and I have a CEO standing behind me, our tool just would corral the people for you.It was kind of like a bat signal in the air, where it was like, “Hey, there's this issue. I've run all the other process. I just need you to arrive at and help solve this problem.” And we think of it as, like, how can FireHydrant be a mech suit for the team that owns incidents and is responsible for resolving them?Corey: There are a few easier ways to make a product sound absolutely ridiculous than to try and pitch it to a problem that it is not designed to scale to. What is the ‘you must be at least this tall to ride' envisioning for FireHydrant? How large slash complex of an organization do you need to be before this starts to make sense? Because I promise, as one person with a single website that gets no hits, that is probably not the best place for—Robert: Probably not.Corey: To imagine your ideal user persona.Robert: Well, I'm sure you get way more hits than that. Come on [laugh].Corey: It depends on how controversial I'm being in a given week.Robert: Yeah [laugh].Corey: Also, I have several ridiculous, nonsense apps out there, but honestly, those are for fun. I don't charge people for them, so they can deal with my downtime till I get around to it. That's the way it works.Robert: Or, like, spite-visiting your website. No it's—for us, we think that the ‘must be this tall' is when do you have, like, sufficiently complicated incidents? We tell folks, like, if you're a ten-person shop and you have incidents, you know, just use our free tier. Like, you need something that opens a Slack channel? Fine. Use our free tier or build something that hits the Slack API [unintelligible 00:18:18] channel. That's fine.But when you start to have a lot of people in the room and multiple pieces of functionality that can break and multiple people on call, that's when you probably need to start to invest in incident management. Because it is a return on investment, but there is, like, a minimum amount of incidents and process challenges that you need to have before that return on investment actually, I would say, comes to fruition. Because if you do think of, like, an incident that takes downtime, or you know, you're a retail company and you go down for, let's say, ten minutes, and your number of sales per hour is X, it's actually relatively simple for that type of company to understand, okay, this is how much impact we would need to have from an incident management tool for it to be valuable. And that waterline is actually way—it's way lower than I think a lot of people realize, but like you said, you know, if you have a few 100 visitors a day, it's probably not worth it. And I'll be honest there, you can use our free tier. That's fine.Corey: Which makes sense. It's challenging to wind up-sizing things appropriately. Whenever I look at a pricing page, there are two things that I look for. And incidentally, when I pull up someone's website, I first make a beeline for pricing because that is the best way I found for a lot of the marketing nonsense words to drop away and it get down to brass tacks. And the two things I want are free tier or zero-dollar trial that I can get started with right now because often it's two in the morning and I'm trying to see if this might solve a problem that I'm having.And I also look for the enterprise tier ‘contact us' because there are big companies that do not do anything that is not custom nor do they know how to sign a check that doesn't have two commas in it. And whatever is between those two, okay, that's good to look at to figure out what dimensions I'm expected to grow on and how to think about it, but those are the two tent poles. And you've got that, but pricing is always going to be a dark art. What I've been seeing across the industry. And if we put it under the broad realm of things that watch your site and alert you and help manage those things, there are an increasing number of, I guess what I want to call component vendors, where you'll wind up bolting together a couple dozen of these things together into an observability pipeline-style thing, and each component seems to be getting extortionately expensive.Most of the wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night services that will page you—and there are a number of them out there—at a spot check of these, they all cost more per month per user than Slack, the thing that most of us to end up living within. This stuff gets fiendishly expensive, fiendishly quickly, and at some point, you're looking at this going, “The outage is cheaper than avoiding the outage through all of these things. What are we doing here?” What's going on in the industry, other than ‘money printing machine stopped going brrr' in quite the same way?Robert: Yeah, I think that for alerting specifically, this is a big part of, like, the journey that we wanted to have in FireHydrant was like, we also want to help folks with the alerting piece. So, I'll focus on that, which is, I think that the industry around notifying people for incidents—texts, call, push notifications, emails, there's a bunch of different ways to do it—I think where it gets really crazy expensive as in this per-seat model that most of them seem to have landed on. And we're per-seat for, like, the core platform of FireHydrant—so you know, before people spite-visit FireHydrant, look at our pricing pitch—but we're per-seat there because the value there is, like, we're the full platform for the service catalog retrospectives, Runbooks, like, there's a whole other component of FireHydrant—status pages—but when it comes to alerting, like, in my opinion, that should be active user for a few reasons. I think that if you're going to have people responding to incidents and the value from us is making sure they get to that incident very quickly because we wake them up in the middle of the night, we text them, we call them we make their Hue lights turn red, whatever it is, then that's, like, the value that we're delivering at that moment in time, so that's how we should probably invoice you.And I think that what's happened is that the pricing for these companies, they haven't innovated on the product in a way that allows them to package that any differently. So, what's happened, I think, is that the packaging of these products has been almost restrictive in the way that they could change their pricing models because there's nothing much more to package on. It's like, cool there's an alerting aspect to this, but that's what people want to buy those tools for. They want to buy the tool so it wakes them up. But that tool is getting more expensive.There was even a price increase announced today for a big one [laugh] that I've been publicly critical of. That is crazy expensive for a tool that texts you and call you. And what peo—what's going on now are people are looking, they're looking at the pricing sheet for Twilio and going, “What the heck is going on?” Like, I—to send a text on Twilio in the United States is fractions of a penny and here we are paying $40 a user for that person to receive six texts that month because of a webhook that hit an HCP server and, like, it's supposed to call that person? That's kind of a crazy model if you think about it. Like, engineers are kind of going, “Wait a minute. What's up here?” Like, and when engineers start thinking, “I could build this on a weekend,” like, something's wrong, like, with that model. And I think that people are starting to think that way.Corey: Well engineers, to be fair, will think that about an awful lot of stuff.Robert: Anything. Yeah, they [laugh]—Corey: I've heard it said about Dropbox, Facebook, the internet—Robert: Oh, Dropbox is such a good one.Corey: BGP. Yeah okay, great. Let me know how that works out for you.Robert: What was that Dropbox comment on Hacker News years ago? Like, “Just set up NFS and host it that way and it's easy.” Right?Corey: Or rsync. Yeah—Robert: Yeah, it was rsync.Corey: What are you going to make with that? Like, who's going to buy that? Like, basically everyone for at least a time.Robert: And whether or not the engineers are right, I think is a different point.Corey: It's the condescension dismissal of everything that isn't writing the code that really galls, on some level.Robert: But I think when engineers are thinking about, like, “I could build this on a weekend,” like, that's a moment that you have an opportunity to provide the value in an innovative, maybe consolidated way. We want to be a tool that's your incident management ring to retro, right? You get paged in the middle of the night, we're going to wake you up, and when you open up your laptop, groggy-eyed, and like, you're about to start fighting this fire, FireHydrant's already done a lot of work. That's what we think is, like, the right model do this. And candidly, I have no idea why the other alerting tools in this space haven't done this. I've said that and people tend to nod in agreement and say like, “Yeah, it's been—it's kind of crazy how they haven't approached this problem yet.” And… I don't know, I want to solve that problem for folks.Corey: So, one thing that I have to ask, you've been teasing on the internet for a little bit now is something called Signals where you are expanding your product into the component that wakes people up in the middle of the night, which in isolation, fine, great, awesome. But there was a company whose sole stated purpose was to wake people up in the middle of the night, and then once they started doing some business things such as, oh I don't know, going public, they needed to expand beyond that to do a whole bunch of other things. But as a customer, no, no, no, you are the thing that wakes me up in the middle of the night. I don't want you to sprawl and grow into everything else because if you're going to have to pick a vendor that claims to do everything, well, I'll just stay with AWS because they already do that and it's one less throat to choke. What is that pressure that is driving companies that are spectacular at the one thing to expand into things that frankly, they don't have the chops to pull off? And why is this not you doing the same thing?Robert: Oh, man. The end of that question is such a good one and I like that. I'm not an economist. I'm not—like, that's… I don't know if I have a great comment on, like, why are people expanding into things that they don't know how to do. It seems to be, like, a common thing across the industry at a certain point—Corey: Especially particularly generative AI. “Oh, we've been experts in this for a long time.” “Yeah, I'm not that great at dodgeball, but you also don't see me mouthing off about how I've been great at it and doing it for 30 years, either.”Robert: Yeah. I mean, there was a couple ads during football games I watched. I'm like, “What is this AI thing that you just, like, tacked on the letter X to the end of your product line and now all of a sudden, it's AI?” I have plenty of rants that are good for a cocktail at some point, but as for us, I mean, we knew that we wanted to do alerting a long time ago, but it does have complications. Like, the problem with alerting is that it does have to be able to take a brutal punch to the face the moment that AWS us-east-2 goes down.Because at that moment in time, a lot of webhooks are coming your way to wake somebody up, right, for thousands of different companies. So, you do have to be able to take a very, very sufficient amount of volume instantaneously. So, that was one thing that kind of stopped us. In 2019 even, we wrote a product document about building an alerting tool and we kind of paused. And then we got really deep into incident management, and the thing that makes us feel very qualified now is that people are actually already integrating their alerting tools into FireHydrant today. This is a very common thing.In fact, most people are paying for a FireHydrant and an alerting tool. So, you can imagine that gets a little expensive when you have both. So, we said, well, let's help folks consolidate, let's help folks have a modern version of alerting, and let's build on top of something we've been doing very well already, which is incident management. And we ended up calling it Signals because we think that we should be able to receive a lot of signals in, do something correct with them, and then put a signal out and then transfer you into incident management. And yeah, we're are excited for it actually. It's been really cool to see it come together.Corey: There's something to be said for keeping it in a certain area of expertise. And people find it very strange when they reach out to my business partner and me asking, okay, so are you going to expand into Google Cloud or Azure or—increasingly, lately—Datadog—which has become a Fortune 500 board-level expense concern, which is kind of wild to me, but here we are—and asking if we're going to focus on that, and our answer is no because it's very… well, not very, but it is relatively easy to be the subject matter expert in a very specific, expensive, painful problem, but as soon as you start expanding that your messaging loses focus and it doesn't take long—since we do you view this as an inherent architectural problem—where we're saying, “We're the best cloud engineers and cloud architects in the world,” and then we're competing against basically everyone out there. And it costs more money a year for Accenture or Deloitte's marketing budget than we'll ever earn as a company in our entire lifetime, just because we are not externally boosted, we're not putting hundreds of people into the field. It's a lifestyle business that solves an expensive, painful problem for our customers. And that focus lends clarity. I don't like the current market pressure toward expansion and consolidation at the cost of everything, including it seems, customer trust.Robert: Yeah. That's a good point. I mean, I agree. I mean, when you see a company—and it's almost getting hard to think about what a company does based on their name as well. Like, names don't even mean anything for companies anymore. Like Datadog has expanded into a whole lot of things beyond data and if you think about some of the alerting tools out there that have names of, like, old devices that used to attach to our hips, that's just a different company name than what represents what they do.And I think for us, like, incidents, that's what we care about. That's what I know. I know how to help people manage incidents. I built software that broke—sometimes I was an arsonist—sometimes I was a firefighter, it really depends, but that's the thing that we're going to be good at and we're just going to keep building in that sphere.Corey: I think that there's a tipping point that starts to become pretty clear when companies focus away from innovating and growing and serving customers into revenue protection mode. And I think this is a cyclical force that is very hard to resist. But I can tell even having conversations like this with folks, when the way that a company goes about setting up one of these conversations with me, you came by yourself, not with a squadron of PR people, not with a whole giant list of talking points you wanted to go to, just, “Let's talk about this stuff. I'm interested in it.”As a company grows, that becomes more and more uncommon. Often, I'll see it at companies a third the size of yours, just because there's so much fear around everything we say must be spoken in such a way that it could never be taken in a negative way against us. That's not the failure mode. The failure mode is that no one listens to you or cares what you have to say. At some point, yeah, I get the shift, but damned if it doesn't always feel like it's depressing.Robert: Yeah. This is such great questions because I think that the way I think about it is, I care about the problem and if we solve the problem and we solve it well and people agree with us on our solution being a good way to solve that problem, then the revenue, like, happens because of that. I've gotten asked from, like, from VCs and customers, like, “What's your end goal with FireHydrant as the CEO of the company?” And what they're really asking is, like, “Do you want to IPO or be acquired?” That's always a question every single time.And my answer is, maybe, I don't know, philosophical, but it's, I think if we solve the problem, like, one of those will happen, but that's not the end goal. Because if I aim at that, we're going to come up short. It's like how they tell you to throw a ball, right? Like they don't say, aim at the glove. They say, like, aim behind the person.And that's what we want to do. We just want to aim at solving a problem and then the revenue will come. You have to be smart about it, right? It's not a field of dreams, like, if you build it, like, revenue arrives, but—so you do have to be conscious of the business and the operations and the model that you work within, but it should all be in service of building something that's valuable.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where should they go to find you, other than, you know, to their most recent incident page?Robert: [laugh]. No, thanks for having me. So, to learn more about me, I mean, you can find me on Twitter on—or X. What do we call it now?Corey: I call it Twitter because I don't believe in deadnaming except when it's companies.Robert: Yeah [laugh]. twitter.com/bobbytables if you want to find me there. If you want to learn more about FireHydrant and what we're doing to help folks with incidents and incident response and all the fun things in there, it's firehydrant.com or firehydrant.io, but we'll redirect you to dot com.Corey: And we will, of course, put a link to all of that in the [show notes 00:33:10]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. It's deeply appreciated.Robert: Thank you for having me.Corey: Robert Ross, CEO and co-founder of FireHydrant. This featured guest episode has been brought to us by our friends at FireHydrant, and I'm Corey Quinn. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment that will never see the light of day because that crappy platform you're using is having an incident that they absolutely do not know how to manage effectively.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

In this episode Frank Ricciardi shares his entrepreneurial journey, his experiences with burnout, and the story behind Maavee's name. He discusses the importance of personalized wellness, the convergence of healthcare and wellness, and the role of Maavee in curating the best wellness products and services. Frank also highlights the significance of employers offering personalized well-being services to their employees.   Frank is currently the founder and CEO of Maavee, a consumer-led "population wellness" SaaS platform that connects humans to their highly personal, fluid and lifelong journeys.Frank began his career with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) where he focused on product lifecycle management and salesforce effectiveness in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries for companies such as Astra-Merck, AstraZeneca and Amgen.In 1999, Frank “caught the Internet wave” and worked for several technology companies at the forefront of their respective fields including more.com and DigitalThink. From 2005 to 2018, he served on the executive team at Cornerstone OnDemand, one of the most successful cloud software companies in the world. During his tenure, he architected the company's client retention and growth capabilities including its innovative client success model, launched and led its international businesses in Israel and nine countries in Asia-Pacific, and finally served as Chief Customer Officer. Over the 13 years that Frank called Cornerstone home, the company grew from $0.5 million to just shy of $500 million in annual revenue with a successful IPO in March 2011. After a short break from the corporate world to reset, Frank served as the Chief Business Officer for Thrive Global, founded by Arianna Huffington, where he led the pivot from a media and content company to a technology company.Los Angeles is home; however Frank spends about half of his time outside of the U.S.A. being a global citizen. He has also lived in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, Healdsburg, and Antibes.   Ways to connect with Frank: Website: www.gomaavee.com Frank's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fricciardi/Maavee's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/maavee/Maavee's Instagram: https://instagram.com/gomaavee   Whether you are a C-Suite Leader of today or tomorrow, take charge of your career with confidence and leverage the insights of The CEO's Compass: Your Guide to Get Back on Track.  To learn more about The CEO's Compass, you can get your copy here: https://amzn.to/3AKiflR    Other episodes you'll enjoy: C-Suite Goal Setting: How To Create A Roadmap For Your Career Success - http://bit.ly/3XwI55n Natalya Berdikyan: Investing in Yourself to Serve Others on Apple Podcasts -http://bit.ly/3ZMx8yw Questions to Guarantee You Accomplish Your Goals - http://bit.ly/3QASvym  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Accenture's Anti-Trend Space Investment Strategy It's chilly and not just outside. Investment in space companies is down by almost a third compared to this time last year, with investor sentiment for space applications companies being downright icy. But Accenture, the publicly traded international technology consulting company is not just saying it's bullish on the future, it's actively making deals in space applications. Laura Winter speaks with Paul Thomas, Accenture's Managing Director and Space Innovation and Technology Lead; and Accenture's Aerospace and Defense Practice Lead, Craig Gottlieb.

In this episode, Dave Sobel discusses the top announcements from Amazon Web Services (AWS) reInvent for MSPs. One highlight is the repurposing of the Fire TV Cube into a desktop productivity device called the Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client. Priced at $195, this device offers a low-cost solution for virtual desktop services, utilizing cloud-based storage and processing. Feedback from beta testers has been positive, and it is being marketed to industries such as healthcare, financial services, and contact centers. Additionally, Accenture's move to go passwordless with biometrics and PINs replacing logins for 600,000 employees is highlighted. Lastly, the strategy of turning MSPs into LSIs (Local Service Integrators) is discussed as a solution to tackle shadow IT and cloud sprawl.Three things to know today00:00 The top AWS re:invent announcements for MSPs06:22 Accenture Goes Passwordless: Biometrics and PINs Replace Traditional Logins for 600,000 Employees09:16 Turning MSPs into LSIs: A Strategy to Tackle Shadow IT and Cloud SprawlSupported by: https://rejectioncon.com/Want to take my class? https://www.itspu.com/all-classes/classes/navigating-emerging-technologies-for-msps/Looking for a link from the stories? The entire script of the show, with links to articles, are posted in each story on https://www.businessof.tech/Do you want the show on your podcast app or the written versions of the stories? Subscribe to the Business of Tech: https://www.businessof.tech/subscribe/Support the show on Patreon: https://patreon.com/mspradio/Want our stuff? Cool Merch? Wear “Why Do We Care?” - Visit https://mspradio.myspreadshop.comFollow us on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28908079/YouTube: https://youtube.com/mspradio/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mspradionews/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mspradio/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@businessoftech

How are leading employers thinking about DEI recruiting? Listen to hear directly from:AccentureeBayHersheyPwCSercoClick here to find opportunities for candidates from underrepresented backgrounds at these organizations.Relevant LinksRegister for an upcoming panel eventSelect your affiliation to receive future opportunities and eventsConnect With Management Consulted Follow Management Consulted on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok for the latest updates and industry insights. Join the next Extreme Consulting Makeover - every Tuesday at 12pm ET! Email our team (podcast@managementconsulted.com) with any questions or feedback. Sponsor an episode or advertise on Strategy Simplified. Check out our Media Kit for more information.

Campaigning with Corruption - Winning at Our CostsWebsite: http://www.battle4freedom.comNetwork: https://www.mojo50.comStreaming: https://www.rumble.com/Battle4Freedomhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12808991/Denmark-battles-surge-pneumonia-sparking-fears-China.htmlNow DENMARK battles surge in same type of 'white lung syndrome' pneumonia sparking fears in China - after Netherlands warned of alarming spike in casesDanish health experts said they had were expecting this 'epidemic' for some timehttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12806969/rfk-cheryl-hines-jonathan-macht-stalker-secret-service-security.htmlMan who broke into RFK Jr's home TWICE and sent him 430 'harassing emails' agrees to five-year restraining order - as Biden refuses Secret Service protection for the presidential hopefulCalifornia realtor Jonathan Macht had warned Kennedy about getting a 'bullet in the brain' He broke into Kennedy's California home twice in one day while the couple were there Kennedy has now struck a deal with the 28-year-old to stay at least 100 yards apart after the Biden White House refused to provide Federal Protectionhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12807589/trump-kinky-political-fantasies-maga-dominatrix-doms-subs.html'Vote Republican for daddy Trump': BDSM business is booming for 'MAGA doms' and 'liberal subs' with one dominatrix earning a six-figure salary to fulfill political fantasiesPolitical polarization is fueling a boom in unlikely bedroom fantasies Sites including 'hot conservative girls who make liberals cry' are catering to the growing fetishAnd politicians themselves are increasingly figuring in fantasies with Marjorie Taylor Greene and even Bill Clinton among the favoriteshttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/college-football/article-12807769/College-football-player-Reed-Ryan-22-tragically-dies-suffering-cardiac-arrest-following-team-workout-family-say-defensive-end-passed-away-doing-loved.htmlCollege football player Reed Ryan, 22, tragically dies after suffering a cardiac arrest following a team workout... as family say defensive end passed away 'doing what he loved'Reed collapsed following a team workout in a weight room on November 21After school officials regained his pulse, he sadly passed away seven days laterhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12806485/michael-latt-murder-michelle-satter-son.htmlMichael Latt, social justice charity founder who worked with rapper Common, is shot dead by homeless woman who broke into his LA homeLatt, 33, who created Lead with Love in Los Angeles, was shot Monday eveningJameelah Elena Michl, 36, has been charged with his murderLatt is the son of the founder and director of the Sundance Institute https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12806175/Republicans-accuse-Biden-having-no-shame-cancels-student-debt-813-000-people-election-ploy-force-taxpayers-saddle-billions-dollars-extra.htmlRepublicans accuse Biden of having 'no shame' as he cancels student debt for 813,000 people in 're-election ploy' that will force taxpayers to saddle billions of dollars extraRepublican Sen. Bill Cassidy was among those condemning debt forgivenessHe highlighted that beneficiaries will receive an email from Biden himself'No shame,' he said as he accused the president of buying his 2024 reelectionhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/consumer/article-12805979/americans-quality-life-cities-hit-worst-inflation.htmlAmericans need an extra $11,400 a year to afford the same quality of life they enjoyed in 2021 - here are the states hit worst by inflationColorado residents must fork out an extra $14,995 to afford the same quality of life as two years agoArkansas has the lowest extra expenditures needed - but households will still need an extra $8,528 a yearThe data compares the prices of everyday essentials including food, housing, energy and transportation in October this year and January 2021 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/consumer/article-12806053/companies-ax-college-bachelors-degree-requirements-walmart.htmlHow the college degree lost its value: Nearly half of US companies plan to ax Bachelor's degree requirements - after Walmart, Accenture and IBM led the chargeSome 45% of companies plan to eliminate bachelor's degree requirementsAnd 55% said they'd already eliminated bachelor's degree requirements in 2023Walmart , IBM , Accenture and Google are among those to have led the charge

As a consultant for more than 40 years, Glenn Parker has helped create high-performing teams at hundreds of organizations. He currently is a consultant to Accenture where he has developed numerous online courses in professional and leadership development, including the recent webinar, Positive Influence: Finding People Who Can Help You Be Your Best Self. Glenn is the author or coauthor of some 16 books including the best-sellers “Cross Functional Teams: Working with Allies, Enemies and other Strangers;” and “Team Players and Teamwork: New Strategies for Developing Successful Collaboration.” He is also co-author of Positive Influence: The Leader Who Helps People Become Their Best Self (2020) and Positive Influence: Leadership in a Time of Crisis (2023). Listen NOW to discover, “How To Lead During A Time of Crisis.” PS. Make sure you SUBSCRIBE to The 30 Minute Hour Podcast so that you never miss an episode! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/30minutehour/support

The manufacturing centers of the future use every technology at their disposal, from automation to digital twin networks and proprietary cellular networks. Advances in technology will allow enterprises to predict and respond quickly to problems before they arise. In this episode, we'll examine what a resilient supply chain looks like — and discuss the new technologies that can help create manufacturing processes that remain stable amidst disruption. We'll speak to Eric Green, VP of User Experience at Dassault Systèmes; Sef Tuma, Global Engineering and Manufacturing Lead at Accenture; and Manish Bhatia, Executive VP of Global Operations at Micron Technology. 

Nick Law is the Global Creative Chairperson for Accenture Song. He joined me for 20 mins to discuss where we are in terms of AI in our space and he shared a snippet of his 7 creative principles. Nick states "It is our responsibility to stop thinking about technology as anything other than a medium that makes us more creative and not less.” Nick, who has recently laid out his “Seven Principals of Creativity”, shares his insights at the Nedbank IMC Conference on what industry captains should embrace over the next decade, to ensure they keep up with ever-evolving business landscapes. Nick encourages a dynamic approach, stressing that adapting to new technologies, adopting creativity, and welcoming collaboration, are key to success. This episode is brought to you by The Integrated Marketing Council (IMC)

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we had a chat with Tyler Melton, the co-founder and CEO of Corveus Medical, a Houston-based startup on a mission to redefine heart failure treatment. Tyler previously worked at Accenture, consulting for top-tier pharmaceutical companies, and at the J&J Center for Device Innovation, where he honed his skills in strategic planning and financial modeling. He then joined the Texas Medical Center Biodesign Program, where he uncovered his current mission: to treat heart failure with targeted nerve ablation. In this interview, Tyler shares how using off-the-shelf products for early prototypes saved him both time and money and how accelerator programs provided the networking boost his startup needed to tackle the demanding PMA regulatory pathway. Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you're into learning from medical device and health technology founders and CEOs, and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.Second, if you want to peek behind the curtain of the world's most successful startups, you should consider a Medsider premium membership. You'll learn the strategies and tactics that founders and CEOs use to build and grow companies like Silk Road Medical, AliveCor, Shockwave Medical, and hundreds more!We recently introduced some fantastic additions exclusively for Medsider premium members, including playbooks, which are curated collections of our top Medsider interviews on key topics like capital fundraising and risk mitigation, and a curated investor database to help you discover your next medical device or health technology investor!In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, premium members also get a copy of every volume of Medsider Mentors at no additional cost, including the recently launched Medsider Mentors Volume IV. If you're interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.Lastly, if you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Tyler Melton.

US data firm Palantir Technologies Inc has won a £480 million contract (along with professional services firm Accenture) to handle the new Federated Data Platform for the Health Service.On the face of it this looks like a positive for patients. The new Platform is designed to facilitate information sharing among hospital trusts and other parts of the NHS, enabling them to communicate more efficiently. No more having to repeat your past medical history every time you see a doctor.But Palantir's involvement has caused real concern. The company has worked with the CIA and other intelligence agencies and what critics describe as mass surveiilance programmes. Its Trump supporting co founder Peter Thiel has been an outspoken critic of the NHS, suggesting that British Taxpayers have fallen to ‘Stockholm syndrome'.Adrian Goldberg hears from Max Colbert, who has chronicled Palantir for Byline Times, Dr Jeni Tennision, Executive Director of Connected by Data and Hope Worsdale, a spokesperson for Just Treatment,Produced in Birmingham by Adrian Goldberg and Harvey White. Funded by subscriptions to the Byline Times. Made by We Bring Audio for Byline Times. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Over 40 percent of shoppers aged 55 and over say they will spend less this Christmas while only a quarter of 18-24-year-olds plan on restricting their spending. This is according to new research from Accenture, which reveals a divide amongst generations in the run up to Christmas with the older generation seemingly feeling less optimistic and planning to budget more compared to their younger counterparts. The survey of 1,000 Irish adults revealed that when it comes to setting budgets for Christmas spending, there is a clear divide across the generations with only 13 percent of those aged between 25 and 34 having a budget for spending this Christmas, compared to a more cautious three in 10 of those aged over 55. Men are feeling marginally more optimistic than women about their financial situation, at 16 percent, compared to just over one in 10 (12%) women. Overall, less than one in five (16%) of Irish consumers are feeling optimistic about their financial situation coming up to the Christmas season and almost one in three (32%) are worried about funding Christmas celebrations. So far this year, 94 percent of consumers have made cutbacks in their spending habits, with 46 percent of these making significant cutbacks. When compared to the previous Christmas period, in 2022, 23 percent of shoppers said they would spend more this year on Christmas than last year, with 45 percent spending the same, and 31 percent saying that they will spend less. Broken out between the age demographics, only seven percent of over 55's will spend more this year on Christmas than last, compared to a much higher 31 percent of 18-24-year-olds saying they will spend more this year, and 29 percent of 25-34-year-olds saying the same. When it comes to the factors that are important to Irish consumers when making a purchase, cost came in number one (30%) followed by good quality (27%). Sinead Barry, Head of Products, Accenture in Ireland commented on the results: "Our findings show that most Irish customers have made cutbacks to their spending this year, and a significant number are concerned about funding Christmas. In times like this, retailers need to be agile and responsive, offering well-timed promotions targeted at the right products and consumers. "While Irish customers will be looking for value at the tills this Christmas, they're also looking for quality. To deliver this, Irish retailers need to turn to their data and use it to build an understanding of individual customer needs. This will equip them to put the right strategy in place and enable them to respond quickly to their consumers' changing behaviours. Retailers must be willing to rethink their strategies and make customers feel valued by creating personalised experiences, both in-store and online. Further findings from the Accenture research revealed: One in 10 will work overtime to fund Christmas while just over a third (33%) will fund Christmas using funds in their current account and almost a quarter (24%) will turn to their savings account. Only 20% of respondents plan to spend more than 1,000 this Christmas. The majority of people, almost one quarter, (24%) plan to spend between 100-300 on Christmas this year, which includes all holiday related spend from food to decorations, gifts and socialising. The majority (22%) of shoppers said that they would be changing their spending habits this Christmas to buy from more budget friendly supermarkets. 12 percent of respondents said that they would be cutting back on gifts to close friends and family due to budget constraints, and almost one in 10 (8%) said they will avoid hosting Christmas altogether, on account of the cost-of-living crisis. See more stories here.

This week Yon welcomes Raffaella Camera into the metaverse to discuss how the power of platforms like UEFN and Roblox can be leveraged by brands to improve and grow their businesses. Raffaella was most recently the Head of Brands at Epic Games' Unreal Engine where she was responsible for the overall industry setup and strategic growth of the Epic ecosystem - from tools to Fortnite - for the Lifestyle Brands industry. Prior to Epic, Raffaella spent time as a Partner at Accenture, where she co-created the global Accenture XR practice and served as Global Head of Innovation & Strategy. Between these roles and others she has held in her career, she has built a deep knowledge of how brands can interact with and derive value from metaverse platforms, making her a fantastic guest to dive into today's topics with.  During their conversation, Yon and Raffaella discuss the power of Unreal Engine for verticals outside of gaming, the UEFN & LVMH partnership that Raffaella helped secure and what it means for the industry, how Fortnite could transition from a game to a platform, and much more.  Chapters: Episode and Guest Introduction (00:00) How Does Raffaella Define the Metaverse (02:48) Raffaella's Journey that Led Her to Epic Games (07:50) Why Epic Games and Their Platform was so Attractive (13:05) Proving the Unreal Engine's Power to Other Verticals (17:10) LVMH Partnership and What it Means for the Industry (19:25) Non-Gaming Solutions Offered by the Metaverse (24:55) Fortnite Creative's Role in the Future of the Game Industry (31:55) Dealing with Perception that Fortnite is a Game, Not a Platform (36:45) Role of Platforms like Roblox and Fortnite Creative for Brands in Short Term (40:45) Most Excited About in Next Twelve Months (47:25) Follow Raffaella: LinkedIn | Twitter Learn more about Into the Metaverse and Yon by visiting the website. Follow Yon: LinkedIn | Twitter Learn more about Supersocial by visiting the website.

The healthcare news cycle is heating up. In this 5-minute newsflash, we'll share what Walmart Health's first hospital partnership with Orlando Health means for disruptors and health systems alike. And, we'll dig into the ever-changing world of AI with Salesforce and Accenture's first foray into life sciences AI, and discuss AI's future impact on knowledge work.

A recent report titled "The Cyber-Resilient CEO" by Accenture reveals a paradox in the mindset of global CEOs regarding cybersecurity. In this episode, host Paul John Spaulding is joined by Steve Morgan, Founder of Cybersecurity Ventures and Editor-in-Chief at Cybercrime Magazine, to discuss. The Cybercrime Magazine Update airs weekly and covers the latest news, interviews, podcasts, reports, videos, and special productions from Cybercrime Magazine, published by Cybersecurity Ventures. For more on cybersecurity, visit us at https://cybersecurityventures.com

In this insightful episode of Data Bytes, we sit down with Tracy Ring, a luminary in the intersection of AI and Life Sciences. Currently serving as the CDO and Global Generative AI lead in Life Sciences at Accenture, Tracy brings a wealth of experience from her previous roles at Deloitte, Capgemini, Walgreen's, Abbott Labs, and Kraft Foods. Her educational background from Harvard Business School and Miami University has laid a strong foundation for her exceptional career. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/women-in-data/support

We are in the midst of an era defined by constant change. Many organizations are rising to the challenge, transforming faster than ever and embracing new technologies. But research shows that some companies are truly leading the way, embracing a strategy that Accenture calls Total Enterprise Reinvention. So what does it mean to be a Reinventor? In this episode, our host Josh Klein leads a roundtable discussion with Jack Azagury, Group Chief Executive, and Penelope Prett, former Chief Information, Data and Analytics Officer and now lead for the Workday Business Group at Accenture. We'll also speak with David Puente, Global Head of Client Solutions at BBVA.

Building Culture, Emotional Truth, Transparency, and Fearless Leadership: Adrian Koehler is a leadership engagement expert and senior partner at the executive coaching firm, Take New Ground. He coaches executives and entrepreneurs in the art and science of leadership for themselves, their teams, and clients to create new, unprecedented results and experience fulfillment in their work."Growth, Change, & Transition"He is the Founder and Senior Partner at Take New Ground, a leadership coaching, training, and consulting firm based in Los Angeles and is the co-host of two engaging podcasts: Raising The Bar with Drybar Founder Alli Webb and The Naked Leadership Podcast with TNG Sr Partner Dan Tocchini.Today's Top 3 Takeaways: Fearless leadership.Truth and Transparency.Creating connected culture through emotional truth. Today's Guest & Resource Links: https://takenewground.com/https://www.instagram.com/adrian.k/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/adriankoehler/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3c7kMcC7nah-QdxffV2NXA Watch us on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Tk6u6h-OaZU?si=HYMIQltE7h4j-oVt Timestamped Show Notes: 07:00 – We love being distinct. We don't do what most coaching companies or training companies do most of, that shits boring and useless, as well. Wat they do is usually provide formulas that gesture at results. We don't mess around. We drive with three very distinct conversations. One is we do care about results. That's what people are paying for, something new that's happening that wasn't happening before. So we get really clear on that and how do we do that? Well, leadership, if we could talk about what leadership is for a long time, but at least we know, leadership is getting results through other people. 23:00 - In our work, we call it vital competencies. This is where life is like the connection between two humans, that's where life is, period. I mean, we can have a transaction, but we're not gonna have a future together, that is, unless we like each other. We get some vested interest, and we get shared interest together. Actually, you know what, I'd really trust Scott, I get this guy, even if we want different things, and I get you. We might be on the other side of the table, but it's like, Man, I get this dude. He's a real deal. Now that's vital. That's like truth telling and that's really listening. That's the presence and all of the things that you naturally show up as30:00 – When I first got into coaching, I would hope nobody would ask, how how'd you get into this? Because I wasn't an Accenture guy, I wasn't an IBM guy, I wasn't a Google guy. There's a natural thing here, I've been spending years doing a bunch of crazy weird shit, from being an ICU nurse at the bedside, when trying to keep a kid alive, to running a multi-million dollar Foundation, to working mostly to doing leadership training with murderers to taking teams to go overseas.40:00 – It's honoring our convictions as much as our emotions most, the imposter syndrome was really my feelings about what's happening matter more to me than my capacity. I speak on lots of big stages these days, I sit in rooms, wave, and have conversations that have lots of dollar signs in the backend. Am I scared? Yes, I am. I am intimidated. I am insecure, I know all of that shits happening. When...

Welcome to the 74th Episode of the #100MasterCoaches​ Show. In this episode, Mel interviews Clare Norman from England, UK. With over 20 years of coaching experience, Clare is highly sought after by other expert coaches, as well as successful coach training companies as a Master Mentor Coach. Clare looks to continually sharpen individuals' coaching edge and upskill mentor coaches so they can deliver high-quality feedback to their coaches-in-development. Her laser focus on mindset shifts and her knack for spotting marginal gains has made her a go-to person for coaches looking for mentorship and practical, meaningful ways to improve their practice. With an international following from both her coaching peers and senior leadership, Clare is making a difference in the world of work via the professional application of coaching. Her mission across all her work is to encourage leaders to put people and the planet before profits. In 2015, Clare started her own business, Clare Norman Coaching Associates. Drawing on 25 years of learning and development experience gleaned from leading L&D strategy within NatWest and Accenture, she specializes in transition and leadership coaching, alongside mentor coaching and coaching supervision. Clare's first book, "Mentor Coaching: A Practical Guide" is a work of passion and according to Fran Fisher MCC, makes a significant contribution to the conscious evolution of the coaching profession, and offers a new paradigm for coach mentoring and the continuous personal and professional development of the coach.' Her second book, "The Transformational Coach", enables you to shed the ineffective scripts, trappings, and beliefs that a lifetime of personal interactions, professional training, and even your parents have taught you, such that you can reset your thinking to a beginner's mentality and so begin a fulfilling and exciting journey to coaching mastery. Living in the New Forest, Hampshire with her bloodhound and husband, Clare is a prolific blogger and an award-winning regular feature writer for industry magazines and journals. She is also a popular speaker, often called upon to deliver webinars and keynotes to fellow coaches looking to sharpen their edge. You too can be an ICF Credentialed Coach like Clare. We invite you to start your journey today at Catalyst Coach. www.catalystcoach.live.

Industrial Talk is onsite at SMRP 31 and talking to Johnny Bofilios, Sales Capture Manager at Accenture about "Why Industrial Maintenance Matters".  Here are some of the key takeaways from our conversation: Industrial IoT security and reliability conference. 0:00 Palo Alto Networks has a new report on industrial IoT security, highlighting improved ROI and reduced complexity. Industrial talk podcast host Scott Mackenzie welcomes listeners to the 31st annual SMRP conference in Orlando, where professionals gather to solve problems through reliability tools and techniques. Maintenance matters and its importance in various industries. 2:42 Practitioners organize SMRP conference to share knowledge and improve operations. Johnny emphasizes the importance of maintenance to prevent equipment failure and ensure reliability. The importance of maintenance in various industries. 6:05 Scott MacKenzie highlights the importance of maintenance in various industries, emphasizing that it's not just a cost but a crucial aspect of reliability and asset longevity. Johnny agrees, adding that neglecting maintenance can lead to more significant costs in the long run, and data analytics can help predict and prevent maintenance issues. Johnny : Maintenance is often seen as a bad word, but it's essential for asset management and reliability. Scott MacKenzie: Maintenance is not just about fixing things when they break, but about proactively managing assets for peak performance. Maintenance professionals' importance and Accenture's innovation center. 12:05 Scott MacKenzie emphasizes the importance of maintenance professionals having a desire and passion to care for the systems they work on. Accenture's industry X focuses on reducing cost of revenue through innovation and strategic approach to asset management. Maintenance and reliability strategies. 15:40 Scott MacKenzie and Speaker 3 discuss the importance of focusing on the fundamentals of a business, such as customer satisfaction and on-time delivery, in order to improve overall performance. Johnny emphasizes the role of leadership in driving change and improving processes, citing an example of a janitor who went above and beyond to help a passenger. Johnny is a maintenance expert who is passionate about his work and wants to help others succeed. Scott MacKenzie interviews Johnny at SMRP and highlights the importance of maintenance in the industry. Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2023. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy! JOHNNY BOFILIOS' CONTACT INFORMATION: Personal LinkedIn: 

ในช่วงหลังโควิด หลายบริษัทพยายามขยายธุรกิจเพื่อสร้างการเติบโต แต่กลับเจอปัญหาขาดเเคลนพนักงานหรือคนเก่งๆ จำนวนมาก จนเกิด Talent War สงครามดึงคนเก่งที่กลายเป็นหนึ่งในความท้าทายที่สุดขององค์กร ณ เวลานี้ เคน นครินทร์ พูดคุยกับ ปฐมา จันทรักษ์ กรรมการผู้จัดการใหญ่ เอคเซนเชอร์ ประเทศไทย บริษัทที่ปรึกษาด้านธุรกิจและไอทีชั้นนำระดับโลก ที่มาเผยกลยุทธ์ฉบับ Accenture ในการสร้างองค์กรที่เหมาะกับความต้องการของบุคลากร ที่สามารถดึงดูดพนักงานจำนวนมาก พร้อมอาวุธลับที่จะรักษาพนักงานเก่งๆ ให้อยู่กับองค์กร พบคำตอบได้ใน The Secret Sauce เอพิโสดนี้

รับชมทาง YouTube ในช่วงหลังโควิด หลายบริษัทพยายามขยายธุรกิจเพื่อสร้างการเติบโต แต่กลับเจอปัญหาขาดเเคลนพนักงานหรือคนเก่งๆ จำนวนมาก จนเกิด Talent War สงครามดึงคนเก่งที่กลายเป็นหนึ่งในความท้าทายที่สุดขององค์กร ณ เวลานี้ เคน นครินทร์ พูดคุยกับ ปฐมา จันทรักษ์ กรรมการผู้จัดการใหญ่ เอคเซนเชอร์ ประเทศไทย บริษัทที่ปรึกษาด้านธุรกิจและไอทีชั้นนำระดับโลก ที่มาเผยกลยุทธ์ฉบับ Accenture ในการสร้างองค์กรที่เหมาะกับความต้องการของบุคลากร ที่สามารถดึงดูดพนักงานจำนวนมาก พร้อมอาวุธลับที่จะรักษาพนักงานเก่งๆ ให้อยู่กับองค์กร พบคำตอบได้ใน The Secret Sauce เอพิโสดนี้

Timestamps: 5:01 - What does culture mean? 12:00 - Making exceptions to culture 15:00 - Measuring culture 20:48 - Dealing with a poor value fit 36:05 - Hiring family and friends About Anna Grassler, Cristian Grossmann & Sven Jakelj: ⁠Anna Grassler⁠ is co-CEO at ⁠FELFEL⁠, a company changing the way people eat at work. She holds a masters in Management & Social Entrepreneurship from ESCP Business School and previously worked for companies like L'Oréal and Gärtnerei before joining FELFEL in 2022. ⁠Cristian Grossmann⁠ is the co-founder and Head Bee at ⁠beekeeper⁠, the well-known Swiss frontline operating system. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from ETH and worked for companies like ChromaCon and Accenture before starting beekeeper in 2011. ⁠Sven Jakelj⁠ is the co-founder and CEO at ⁠feey⁠, an online shop for house plants. He holds an MA in Economics from UZH and previously worked for Deutsche Bank and PROCIVIS before starting feey in 2019.  As both external CEOs and founders, this trio had a lot to say about shaping and trimming your company culture. They agreed that “culture” can best be defined as the shared set of values that is reflected in every interaction each employee has with the company. This means that once you've defined your company values, it isn't enough to create posters stating these and hang them around the office: you've got to live them out during hiring, during performance reviews, at lunch time — all the time! Which is not to say that as your company scales, your values can't evolve as well. At beekeeper, for instance, their values used to be described by their stakeholders as very “kumbaya”, but as this Swiss company grew, these values adapted to withstand bigger and tougher challenges, and a clear reflection of that change was that their performance reviews became stricter.  Check out Silvan's conversation with these 3 entrepreneurs to learn more about how to set the right values, how to make sure the culture reflects them, and how to tell the difference between letting your values evolve and letting culture get out of hand.  Memorable Quotes: "All the jobs I've had I liked at the beginning, but eventually got bored with." (Sven) "Don't hire 'maybes' out of desperation. You will regret it, and you will have lost time." (Anna) "Our values have stayed constant, but our culture has changed."(Cris) Don't forget to give us a follow on our⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Linkedin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠accounts, so you can always stay up to date with our latest initiatives. That way, there's no excuse for missing out on live shows, weekly giveaways or founders' dinners.

In this month's episode we spend time with Jim Hadley.  Jim has a great story to tell about how God called him to found two separate companies to support leaders.  Want to connect with Jim?  Check out all his information below!Jim Hadley is a disciple of Jesus Christ, a husband, a father of four adult children, and Founder/CEO of two companies – Tiber Solutions and Tiber Leadership. Jim has spent over 30 years in the data analytics industry serving over 70 organizations of all sizes – from start-ups to publicly-traded companies. He spent the first eight years of his career at Accenture. Afterwards, he held senior technology/engineering leadership positions at four data-related startups: two product companies and two services companies. One was acquired, one went public, and two failed. In 2005, Jim founded Tiber Solutions, a professional services company focused on delivering data analytics and AI/ML leadership and solutions to corporations and government agencies. In 2021, while still running Tiber Solutions, Jim founded Tiber Leadership, a Christian CEO coaching company helping CEOs seek out and depend upon God to lead, protect, and provide for their businesses and personal lives. Currently, God has given Jim the privilege of serving 24 CEOs on their journey to lead well. Jim has served on seven boards of technology and non-profit organizations. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt University.  Reach out to Jim to learn more at jhadley@tibersolutions.com.Find out more about the ministry of Staff Fellowship, Inc at https:///www.stafff.org. If you want to learn more about how you can be involved with LFECast as a guest or sponsor please reach out to lfecast@stafff.org or dan@stafff.org.

We're thrilled to host Anthony Quinn, Founder of Arctic Intelligence and Co-Founder of AML Accelerate.Originally from the UK, Anthony's journey is a testament to resilience. Facing sponsorship challenges during his gap year in Australia, he turned setbacks into opportunities, ultimately creating a unique path back. His corporate experience includes roles at major banks like Goldman Sachs, Westpac, ING and Macquarie, where he juggled entrepreneurship while bootstrapping his own business.In 2015, Anthony founded Arctic Intelligence, offering innovative audit, risk and compliance software platforms. A significant moment came in 2016 when he co-founded AML Accelerate, now a market-leading platform under Arctic Intelligence, revolutionising AML compliance efforts globally.With over two decades as a management consultant, Anthony's early career at Accenture in London involved advising top-tier clients like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Since his move to Australia in 2003, he's played pivotal roles in high-profile programs at Macquarie Bank, Westpac and the National Australia Bank.As a member of the RegTech Association Advisory Committee, Anthony actively shapes the future of regulatory technology. Beyond his professional achievements, he finds balance on the Northern Beaches of Sydney with his wife and two children.Join us in this episode as Anthony Quinn shares insights into his journey, the evolution of Arctic Intelligence, and the transformative impact of AML Accelerate on Books to the Boardroom.

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I enjoy a thought-provoking conversation with Projjal Ghatak, the innovative mind behind OnLoop, a platform that's pioneering the space of Collaborative Team Development (CTD). Projjal, with his rich background from Uber to Accenture and his academic stint at Stanford GSB, brings a disruptive approach to traditional performance management. The dialogue opens with an exploration of OnLoop's mission to transform how hybrid teams are assessed and developed. Projjal shares his decade-long frustration with outdated enterprise performance tools and how it fueled his dedication to empowering the world's 1 billion knowledge workers. We dive into the nuances of managing team productivity, discussing the critical need for managers to maintain visibility on their team's capacity to perform. They dissect the concept of shared clarity on business and personal goals, and the importance of building habits around frequent and constructive feedback. A significant highlight of the conversation is the discussion on the redundancy of writing performance summaries in the digital age. Projjal suggests that generative AI could streamline this process, although user feedback on this innovative approach remains to be seen. The challenges and benefits of managing hybrid teams take center stage as Projjal acknowledges the complexities of remote work, from reduced accountability to the necessity of finding effective management solutions. They agree that hybrid work is here to stay, underscoring the need for tools that support this enduring shift. Feedback's role in professional growth is also a focal point, with Projjal introducing 'On Loopers', an app designed to facilitate effective feedback exchange. They touch upon the value of diverse global teams in creating universally relevant products. Closing the episode, Projjal emphasizes the importance of self-education and coaching, advocating for learning through various channels, including podcasts. This discussion is not just a deep dive into the mechanics of CTD but also a testament to the power of innovation in unlocking team potential.

Join me as I chat with esteemed yogi and photographer, Leo Lourdes, as he explores ways that yoga can help us overcome trauma.Creating Wellness From Within is a podcast devoted to empowering you to live your best life by taking accountability for your own personal wellness … brought to you in part by Integrated Health Systems located in Denver, CO. Women in particular have a tendency to take care of everyone else around them first, while putting their own self care and wellness on the back burner. This podcast is designed to give you actionable advice and tools to help you power up your own wellness journey, and live the best life possible!I am your host, Amy Zellmer. I am editor-in-chief of MN YOGA + Life magazine and author of The Chair Yoga Pocket Guide. Additionally I am passionate about yoga, photography, wellness, and all things glittery! You can find out more about me at www.creatingwellnessfromwithin.comFollow me on: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter         Today's guest is: Leo LourdesLeo Lourdes is a globally renowned yoga master and transformational coach who has committed his life to helping clients improve their well-being in their private and professional lives. As the creator of Brahma Yoga and a wellness entrepreneur, he has taught, coached, and shared wisdom with, more than 40,000 people globally, including Elle Macpherson, Donna Karan, Dua Lipa, Helena Bonham Carter, and Oprah Winfrey. At the age of 22, he was the youngest consultant on London's prestigious Harley Street. He is a motivational speaker and a personal coach for business leaders. He has also been a consultant for organizations such as Accenture, Unilever, Disney, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, as well as the yoga master for Blackstone, an investment company. He has an avid interest in the ecology and biodiversity of the planet, and he spends time in East Africa each year helping protect endangered wildlife and the rights of Indigenous people. He also supports an orphanage in the Himalayas that looks after more than 40 children. In addition to running yoga retreats and wellness festivals globally, he is passionate about songwriting and producing music, climbing mountains, and walking his beautiful beagle, Lamu. Www.ysyoga.co.ukPurchase his photo book: https://amzn.to/47f5HAhConsider supporting the podcast for $5 though BuyMeACoffeeSupport the show

All veterans and their families deserve to receive every single benefit from both state and federal governments that they earned by bravely serving our country,In honor of Veterans Day on Nov. 11, our Lean to the Left podcast guest is Paul R. Lawrence, Ph.D, former Under Secretary for Benefits at the Veterans Administration. An Army veteran, Dr. Lawrence is the author of a new book, "Veterans Benefits for You," which provides updated information, including some insider tips, explaining how to maximize your veterans benefits.A public sector vice president with Kaiser Associates, Dr. Lawrence helps business and government leaders make informed strategic and operational decisions by developing and implementing unique solutions. He has a long and distinguished career writing extensively about management and government, testifying before Congress and state legislatures, and was twice selected by Federal Computer Week as one of the top 100 public service business leaders.We're proud to present Dr. Lawrence and hope the information he provides will help veterans take advantage of the benefits and services to which they are entitled.Some questions we discussed with Dr. Lawrence, who explains how to maximize your veterans benefits:Q. You served in the Army and attained the rank of Captain after graduating from the Army's Airborne School, and you received the Meritorious Service Medal. Tell us a little bit about your time in the Army.Q. What prompted you to write this book?Q. After the Army, you became a management consultant becoming a partner at Ernst & Young, a vice president with Accenture, executive director at the MITRE Corporation, vice president with IBM Business Consulting Services, and a partner at Pricewaterhouse Coopers. What did you do during your business career to help fellow employees who were veterans?Q. You served as undersecretary for benefits in the VA for three years during the Trump administration. I'm sure that experience helped prepare you for this book about veterans benefits, right?Q. Can you walk us through the key components of your book and how veterans can benefit from it?Q. In your book's introduction, you write that more than 3 million Americans have served in the military since 9/11. How did that event affect veterans and the services they need?Q. What is your advice to veterans who are having difficulty obtaining the benefits they seek?Q. You also are the author of “Transforming Service to Veterans,” which details your journey from a business executive to political appointee charged with providing benefits to veterans and implementing veteran-focused legislation. Tell us about that and why you wrote it.Q. What's your take on the VA and its service to veterans? Are changes needed, especially when it comes to medical care?This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4719048/advertisement

This episode features an interview with Scott Booker, Chief Customer Officer at EasyPark Group, a leading global parking tech company with the vision to make cities more livable. Scott has extensive experience in leading large organizations in travel, retail e-commerce, and the consumer marketplace. He is the former President of Hotels.com Worldwide and Chief Marketing and Product Officer at Copart. And on this episode, host Larry Fleischman and Scott discuss how he built a loyalty program at Hotels.com, creating different customer experiences for new customers versus loyal ones, and making an experience so easy and simple that customers don't need to call in for support.Quotes*”If you don't disrupt [the industry] yourself, somebody's going to do it for you.  And that's what Hotels.com was doing in the hotel space. They were disrupting. And I wanted to be a part of that.”*”It's always cheaper to keep a customer than it is to go acquire a new one. How do you treat a new customer through customer service versus an existing one? Should they have a different service? We decided we would create a separate call center environment, customer experience environment, for those loyalty customers. They got a special number, they got special treatment. We would send out gift bags for our most loyal customers so that they felt like they were a part of something bigger.”*”It's okay for customers not to have to call in. The best experience is the experience where it's so easy and simple that they don't need to call in. I think over the last 10 years, I've learned in my career how to build the most amazing experience where you don't need somebody to call in.”*”If we can make it super easy for the consumer, then we're helping the city improve the flow of traffic through the city. And we're making it so much easier for somebody to live in that space because they can use a mobile app with ease.”*”We need to fail fast and learn from it. How do we put something out there in an A/B test fashion without too much exposure so it doesn't risk the business, but in a way that we can test it on a micro level and understand what the impacts are?”Time Stamps[1:23] Introducing Scott Booker, Chief Customer Officer at EasyPark Group[3:26] Learn about Scott's background and path to CCO at EasyPark Group[6:17] Hear about Scott's first job out of school at Accenture[7:12] What did Scott learn about customer experience while at Blockbuster?[12:49] How did Scott fundamentally shift the CX at Hotels.com to drive growth?[20:36] How did Scott create the loyalty program at Hotels.com?[25:56] How do you create a low- or no-touch customer experience?[31:33] What's Scott's take on striking a balance between automation and human interaction in the customer experience?[34:02] What's Scott's appetite for risk? And how does he handle change management at speed?[37:02] What's in the future for EasyPark Group?BioScott Booker is Chief Customer Officer at EasyPark Group. He has held leading positions at large scale, digital marketplaces. Most recently at Copart, the number one global leader in online vehicle auctions. Prior to Copart, Scott had several leading roles at Expedia Inc., one being President of Hotels.com, where he led the company's rapid global expansion. Scott also has profound experience developing transformational growth strategies.Thank you to our friendsThis podcast is brought to you by HGS. HGS is a digital customer experience leader dedicated to delivering winning customer interactions at scale that are prompt, personal, and positive. We continuously transform, optimize, and grow enterprises to exceed ever-rising customer expectations. HGS provides our clients with the right talent and technologies needed to champion every moment. Learn more at hgs.cx.LinksConnect with ScottLearn more about EasyPark GroupConnect with Larry on LinkedInCheck out HGS

Looking for keys to optimize your resume for consulting applications? This resume makeover episode is just that.Jenny Rae (ex-Bain, Management Consulted CEO) gives Abhi (Michigan Ross MBA, ex-Accenture and ZS) a comprehensive review of his resume - what's important, what's not, and resume mistakes to avoid.Join an upcoming Extreme Consulting Makeover session - Tuesdays, 12pm Eastern.Relevant LinksJoin our Black Belt case prep program (at a partner school? Email us for a discount)See the video recording of this resume makeoverGet a resume editRegister for an upcoming Extreme Consulting MakeoverConnect With Management Consulted Follow Management Consulted on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok for the latest updates and industry insights. Join the next Extreme Consulting Makeover - every Tuesday at 12pm ET! Email our team (podcast@managementconsulted.com) with any questions or feedback. Sponsor an episode or advertise on Strategy Simplified. Check out our Media Kit for more information.

Chris Holman welcomes back Teri Sand, SHRM-CP, PHR, CBSP, CRP, Business Services Manager, Capital Area Michigan Works!, Lansing, MI, but serving Ingham Eaton, and Clinton Counties. THEME: National Disability Employment Awareness Month and best practices for recruitment. Teri will discuss hiring and employment accommodations, and accessibility best practices. ● October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, Teri, tell us about that? ○ “NDEAM celebrates the contributions of America's workers with disabilities past and present and showcases supportive, inclusive employment policies and practices that benefit employers and employees,” according to the U.S. Department of Labor. ○ This year's theme is titled, “Advancing Access and Equity.” ● Tell us how Embracing diversity and inclusion in your workplace is the right thing to do? ○ “Companies that embrace disability inclusion have 28% higher revenue than those that don't,” according to Accenture. ○ When hiring ensure your process is accessible to everyone. ■ Be clear you're open to individuals with disabilities in your workforce. ● A 2019 study by the Harvard Business Review found only 39% of individuals with disabilities felt comfortable disclosing their disability to their manager. How does that apply to our discussion? ● Showing that you're the kind of company that actively wants individuals with disabilities as part of your workforce should not only get more individuals with disabilities to apply to open positions but help them feel comfortable advocating for their needs from the start. ■ Offer accommodations. ● Ask, “Is there anything we can do to accommodate you so that you have all the tools necessary to nail this interview?” ● Provide candidates with a choice in format or flexible interview times. ■ Remove barriers and unnecessary restrictions. ● Do job candidates need to lift anything for your position? Do they need to be able to stand for a specified number of hours? ● We understand Some positions have obvious physical requirements, but others don't need to include them on a job posting if it's not necessary for a role? ■ Offer remote interviews. ● This allows job candidates to interview from a space they are comfortable with, in a way that doesn't highlight their disability. ● “10% of the US population and 96% of individuals with chronic medical conditions have an ‘invisible' disability, one that's not readily apparent by looking at them,” according to Disabled World, an independent health and disability news and information source. » Visit MBN website: www.michiganbusinessnetwork.com/ » Subscribe to MBN's YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCqNX… » Like MBN: www.facebook.com/mibiznetwork » Follow MBN: twitter.com/MIBizNetwork/ » MBN Instagram: www.instagram.com/mibiznetwork/

In this episode, you will learn: Most effective ways to communicate What you need to be aware of in communication How to add value How to POP your brand Sam's work has been featured in New York Times, Fast Company, Investors Business Daily, MSNBC, Forbes, INC, Foreign Service Journal, NPR, and Huffington Post. Her books  – including Talking on Eggshells, POP!, Tongue Fu!®, ConZentrate, What's Holding You Back? and Washington Post bestseller Got Your Attention? – have been endorsed by dozens of thought leaders including Stephen Covey, Jack Canfield, Tony Robbins, and Miki Agrawal. Her 20+ year track record of results includes speaking for such clients as National Geographic, Cisco, SXSW, Fortune 500 Forum, Intel, YPO, Capital One, NASA, Accenture, Fidelity, the U.S .Navy and Four Seasons Resorts. She was the pitch coach for Springboard Enterprises which has helped women entrepreneurs generate $36+ billion in funding / valuation.

Neil Mullarkey visits Google to discuss his book “In the Moment: Build Your Confidence, Communication and Creativity at Work” There are moments throughout our lives when our confidence and creativity can make all the difference. Every meeting, presentation and conversation is an opportunity to embrace your confidence and show your creative flair. With insights on collaboration, risk-taking and organization, this book arms you with a complete repertoire of powerful communication tricks and strategies. Neil Mullarkey is an actor, author, comedian and communication expert, notably known for his roles in “Whose Line Is it Anyway” and the Austin Powers movies. Neil also travels the world bringing the skills of theater and improv to clients such as EY, Deloitte, Vodafone, Accenture and Unilever. He has delivered hundreds of keynotes and workshops to various organizations and is a guest speaker at London Business School, London Business Forum and Bayes Business School. Visit http://g.co/TalksAtGoogle/BuildConfidence to watch the video.

In this episode of What That Means, Camille gets into cloud sovereignty with guest Mauro Capo, Managing Director and Cloud First/Sovereign Cloud Lead at Accenture, and co-host Paul O'Neill, Director of Strategic Business Development in Intel's Confidential Computing Group. They talk about the political influences and benefits of data sovereignty, the definition of sovereign cloud, what adoption and implementation of cloud sovereignty looks like, data sovereignty solutions like confidential computing, and more. The views and opinions expressed are those of the guests and author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Intel Corporation.

In this episode of Driving Digital in Biopharma, Accenture host, Tom Lehmann, speaks to Chris Braithwaite, Global Head of Drug Development, Digital and IT Novartis. Achieving digital transformation requires a delicate balance between traditional methods, rapidly emerging technology, and human decision-making. Chris encourages a shift in perspective and a focus on change management, emphasizing that working in a human+machine mode does not entail eliminating human roles. Instead, it involves developing comfort and knowledge regarding data and technology to enhance human potential and increase role effectiveness. By embracing digital tools and leveraging data, organizations can empower themselves to make informed decisions, drive adoption, and ultimately improve patient care.

Michael Schank discusses his book “Digital Transformation Success” and how to deliver results with a process inventory framework. Michael is Managing Director at Process Inventory Advisors and has held tech leadership roles at Accenture, Bank of America, Citi Bank and E&Y.  Listen as we explore the framework and how it can boost your success with digital transformation. Host, Kevin Craine Do you want to be a guest? DigitalTransformationPodcast.net/guest  

Description: How do we adapt, collaborate and stay resilient in a fast paced and constantly changing environment?  The answer, we cultivate and embrace the feminine qualities of leadership and empower multiple leaders to guide.  In this interview with Coco Brown, CEO of Athena Alliance we talk about the importance of cultivating leadership qualities that are often associated with feminine energy and relate to increased collaboration, empathy, communication, and nurturing. You will learn how to prioritize and create a foundation of these important leadership qualities from the top down so that everyone feels empowered to lead together.  Lastly, you will hear why having more women at the helm will support a more sustainable and equitable workplace and world.  Episode Links: Coco on LinkedIn Athena Alliance  Podcast Interview- What leadership skills are needed to create a healthy organizational culture with Carley and Coco.  Learning & Conscious Leadership Development  SHINE Links: Thank you for listening. Want to build a high trust, innovative, and inclusive culture at work? Sign up for our newsletter and get the free handout and be alerted to more inspiring Shine episodes  Building Trust Free Gift Carley Links: Carley LinkedIn Consultation Call with Carley Book Carley for Speaking  Carley's Book  Executive Coaching with Carley  Well Being Resources: Inner Game Meditations  Inner Game Leadership Assessment Social:  LinkedIn IG  Website  Shine Podcast Page    IMPERFECT SHOWNOTES: Carley Hauck  0:11   Hi, my name is Carley Hauck and I am host of the shine podcast. This podcast has been flickering strong since May 2019. I began the podcast due to all the research I was conducting. In interviews with organizational leaders, lead scientists, academic researchers and spiritual teachers for my new book shine, ignite your inner game to lead consciously at work in the world. I wrote my book to inspire a new paradigm of conscious leadership and business that was in service of higher purpose to help humans flourish, and regenerate our planet. The podcast focuses on the science and application of conscious inclusive leadership, the recipe for high performing teams and awareness practices that you can cultivate to be the kind of leader our world needs now. I will be facilitating two to three episodes a month. And before I tell you about the theme of our season, please go over to Apple podcasts, hit the subscribe button on shine or go to your favorite podcast platform carrier. That way you don't miss one episode. Thank you. This season is going to be focused on what leadership skills are most needed to create a healthy organizational culture. Leadership and manager effectiveness has been deemed the number one priority for HR in 2023. And every person listening whether you have a formal leadership title or not, you are a leader. We all have the responsibility to lead around something that we care about whether it's at home, with our family, in our communities, and or in the workplace. And on to the podcast. Hi, Shine podcast listeners, I am delighted to be with my friend Coco brown. This is going to be an incredible conversation. Hi, Coco. Hi. So great to have you here. Thanks for being with me. Coco Brown  2:33   I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me here. Carley Hauck  2:36   You're so welcome. Well, I know a lot about you. But for our listeners, tell me a little bit about what you're feeling excited about. And perhaps even just sharing some of the roles that you wear from, you know, daughter to mother to CEO any identity identities that you want to share? Coco Brown  3:00   No, okay. Yeah, I, let's see my identity start with mother. I think within that identity, my biggest complaint from my kids about me is that I inhabit a seven year old mind maybe at the wrong times. I I'm playful and fun. And I like to I like to be young. And I'm trying to I think I'm trying to hold my kids back in that in that younger age. They're now in there. They're 22 and, and almost 19 So you know, my kids are growing older than me, I guess is what I'm saying. So, but they're my obsession, and I'm old by life and I'm a neighbor and Family is very important to me. Communities important to me. My my parents are are 3000 miles away from me. So as a woman in her early 50s I our mid 50s, mid mid early 50s. Now I worry about aging parents and I worry about kids launching into this crazy world. So those are that's I guess me personally, I I'm a potter. Not a great one, but a decent one. So I make pottery I am obsessed with pickleball although I've only played it a few times, and I play the beach volleyball as often as I can. And then on the work side of me. I am a fourth time entrepreneur. I have in one of those cases the very first one when I was in my early 20s. I created a product I couldn't take anywhere other than to sell it to another company. So and in the process. I talked to one on one venture capital firm, which is never advised you're supposed to talk to a lot of them and then As I became as Satya Nadella says a re founder, I became the second owner or sorry, the third owner of a company that needed to be pulled the Phoenix pulled from the ashes as it crashed in the.com bust and became really a shell of its former self. And I became the turnaround leader of that company and then ran it for about 10 years and grew it to a size where it could be sold. It was eventually sold to IBM. And my third entrepreneurial endeavor was really around, building a consulting practice and working with CEOs to build advisory boards for them and lead their annual and quarterly strategy planning sessions and help them build their teams cohesiveness. That was a lot of fun for a little while. And then I started Athena Alliance, and that is my, my passion. My kids are my obsession and my Athena's the passion project. I am growing Athena, which is an ecosystem of community content and coaching for executive women. Carley Hauck  6:07   Mm hmm. Amazing. Well, I didn't know about the Potter or the pickleball fan. But yes, I did know about the four time entrepreneur and I'm just amazed at your energy, Coco. And so do you want to share a little bit more about why you launched Athena? And why that is so important right now? Coco Brown  6:35   Yeah, I, you know, Athena has many mothers in a lot of ways. Athena has started in 2005, which is almost 20 years ago. Because I was finding myself in more and more high stakes environments as the President CEO of of Taos, I was walking into rooms where people had chief titles, and they were our customers. And I would run into women. Our customer was the CIO. So on the tech side, and I'd run into women, and they'd say, I'm the only one, you know, I'm the only CIO in the valley and, and it started, I started a dinner group to get us together, because there were more than just one. And I happen to keep running into the others. And there were about eight of us at the time. And so and I know there were more than eight, but eight is what I started with, and, and that grew and grew and grew and 10 years into it 2015, I had 80 Some women and by sorry, by 2012, I had 80 Some women, and by 2015, it was 157 women. And in 2012, I stepped down from running Taos, and it had been 10 years. And I stayed on the board two years. But I had a lot that I was trying to figure out. And these women who had been my, my, I don't know, what would you call it, that there was just like this nice place to go every two months where we'd have dinner and cocktails together. And we didn't talk about you know, woe is me, it's hard to be a woman or you know, we talked about our data center strategies and business continuity planning and network, you know, redesigns and that sort of thing. But it was this nice, easy place to be having those work discussions and, and that group of women said to me, when I when I was leaving everything behind, after so many years of being in the tech world, they said Don't leave us behind. And the many mothers became, you know, really evident. In the early days back in 2005, I think it was sunny as a day who suggested that I even start the dinner in the first place. And then Thomas tam Oliver, who said, I used to have these back in, in the 90s. And these dinners I called the no name group and you know, so I got inspiration from others. And in 2012, when I was walking away from the tech world for what I didn't, you know, I didn't know how long I was walking away from it. Gina Ray Haig said, don't stop the dinners, I'll pay for the first one. And then Cindy Reese said, I'll pay for the second one. And, you know, we we just kept going and, and then I got this mandate, you know, almost a flurry of emails. And after a group of us met with Senator Mark Warner, who was out from Virginia doing a hearts and minds tour, and he, you know, he said, what's on your mind and somebody said boardroom and I got a flurry of email the next day emails the next day saying that's it, Coco. You heard what was being said in that room. You know, we've got to get women on boards and you've got the ecosystem go solve this problem. And so it sort of started with me solving a problem. And starting it as a nonprofit and getting you know, we've got over 450 women to boards and then figuring out a commercial company that became even bigger than that. Carley Hauck  9:49   Amazing. Well, I love hearing that story. And I know that we're gonna we're gonna go more in depth in into why it's important to have women on boards and and women in leadership, but I want to move into how you're leading yourself. And also did just speak more into conscious leadership because I know we're both really passionate about that topic. So as I've gotten to know you, you seem to be juggling so many things. And what I always notice every time we talk is that you feel at least from the outside, calm, grounded, you may not feel like that on the inside, but you present that way. And I think there's this this quality of I don't, I don't know how you do it. But it's like, I never hear you frazzled. Even if you haven't eaten anything all day, which sometimes I've talked to you like, Yeah, I haven't eaten anything all day. I was just thinking Unknown Speaker  10:48   that I actually haven't eaten today, and I'm really hungry. Carley Hauck  10:51   Oh, no, oh, no. Okay, well, but I want you to eat. worry, don't worry. But I guess what I'm wondering is, I know that there are certain things that you're doing and being that are actually really supporting you to thrive in the midst of all the things that you're juggling. And so what are some of those things that really support you? And what is it look like on a daily practice? Coco Brown  11:23   I mean, one of the things I think about all the time, and I kind of think my kids for this, when my kids were born, I immediately started thinking about when they would leave the house, you know, like, I'm gonna lose them, you know, and this is like, 22 years ago, and I just was always so aware of, of the moment like feeling like I was going to, you're going to look back on these this time, Koko, you're going to, you know, and just always wanting to make sure that I didn't miss a moment and, and that, I'm really glad that that was my, that that happened to me, because it puts you in a frame of mind whenever possible, sometimes it's not possible to be your best self. But whenever possible, it puts you in a frame of mind to say, how can you make the most of this rather than why is this crappy? And, you know, so you just like, well, she wants to play Barbies again, and then you go, okay, how can I make this fun for me, and you just sort of try to find the ways to make everything meaningful, and to find the meaning and the things that are happening and to make the most of it, and to not focus so much on the complaint, but rather focus on the opportunity. And, and I think I, I went through a phase where I was really not happy for a long time of not at my end home, I you know, loved that part of it. But we spend more time at work than we do at home and I I was not enjoying for a long time, my sense of purpose in work, and I didn't feel I had a sense of purpose. And in work the, the main objective of the company was to enrich the shareholders, of which there were three, myself and two others. And in IT tech, and it was before the days of, you know, purpose and culture and, and so you could have big personalities that were difficult to deal with. And that was more than accepted. It was praised in lots of ways and, and, you know, you didn't have to have any reason for, for what you were doing on the planet. And, and I like this new place that we are as, you know, we can choose as individuals, not everybody works at a place where they feel valued, or feel that there's purpose or meaning or impact, but I do and I choose to and the people that work around me choose to and I think most of us can choose to I think we often feel stuck, you know, when I'm in my day to day when I'm back to back of meetings, and I've got too much going on and I'm feeling exhausted and everything's blowing up and it's nothing's going right. And I can't get people to do what they're supposed to don't do, even though I've said it seven different ways and all the things that we deal with. Then, you know, I kind of I tried to remind myself that I choose to be here and that I can also only focus on what I can influence and what I can control. We control very, very little. We influence a lot more and so you know, how do you convey influence and so I you know, it's kind of a long winded I don't know how to fully answer this question. Well, other than to say, Carley Hauck  14:56   what I actually here is and this is this is One of the nine leadership competencies that I have really researched as part of what actually creates a conscious, inclusive leader. But one of that one of those competencies is having a growth mindset. And I heard you say it, you know, very explicitly, how can I choose to make this, you know, joyful? Or how can I choose to have fun here? Or what, you know, instead of how is this happening? Or why is this happening to me? How is this happening for me? And how do I want to respond? Coco Brown  15:34   Yeah, yeah, yes. And I think that's, that's extremely important in in every surgery, Carley Hauck  15:41   for sure. Wonderful. Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And so that is a daily practice having that mantra, we could say, or that narrative that allows you to bring your best to every moment, even when it's a difficult moment. Unknown Speaker  15:58   Yeah, absolutely. Carley Hauck  16:01   Thank you. I wanted to talk to you about a conscious leader that you've had in your life. Who was that person? Why would you call them a conscious leader? Like how did they empower you or support you or inspire you? How many more? Coco Brown  16:22   You know, I in my own career, I don't, I feel like the the person I've witnessed as the most conscious leader is, is someone I didn't actually work for or work directly with. So no, maybe that's Carley Hauck  16:40   a little rose colored glasses. And that's fine. Coco Brown  16:44   Yeah, so So a woman I'm a big fan of named Yvonne Watson, our associates. So just a quick on her, she, you know, early career at Accenture, or then ended up in a very, very important strategy role at VMware, and then ended up the CIO of New Relic. And then she ended up the CEO of Airware, and then CEO of puppet and she was on my board for a short time when I was for a nonprofit, prior to Athena. So we did work together in that sense. She's one of the mothers of Athena, you know, a lot of early, early insights came from her, the thing I would say, that I admire about her that I see in lots of different I see her and in many different situations, we ended up speaking on stages near each other, or at the same events, or, you know, so she's on a number of prominent boards at this point, she is always measured, and there's a lot of people who are measured. Because they're calculating, you know, the, the measurement is around, like, the calculation for how they can get what they're looking for. And her measurement is much more about, it seems to me, you know, very practiced and very skilled. So it's something she's developed over a lifetime, but it feels to me like it's the kind of thing where she's being thoughtful. She's just always being thoughtful, you know, what are you saying, Why are you saying it? What can come from it? How can I make it work for everyone? You know, you almost see, it's like, you can't, she's like a hummingbird with the hummingbird wings there. It's moving so fast, you can't see it, or move. But the things that come out of her mouth, make it clear that she's being measured, that she's thoughtful, I get a lot of inspiration from her. Because when I watch her, and I listen to her, and the stories she tells or the way she plays things back to people, it's always it's always plus one, it's always additive. You know, it's always contributing, it's never taking away. Carley Hauck  18:56   I love that. So measured, thoughtful, contributing, not taking away. You also said that she's always thinking about, perhaps why she's saying it. Versus just talking to talk. You know, there's, there's a way that she's more deliberate and intentional. You give me an example of an unconscious leader, and what qualities did they showcase? How did that impact you or other people? Even if this is someone that you maybe didn't know, closely? Coco Brown  19:34   Well, I mean, I think I think I would be arrogant to say that it isn't myself. You know, I think we're all unconscious leaders at some point. You know, we're like, Ah, why did I say that? Or? I know I shouldn't say this, but I'm going to say it anyway. It's almost like it just comes out and you just refuse to stop yourself. And you know, and you know, you can do better and you should do better. And you know, you know, you, instead of sending that email, you should pick up that phone. And instead of, you know, sending the subtle reprimand, you should once again say the thing that will be better received. And, and so I think the unconsciousness is when we're, when we act out of exhaustion, and when we act out of our own fear, you know, or our sense of like, Ah, I don't have time for this, or, you know, those sorts of feelings that we we have Carley Hauck  20:37   were triggered, right? Yeah, I think what you're speaking to, to some extent, is we're being triggered. Yeah, acting from that place, it's reactive versus responsive. Coco Brown  20:47   And it's extremely hard to be constantly in a state of, and this is why I admire, you know, Yvonne, it's like, I feel like she's, and I know, she also has hers where she, you know, she's not her best self, I'm sure. Of course, and I see so much more of the best self all the time and the thoughtful self. And, and I think that's what we strive for is like just giving ourselves a breath, not saying the thing that we want to say, because we know that even if it has the right effect, in the moment, it has the right the wrong longer term effect, just stopping ourselves from, from the bad behaviors that are so instinctual that our own self protection or fastest way to a response we want, even though it's not the best way to the response that you want, things like that. Carley Hauck  21:42   Thank you for that. I wanted to speak to some of the unconscious qualities that we all have, I agree, like, and then there are some that are even more harmful than others. And so I was actually having an interview with a colleague and friend of mine who wrote this book managing up. And we were speaking a bit about some of the research that has come out from basically reporting to a unconscious leader. And there has been found to be five to six years of time to recover emotionally, psychologically, from that trauma. And when I think about what's been happening in the world, and what will continue to happen, I feel concerned that our workplaces are not trauma informed. When we think about what's happening in Israel and Palestine, when we think about all the people that have died in the Ukraine, when we think about the climate related traumas that will happen as we have more fires and water shortages, and people are displaced from their homes, I'm bringing these two together when we think about unconscious leaders and trauma, because in my experience, a lot of unconscious leaders are acting from trauma, they're not getting the resources that they need. Or they're not even really aware that they have this deeper trauma to to work on. And so I wanted to get your opinion on one, how do we really inform our workplaces around trauma, so that HR professional so that the C suite is availing people of resources to get the healing to get the help? But also, what does it look like to remove a people leader who is creating so much trauma to everyone else in the organization, we remove them from being a leader of people to potentially working in some other skill set that is not influencing and managing so many people? So there's kind of two questions in there. What do you think about Coco Brown  24:11   I think on the, on the, on the sort of global traumas, you know, the, the, the things that we look at and affect us at a societal level, the job of the employer, the job of the leaders, is to understand how that is affecting the workforce and to be thoughtful about response. You know, I'm thinking about things like, you know, George, George Floyd and how much good, good response came out of that, but then also feels performative if it's not genuine and long lasting. And so I think there's an obligation in leadership to be be very thoughtful about what kinds of societal level impact the company can take on because at the same at the same time the company is running a business. So, you know, at the societal impact, where you're talking about an entire race of people that are everywhere around you, it does impact every single business at a societal impact where we're talking about a war in, in Europe, the Ukraine, it, it's societally traumatic and, and devastating at a business level. The question is, is this impacting our, our business? Our employees? You know, do we have Ukrainian employees who have, who are over there or have relatives or, you know, sort of being sensitive to the level of impact to the business and how that and what people need to be feel supportive? Supported. But one thing i i take a little bit of issue with any sort of sentiment that, that that implies that businesses have to take it all on? Because I don't think that that's fair, I think that a business is a business and at the end of the day, it has to make money or nobody gets paid, right. And so, it, it does need to be able to function, move on appropriately respond, and then be able to move on. And I think that is a tricky thing for us to figure out together. And I think we're really early days and in figuring that out. But but I think on the second layer question where you're where it's immediate, where the trauma that's being caused is, because of the behaviors of people at work, that trauma, you know, that's within the four walls of the business. And that's within the business's control. It's not just even influence, it's like, you've got a, you've got a leader here who's causing horrific experiences for the people around them. And they walk home depressed, and they walk home angry, and they want, you know, like, Whatever, whatever that that is happening, they feel depleted, they feel at least, then I do think that the business has an obligation to address that and figure that out. Like, it's not enough. sponsibility. Yeah, it's not enough to say that, well, that leader produces, their team is producing, they're getting the results, right, like, well, at what cost? Are they getting results? And are those results sustainable? And on a basic human level? Why do you want that, like, there's other people who can perform and get results that aren't also destroying everything in their path. Carley Hauck  27:49   And we know that there are a lot of leaders that are left in those people positions, you know, even very high up in the C suite that are not being held accountable. And again, you know, in my experience working with lots of leaders and studying this, they are leading from trauma that they're not actually getting the help for, and people are not, again, feeling empowered enough to really know how to navigate that. And so that's, that's where my interest in having HR leaders and whatnot, really being more informed on trauma, like what are the signs, how do we bring awareness to it? How do we hold it accountable? How do we help people get the healing that they need so that it isn't creating this toxic work environment for so many. And as you said, we spend the majority of our time at work. And research also shows that the two people that have the biggest influence on our psychological and emotional health is our boss and our partner at home. Coco Brown  28:54   Yes, so. Absolutely. Yeah, I think I do think that there's there are there are other things that also you know, sometimes it's not just it's not just the overt sort of bullying or bat, you know, sort of mean, mean behavior boss, it can be really deflating and super, I guess, deflating it to to work. Yeah, with an ineffective boss too. And I think that's the that's also you know, people want to be amazing, we all want to be amazing. We all want to do great stuff. We all want to be you know, contributing ways that make us feel like you know, like the kid who walked home with that little art project and you know, gives it to mom or dad for Valentine's Day like those the you want to feel amazing and that you're doing amazing things and that people love it and and so there's, you know, many ways I think leadership needs to be looked at and, and not just from the perspective of one person's point of view, but the entire or ecosystem around that leader is that leader effective is that leader, able to get great results out of a team that go beyond the things they're supposed to do to, you know, sort of the miracle moments that they can make. And that's about how, how leaders inspire others to take charge of themselves and self managing. Yeah, I, my, my chief of staff, I absolutely love her. She took me very seriously when I told her and she's, she's fast moving in our in our company, she's doing great. And when she first started working for me, I said, my two rules, time kills all deals, and it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. She went with it, right? And that was super like, she was like, yes. Awesome. And not everybody likes that. Right? But she was like, self empowered, and very confident and, you know, used to being able to figure things out so that those statements were really fabulous for her. They're fabulous for her and me in our dynamic, you know, though that same statement to somebody else might be exactly the wrong way to manage them and may not be the right management relationship. So I think no, no, it's a complex one here. Carley Hauck  31:22   Well, in your you know, I think the other piece around leadership is, especially in the midst of COVID. I believe that we are really reassessing what are the leadership competencies that we need now? What are the responsibilities we're putting on leaders? Is it too much? Are people even equipped to take on the responsibility of leadership? Just because they can be promoted doesn't mean that they should. And so I know, one of the things that you and I feel really passionate about is, how do we lead together? Because I do believe there is way too much responsibility on one leaders shoulders, and how are we empowering others to help us lead? What do you think about that leading together? How do you? How do we do? Yeah, Coco Brown  32:07   I think, Well, I think there's, I think there's a lot of that we're actually about to do a salon on we're about to do a salon on five generations, we're in the workforce, and we've got a silent generation, baby boomer, Gen X, or millennial, and Z. And we're talking about how do we work together. And I think this is kind of at that. The heart of that, like, I believe that the hero CEO CEO is no longer relevant either, if you're a leader is not relevant, like where, you know, you're bringing a lifetime of career wisdom and guidance. And so you know, the formula in your playbook that you've used over and over again, is the one you're going to apply again here. And it's that, you know, you've you've refined this playbook and so you come in, and this is what you do. Like, that's just not the right way to operate in today's world, I because too, there's too many complexities to the way people learn the way people communicate the way people take in information, you know, everything's so different now that you have to be able to collaborate as a leader and figure out who am I dealing with it because one size does not fit all. And, and therefore, your playbook also does not fit all, because to me, every single thing comes down to a people that I started and people I'm always in people, people is everything to me, I think it's you know, all about how you organize, organize and structure people is kind of the key to, to the product side of things and, and everything else. So So I think, you know, on that front, too, I've had my end Miss kind of reflects back to some of the other things we're talking about. I, I had a moment in time, a day, a day where my my husband asked me, he said, and you were really frustrated with, you know, whoever you were talking to, on on the phone and and, and in my own mind, I couldn't pinpoint the moment. So I was like, Oh my gosh, I've been frustrated all day. And you know, that was a long meeting. And I was like, Well, who was I talking to? He's like, I don't know. And it was, you know, maybe around 11 I couldn't quite figure out and then later that the next day, maybe it was my daughter said, Oh mom, you are really laying in on so and so you know on my team and I was like I did. I was like you're right. I did I really was. And so I went to my board. And I said hey, I think I need a CEO review and what's wrong with being and and they said, We don't want to be I don't want to be an asshole and I don't I don't want to be the frustrated leader who's you know, like I told you guys this before and so there's a problem right? There's the when when you feel like you're repeating yourself, you're like I I've said this before we've we've gone over this before, you know why can't I get through and you know, and no, we're not going to do that. And you know, when when you find yourself in this situation where you're like, why don't they understand? Or why can't they get it? Or why you know, which is, I think a lot of like a unidirectional leadership view. And so my point is, is that no matter where you sit in the organization, I sit at the top, there's always something around me that I can draw from and say, Okay, we're not, we're not doing this right together. And I'm a piece of that. How do I make this Carley Hauck  35:26   work? Well, right, what is the impact of me saying this having on this group, because for some reason, there isn't shared understanding or shared agreement on next steps? That's kind of what I'm hearing, right? Coco Brown  35:40   Yeah. And sometimes it's just, you know, we're all looking at an elephant and firmly believing that we're all talking about the foot right now and somebody else's when we're not talking about something else, and perhaps it's the hey, we're talking about the fact that the, you know, elephant is not ready. You know, we don't have not ready to go back in the wild, it's that we often think that things are more obvious than they are, and that they are easier to, to understand and come together and align on. And these things should be simple and formulaic. And it's just, it's complicated. Carley Hauck  36:15   So what would be the first step that C suite leaders and, you know, Chief People officers should be thinking about as far as strategy and creating a different infrastructure to empower people, leaders to lead together being met, you've worked in so many different functions within the organization? Yeah, would you say? What's the first step that they might want to start to think about and put in place? Coco Brown  36:47   I think that from, if it hasn't happened from the beginning, it should happen now. Which is, things trickle down from the top. And I think it's very important that the CEO a