Podcasts about amy so

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 27, 2022 38:34

About AmyAmy Tobey has worked in tech for more than 20 years at companies of every size, working with everything from kernel code to user interfaces. These days she spends her time building an innovative Site Reliability Engineering program at Equinix, where she is a principal engineer. When she's not working, she can be found with her nose in a book, watching anime with her son, making noise with electronics, or doing yoga poses in the sun.Links Referenced: Equinix: https://metal.equinix.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey 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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn, and this episode is another one of those real profiles in shitposting type of episodes. I am joined again from a few months ago by Amy Tobey, who is a Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix, back for more. Amy, thank you so much for joining me.Amy: Welcome. To your show. [laugh].Corey: Exactly. So, one thing that we have been seeing a lot over the past year, and you struck me as one of the best people to talk about what you're seeing in the wilderness perspective, has been the idea of cloud repatriation. It started off with something that came out of Andreessen Horowitz toward the start of the year about the trillion-dollar paradox, how, at a certain point of scale, repatriating to a data center is the smart and right move. And oh, my stars that ruffle some feathers for people?Amy: Well, I spent all this money moving to the cloud. That was just mean.Corey: I know. Why would I want to leave the cloud? I mean, for God's sake, my account manager named his kid after me. Wait a minute, how much am I spending on that? Yeah—Amy: Good question.Corey: —there is that ever-growing problem. And there have been the examples that people have given of Dropbox classically did a cloud repatriation exercise, and a second example that no one can ever name. And it seems like okay, this might not necessarily be the direction that the industry is going. But I also tend to not be completely naive when it comes to these things. And I can see repatriation making sense on a workload-by-workload basis.What that implies is that yeah, but a lot of other workloads are not going to be going to a data center. They're going to stay in a cloud provider, who would like very much if you never read a word of this to anyone in public.Amy: Absolutely, yeah.Corey: So, if there are workloads repatriating, it would occur to me that there's a vested interest on the part of every major cloud provider to do their best to, I don't know if saying suppress the story is too strongly worded, but it is directionally what I mean.Amy: They aren't helping get the story out. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, it's like, “That's a great observation. Could you maybe shut the hell up and never make it ever again in public, or we will end you?” Yeah. Your Amazon. What are you going to do, launch a shitty Amazon Basics version of what my company does? Good luck. Have fun. You're probably doing it already.But the reason I want to talk to you on this is a confluence of a few things. One, as I mentioned back in May when you were on the show, I am incensed and annoyed that we've been talking for as long as we have, and somehow I never had you on the show. So, great. Come back, please. You're always welcome here. Secondly, you work at Equinix, which is, effectively—let's be relatively direct—it is functionally a data center as far as how people wind up contextualizing this. Yes, you have higher level—Amy: Yeah I guess people contextualize it that way. But we'll get into that.Corey: Yeah, from the outside. I don't work there, to be clear. My talking points don't exist for this. But I think of oh, Equinix. Oh, that means you basically have a colo or colo equivalent. The pricing dynamics have radically different; it looks a lot closer to a data center in my imagination than it does a traditional public cloud. I would also argue that if someone migrates from AWS to Equinix, that would be viewed—arguably correctly—as something of a repatriation. Is that directionally correct?Amy: I would argue incorrectly. For Metal, right?Corey: Ah.Amy: So, Equinix is a data center company, right? Like that's why everybody knows us as. Equinix Metal is a bare metal primitive service, right? So, it's a lot more of a cloud workflow, right, except that you're not getting the rich services that you get in a technically full cloud, right? Like, there's no RDS; there's no S3, even. What you get is bare metal primitives, right? With a really fast network that isn't going to—Corey: Are you really a cloud provider without some ridiculous machine-learning-powered service that's going to wind up taking pictures, perform incredibly expensive operations on it, and then return something that's more than a little racist? I mean, come on. That's not—you're not a cloud until you can do that, right?Amy: We can do that. We have customers that do that. Well, not specifically that, but um—Corey: Yeah, but they have to build it themselves. You don't have the high-level managed service that basically serves as, functionally, bias laundering.Amy: Yeah, you don't get it in a box, right? So, a lot of our customers are doing things that are unique, right, that are maybe not exactly fit into the cloud well. And it comes back down to a lot of Equinix's roots, which is—we talk but going into the cloud, and it's this kind of abstract environment we're reaching for, you know, up in the sky. And it's like, we don't know where it is, except we have regions that—okay, so it's in Virginia. But the rule of real estate applies to technology as often as not, which is location, location, location, right?When we're talking about a lot of applications, a challenge that we face, say in gaming, is that the latency from the customer, so that last mile to your data center, can often be extremely important, right, so a few milliseconds even. And a lot of, like, SaaS applications, the typical stuff that really the cloud was built on, 10 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds, nobody's really going to notice that, right? But in a gaming environment or some very low latency application that needs to run extremely close to the customer, it's hard to do that in the cloud. They're building this stuff out, right? Like, I see, you know, different ones [unintelligible 00:05:53] opening new regions but, you know, there's this other side of the cloud, which is, like, the edge computing thing that's coming alive, and that's more where I think about it.And again, location, location, location. The speed of light is really fast, but as most of us in tech know, if you want to go across from the East Coast to the West Coast, you're talking about 80 milliseconds, on average, right? I think that's what it is. I haven't checked in a while. Yeah, that's just basic fundamental speed of light. And so, if everything's in us-east-1—and this is why we do multi-region, sometimes—the latency from the West Coast isn't going to be great. And so, we run the application on both sides.Corey: It has improved though. If you want to talk old school things that are seared into my brain from over 20 years ago, every person who's worked in data centers—or in technology, as a general rule—has a few IP addresses seared. And the one that I've always had on my mind was 130.111.32.11. Kind of arbitrary and ridiculous, but it was one of the two recursive resolvers provided at the University of Maine where I had my first help desk job.And it lives on-prem, in Maine. And generally speaking, I tended to always accept that no matter where I was—unless I was in a data center somewhere—it was about 120 milliseconds. And I just checked now; it is 85 and change from where I am in San Francisco. So, the internet or the speed of light have improved. So, good for whichever one of those it was. But yeah, you've just updated my understanding of these things. All of this is, which is to say, yes, latency is very important.Amy: Right. Let's forget repatriation to really be really honest. Even the Dropbox case or any of them, right? Like, there's an economic story here that I think all of us that have been doing cloud work for a while see pretty clearly that maybe not everybody's seeing that—that's thinking from an on-prem kind of situation, which is that—you know, and I know you do this all the time, right, is, you don't just look at the cost of the data center and the servers and the network, the technical components, the bill of materials—Corey: Oh, lies, damned lies, and TCO analyses. Yeah.Amy: —but there's all these people on top of it, and the organizational complexity, and the contracts that you got to manage. And it's this big, huge operation that is incredibly complex to do well that is almost nobody's business. So the way I look at this, right, and the way I even talk to customers about it is, like, “What is your produ—” And I talk to people internally about this way? It's like, “What are you trying to build?” “Well, I want to build a SaaS.” “Okay. Do you need data center expertise to build a SaaS?” “No.” “Then why the hell are you putting it in a data center?” Like we—you know, and speaking for my employer, right, like, we have Equinix Metal right here. You can build on that and you don't have to do all the most complex part of this, at least in terms of, like, the physical plant, right? Like, right, getting a bare metal server available, we take care of all of that. Even at the primitive level, where we sit, it's higher level than, say, colo.Corey: There's also the question of economics as it ties into it. It's never just a raw cost-of-materials type of approach. Like, my original job in a data center was basically to walk around and replace hard drives, and apparently, to insult people. Now, the cloud has taken one of those two aspects away, and you can follow my Twitter account and figure out which one of those two it is, but what I keep seeing now is there is value to having that task done, but in a cloud environment—and Equinix Metal, let's be clear—that has slipped below the surface level of awareness. And well, what are the economic implications of that?Well, okay, you have a whole team of people at large companies whose job it is to do precisely that. Okay, we're going to upskill them and train them to use cloud. Okay. First, not everyone is going to be capable or willing to make that leap from hard drive replacement to, “Congratulations and welcome to JavaScript. You're about to hate everything that comes next.”And if they do make that leap, their baseline market value—by which I mean what the market is willing to pay for them—approximately will double. And whether they wind up being paid more by their current employer or they take a job somewhere else with those skills and get paid what they are worth, the company still has that economic problem. Like it or not, you will generally get what you pay for whether you want to or not; that is the reality of it. And as companies are thinking about this, well, what gets into the TCO analysis and what doesn't, I have yet to see one where the outcome was not predetermined. They're less, let's figure out in good faith whether it's going to be more expensive to move to the cloud, or move out of the cloud, or just burn the building down for insurance money. The outcome is generally the one that the person who commissioned the TCO analysis wants. So, when a vendor is trying to get you to switch to them, and they do one for you, yeah. And I'm not saying they're lying, but there's so much judgment that goes into this. And what do you include and what do you not include? That's hard.Amy: And there's so many hidden costs. And that's one of the things that I love about working at a cloud provider is that I still get to play with all that stuff, and like, I get to see those hidden costs, right? Like you were talking about the person who goes around and swaps out the hard drives. Or early in my career, right, I worked with someone whose job it was this every day, she would go into data center, she'd swap out the tapes, you know, and do a few things other around and, like, take care of the billing system. And that was a job where it was kind of going around and stewarding a whole bunch of things that kind of kept the whole machine running, but most people outside of being right next to the data center didn't have any idea that stuff even happen, right, that went into it.And so, like you were saying, like, when you go to do the TCO analysis, I mean, I've been through this a couple of times prior in my career, where people will look at it and go like, “Well, of course we're not going to list—we'll put, like, two headcount on there.” And it's always a lie because it's never just to headcount. It's never just the network person, or the SRE, or the person who's racking the servers. It's also, like, finance has to do all this extra work, and there's all the logistic work, and there is just so much stuff that just is really hard to include. Not only do people leave it out, but it's also just really hard for people to grapple with the complexity of all the things it takes to run a data center, which is, like, one of the most complex machines on the planet, any single data center.Corey: I've worked in small-scale environments, maybe a couple of mid-sized ones, but never the type of hyperscale facility that you folks have, which I would say is if it's not hyperscale, it's at least directionally close to it. We're talking thousands of servers, and hundreds of racks.Amy: Right.Corey: I've started getting into that, on some level. Now, I guess when we say ‘hyperscale,' we're talking about AWS-size things where, oh, that's a region and it's going to have three dozen data center facilities in it. Yeah, I don't work in places like that because honestly, have you met me? Would you trust me around something that's that critical infrastructure? No, you would not, unless you have terrible judgment, which means you should not be working in those environments to begin with.Amy: I mean, you're like a walking chaos exercise. Maybe I would let you in.Corey: Oh, I bring my hardware destruction aura near anything expensive and things are terrible. It's awful. But as I looked at the cloud, regardless of cloud, there is another economic element that I think is underappreciated, and to be fair, this does, I believe, apply as much to Equinix Metal as it does to the public hyperscale cloud providers that have problems with naming things well. And that is, when you are provisioning something as a customer of one of these places, you have an unbounded growth problem. When you're in a data center, you are not going to just absentmindedly sign an $8 million purchase order for new servers—you know, a second time—and then that means you're eventually run out of power, space, places to put things, and you have to go find it somewhere.Whereas in cloud, the only limit is basically your budget where there is no forcing function that reminds you to go and clean up that experiment from five years ago. You have people with three petabytes of data they were using for a project, but they haven't worked there in five years and nothing's touched it since. Because the failure mode of deleting things that are important, or disasters—Amy: That's why Glacier exists.Corey: Oh, exactly. But that failure mode of deleting things that should not be deleted are disastrous for a company, whereas if you've leave them there, well, it's only money. And there's no forcing function to do that, which means you have this infinite growth problem with no natural limit slash predator around it. And that is the economic analysis that I do not see playing out basically anywhere. Because oh, by the time that becomes a problem, we'll have good governance in place. Yeah, pull the other one. It has bells on it.Amy: That's the funny thing, right, is a lot of the early drive in the cloud was those of us who wanted to go faster and we were up against the limitations of our data centers. And then we go out and go, like, “Hey, we got this cloud thing. I'll just, you know, put the credit card in there and I'll spin up a few instances, and ‘hey, I delivered your product.'” And everybody goes, “Yeah, hey, happy.” And then like you mentioned, right, and then we get down the road here, and it's like, “Oh, my God, how much are we spending on this?”And then you're in that funny boat where you have both. But yeah, I mean, like, that's just typical engineering problem, where, you know, we have to deal with our constraints. And the cloud has constraints, right? Like when I was at Netflix, one of the things we would do frequently is bump up against instance limits. And then we go talk to our TAM and be like, “Hey, buddy. Can we have some more instance limit?” And then take care of that, right?But there are some bounds on that. Of course, in the cloud providers—you know, if I have my cloud provider shoes on, I don't necessarily want to put those limits to law because it's a business, the business wants to hoover up all the money. That's what businesses do. So, I guess it's just a different constraint that is maybe much too easy to knock down, right? Because as you mentioned, in a data center or in a colo space, I outgrow my cage and I filled up all that space I have, I have to either order more space from my colo provider, I expand to the cloud, right?Corey: The scale I was always at, the limit was not the space because I assure you with enough shoving all things are possible. Don't believe me? Look at what people are putting in the overhead bin on any airline. Enough shoving, you'll get a Volkswagen in there. But it was always power constrained is what I dealt with it. And it's like, “Eh, they're just being conservative.” And the whole building room dies.Amy: You want blade servers because that's how you get blade servers, right? That movement was about bringing the density up and putting more servers in a rack. You know, there were some management stuff and [unintelligible 00:16:08], but a lot of it was just about, like, you know, I remember I'm picturing it, right—Corey: Even without that, I was still power constrained because you have to remember, a lot of my experiences were not in, shall we say, data center facilities that you would call, you know, good.Amy: Well, that brings up a fun thing that's happening, which is that the power envelope of servers is still growing. The newest Intel chips, especially the ones they're shipping for hyperscale and stuff like that, with the really high core counts, and the faster clock speeds, you know, these things are pulling, like, 300 watts. And they also have to egress all that heat. And so, that's one of the places where we're doing some innovations—I think there's a couple of blog posts out about it around—like, liquid cooling or multimode cooling. And what's interesting about this from a cloud or data center perspective, is that the tools and skills and everything has to come together to run a, you know, this year's or next year's servers, where we're pushing thousands of kilowatts into a rack. Thousands; one rack right?The bar to actually bootstrap and run this stuff successfully is rising again, compared to I take my pizza box servers, right—and I worked at a gaming company a long time ago, right, and they would just, like, stack them on the floor. It was just a stack of servers. Like, they were in between the rails, but they weren't screwed down or anything, right? And they would network them all up. Because basically, like, the game would spin up on the servers and if they died, they would just unplug that one and leave it there and spin up another one.It was like you could just stack stuff up and, like, be slinging cables across the data center and stuff back then. I wouldn't do it that way now, but when you add, say liquid cooling and some of these, like, extremely high power situations into the mix, now you need to have, for example, if you're using liquid cooling, you don't want that stuff leaking, right? And so, it's good as the pressure fittings and blind mating and all this stuff that's coming around gets, you still have that element of additional training, and skill, and possibility for mistakes.Corey: The thing that I see as I look at this across the space is that, on some level, it's gotten harder to run a data center than it ever did before. Because again, another reason I wanted to have you on this show is that you do not carry a quota. Although you do often carry the conversation, when you have boring people around you, but quotas, no. You are not here selling things to people. You're not actively incentivized to get people to see things a certain way.You are very clearly an engineer in the right ways. I will further point out though, that you do not sound like an engineer, by which I mean, you're going to basically belittle people, in many cases, in the name of being technically correct. You're a human being with a frickin soul. And believe me, it is noticed.Amy: I really appreciate that. If somebody's just listening to hearing my voice and in my name, right, like, I have a low voice. And in most of my career, I was extremely technical, like, to the point where you know, if something was wrong technically, I would fight to the death to get the right technical solution and maybe not see the complexity around the decisions, and why things were the way they were in the way I can today. And that's changed how I sound. It's changed how I talk. It's changed how I look at and talk about technology as well, right? I'm just not that interested in Kubernetes. Because I've kind of started looking up the stack in this kind of pursuit.Corey: Yeah, when I say you don't sound like an engineer, I am in no way shape or form—Amy: I know.Corey: —alluding in any respect to your technical acumen. I feel the need to clarify that statement for people who might be listening, and say, “Hey, wait a minute. Is he being a shithead?” No.Amy: No, no, no.Corey: Well, not the kind you're worried I'm being anyway; I'm a different breed of shithead and that's fine.Amy: Yeah, I should remember that other people don't know we've had conversations that are deeply technical, that aren't on air, that aren't context anybody else has. And so, like, I bring that deep technical knowledge, you know, the ability to talk about PCI Express, and kilovolts [unintelligible 00:19:58] rack, and top-of-rack switches, and network topologies, all of that together now, but what's really fascinating is where the really big impact is, for reliability, for security, for quality, the things that me as a person, that I'm driven by—products are cool, but, like, I like them to be reliable; that's the part that I like—really come down to more leadership, and business acumen, and understanding the business constraints, and then being able to get heard by an audience that isn't necessarily technical, that doesn't necessarily understand the difference between PCI, PCI-X, and PCI Express. There's a difference between those. It doesn't mean anything to the business, right, so when we want to go and talk about why are we doing, for example, multi-region deployment of our application? If I come in and say, “Well, because we want to use Raft.” That's going to fall flat, right?The business is going to go, “I don't care about Raft. What does that have to do with my customers?” Which is the right question to always ask. Instead, when I show up and say, “Okay, what's going on here is we have this application sits in a single region—or in a single data center or whatever, right? I'm using region because that's probably what most of the people listening understand—you know, so I put my application in a single region and it goes down, our customers are going to be unhappy. We have the alternative to spend, okay, not a little bit more money, probably a lot more money to build a second region, and the benefit we will get is that our customers will be able to access the service 24x7, and it will always work and they'll have a wonderful experience. And maybe they'll keep coming back and buy more stuff from us.”And so, when I talk about it in those terms, right—and it's usually more nuanced than that—then I start to get the movement at the macro level, right, in the systemic level of the business in the direction I want it to go, which is for the product group to understand why reliability matters to the customer, you know? For the individual engineers to understand why it matters that we use secure coding practices.[midroll 00:21:56]Corey: Getting back to the reason I said that you are not quota-carrying and you are not incentivized to push things in a particular way is that often we'll meet zealots, and I've never known you to be one, you have always been a strong advocate for doing the right thing, even if it doesn't directly benefit any given random employer that you might have. And as a result, one of the things that you've said to me repeatedly is if you're building something from scratch, for God's sake, put it in cloud. What is wrong with you? Do that. The idea of building it yourself on low-lying, underlying primitives for almost every modern SaaS style workload, there's no reason to consider doing something else in almost any case. Is that a fair representation of your position on this?Amy: It is. I mean, the simpler version right, “Is why the hell are you doing undifferentiated lifting?” Right? Things that don't differentiate your product, why would you do it?Corey: The thing that this has empowered then is I can build an experiment tonight—I don't have to wait for provisioning and signed contracts and do all the rest. I can spend 25 cents and get the experiment up and running. If it takes off, though, it has changed how I move going forward as well because there's no difference in the way that there was back when we were in data centers. I'm going to try and experiment I'm going to run it in this, I don't know, crappy Raspberry Pi or my desktop or something under my desk somewhere. And if it takes off and I have to scale up, I got to do a giant migration to real enterprise-grade hardware. With cloud, you are getting all of that out of the box, even if all you're doing with it is something ridiculous and nonsensical.Amy: And you're often getting, like, ridiculously better service. So, 20 years ago, if you and I sat down to build a SaaS app, we would have spun up a Linux box somewhere in a colo, and we would have spun up Apache, MySQL, maybe some Perl or PHP if we were feeling frisky. And the availability of that would be one machine could do, what we could handle in terms of one MySQL instance. But today if I'm spinning up a new stack for some the same kind of SaaS, I'm going to probably deploy it into an ASG, I'm probably going to have some kind of high availability database be on it—and I'm going to use Aurora as an example—because, like, the availability of an Aurora instance, in terms of, like, if I'm building myself up with even the very best kit available in databases, it's going to be really hard to hit the same availability that Aurora does because Aurora is not just a software solution, it's also got a team around it that stewards that 24/7. And it continues to evolve on its own.And so, like, the base, when we start that little tiny startup, instead of being that one machine, we're actually starting at a much higher level of quality, and availability, and even security sometimes because of these primitives that were available. And I probably should go on to extend on the thought of undifferentiated lifting, right, and coming back to the colo or the edge story, which is that there are still some little edge cases, right? Like I think for SaaS, duh right? Like, go straight to. But there are still some really interesting things where there's, like, hardware innovations where they're doing things with GPUs and stuff like that.Where the colo experience may be better because you're trying to do, like, custom hardware, in which case you are in a colo. There are businesses doing some really interesting stuff with custom hardware that's behind an application stack. What's really cool about some of that, from my perspective, is that some of that might be sitting on, say, bare metal with us, and maybe the front-end is sitting somewhere else. Because the other thing Equinix does really well is this product we call a Fabric which lets us basically do peering with any of the cloud providers.Corey: Yeah, the reason, I guess I don't consider you as a quote-unquote, “Cloud,” is first and foremost, rooted in the fact that you don't have a bandwidth model that is free and grass and criminally expensive to send it anywhere that isn't to you folks. Like, are you really a cloud if you're not just gouging the living piss out of your customers every time they want to send data somewhere else?Amy: Well, I mean, we like to say we're part of the cloud. And really, that's actually my favorite feature of Metal is that you get, I think—Corey: Yeah, this was a compliment, to be very clear. I'm a big fan of not paying 1998 bandwidth pricing anymore.Amy: Yeah, but this is the part where I get to do a little bit of, like, showing off for Metal a little bit, in that, like, when you buy a Metal server, there's different configurations, right, but, like, I think the lowest one, you have dual 10 Gig ports to the server that you can get either in a bonded mode so that you have a single 20 Gig interface in your operating system, or you can actually do L3 and you can do BGP to your server. And so, this is a capability that you really can't get at all on the other clouds, right? This lets you do things with the network, not only the bandwidth, right, that you have available. Like, you want to stream out 25 gigs of bandwidth out of us, I think that's pretty doable. And the rates—I've only seen a couple of comparisons—are pretty good.So, this is like where some of the business opportunities, right—and I can't get too much into it, but, like, this is all public stuff I've talked about so far—which is, that's part of the opportunity there is sitting at the crossroads of the internet, we can give you a server that has really great networking, and you can do all the cool custom stuff with it, like, BGP, right? Like, so that you can do Anycast, right? You can build Anycast applications.Corey: I miss the days when that was a thing that made sense.Amy: [laugh].Corey: I mean that in the context of, you know, with the internet and networks. These days, it always feels like the network engineering as slipped away within the cloud because you have overlays on top of overlays and it's all abstractions that are living out there right until suddenly you really need to know what's going on. But it has abstracted so much of this away. And that, on some level, is the surprise people are often in for when they wind up outgrowing the cloud for a workload and wanting to move it someplace that doesn't, you know, ride them like naughty ponies for bandwidth. And they have to rediscover things that we've mostly forgotten about.I remember having to architect significantly around the context of hard drive failures. I know we've talked about that a fair bit as a thing, but yeah, it's spinning metal, it throws off heat and if you lose the wrong one, your data is gone and you now have serious business problems. In cloud, at least AWS-land, that's not really a thing anymore. The way EBS is provisioned, there's a slight tick in latency if you're looking at just the right time for what I think is a hard drive failure, but it's there. You don't have to think about this anymore.Migrate that workload to a pile of servers in a colo somewhere, guess what? Suddenly your reliability is going to decrease. Amazon, and the other cloud providers as well, have gotten to a point where they are better at operations than you are at your relatively small company with your nascent sysadmin team. I promise. There is an economy of scale here.Amy: And it doesn't have to be good or better, right? It's just simply better resourced—Corey: Yeah.Amy: Than most anybody else can hope. Amazon can throw a billion dollars at it and never miss it. In most organizations out there, you know, and most of the especially enterprise, people are scratching and trying to get resources wherever they can, right? They're all competing for people, for time, for engineering resources, and that's one of the things that gets freed up when you just basically bang an API and you get the thing you want. You don't have to go through that kind of old world internal process that is usually slow and often painful.Just because they're not resourced as well; they're not automated as well. Maybe they could be. I'm sure most of them could, in theory be, but we come back to undifferentiated lifting. None of this helps, say—let me think of another random business—Claire's, whatever, like, any of the shops in the mall, they all have some kind of enterprise behind them for cash processing and all that stuff, point of sale, none of this stuff is differentiating for them because it doesn't impact anything to do with where the money comes in. So again, we're back at why are you doing this?Corey: I think that's also the big challenge as well, when people start talking about repatriation and talking about this idea that they are going to, oh, that cloud is too expensive; we're going to move out. And they make the economics work. Again, I do firmly believe that, by and large, businesses do not intentionally go out and make poor decisions. I think when we see a company doing something inscrutable, there's always context that we're missing, and I think as a general rule of thumb, that at these companies do not hire people who are fools. And there are always constraints that they cannot talk about in public.My general position as a consultant, and ideally as someone who aspires to be a decent human being, is that when I see something I don't understand, I assume that there's simply a lack of context, not that everyone involved in this has been foolish enough to make giant blunders that I can pick out in the first five seconds of looking at it. I'm not quite that self-confident yet.Amy: I mean, that's a big part of, like, the career progression into above senior engineer, right, is, you don't get to sit in your chair and go, like, “Oh, those dummies,” right? You actually have—I don't know about ‘have to,' but, like, the way I operate now, right, is I remember in my youth, I used to be like, “Oh, those business people. They don't know, nothing. Like, what are they doing?” You know, it's goofy what they're doing.And then now I have a different mode, which is, “Oh, that's interesting. Can you tell me more?” The feeling is still there, right? Like, “Oh, my God, what is going on here?” But then I get curious, and I go, “So, how did we get here?” [laugh]. And you get that story, and the stories are always fascinating, and they always involve, like, constraints, immovable objects, people doing the best they can with what they have available.Corey: Always. And I want to be clear that very rarely is it the right answer to walk into a room and say, look at the architecture and, “All right, what moron built this?” Because always you're going to be asking that question to said moron. And it doesn't matter how right you are, they're never going to listen to another thing out of your mouth again. And have some respect for what came before even if it's potentially wrong answer, well, great. “Why didn't you just use this service to do this instead?” “Yeah, because this thing predates that by five years, jackass.”There are reasons things are the way they are, if you take any architecture in the world and tell people to rebuild it greenfield, almost none of them would look the same as they do today because we learn things by getting it wrong. That's a great teacher, and it hurts. But it's also true.Amy: And we got to build, right? Like, that's what we're here to do. If we just kind of cycle waiting for the perfect technology, the right choices—and again, to come back to the people who built it at the time used—you know, often we can fault people for this—used the things they know or the things that are nearby, and they make it work. And that's kind of amazing sometimes, right?Like, I'm sure you see architectures frequently, and I see them too, probably less frequently, where you just go, how does this even work in the first place? Like how did you get this to work? Because I'm looking at this diagram or whatever, and I don't understand how this works. Maybe that's a thing that's more a me thing, like, because usually, I can look at a—skim over an architecture document and be, like, be able to build the model up into, like, “Okay, I can see how that kind of works and how the data flows through it.” I get that pretty quickly.And comes back to that, like, just, again, asking, “How did we get here?” And then the cool part about asking how did we get here is it sets everybody up in the room, not just you as the person trying to drive change, but the people you're trying to bring along, the original architects, original engineers, when you ask, how did we get here, you've started them on the path to coming along with you in the future, which is kind of cool. But until—that storytelling mode, again, is so powerful at almost every level of the stack, right? And that's why I just, like, when we were talking about how technical I bring things in, again, like, I'm just not that interested in, like, are you Little Endian or Big Endian? How did we get here is kind of cool. You built a Big Endian architecture in 2022? Like, “Ohh. [laugh]. How do we do that?”Corey: Hey, leave me to my own devices, and I need to build something super quickly to get it up and running, well, what I'm going to do, for a lot of answers is going to look an awful lot like the traditional three-tier architecture that I was running back in 2008. Because I know it, it works well, and I can iterate rapidly on it. Is it a best practice? Absolutely not, but given the constraints, sometimes it's the fastest thing to grab? “Well, if you built this in serverless technologies, it would run at a fraction of the cost.” It's, “Yes, but if I run this thing, the way that I'm running it now, it'll be $20 a month, it'll take me two hours instead of 20. And what exactly is your time worth, again?” It comes down to the better economic model of all these things.Amy: Any time you're trying to make a case to the business, the economic model is going to always go further. Just general tip for tech people, right? Like if you can make the better economic case and you go to the business with an economic case that is clear. Businesses listen to that. They're not going to listen to us go on and on about distributed systems.Somebody in finance trying to make a decision about, like, do we go and spend a million bucks on this, that's not really the material thing. It's like, well, how is this going to move the business forward? And how much is it going to cost us to do it? And what other opportunities are we giving up to do that?Corey: I think that's probably a good place to leave it because there's no good answer. We can all think about that until the next episode. I really want to thank you for spending so much time talking to me again. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Amy: Always Twitter for me, MissAmyTobey, and I'll see you there. Say hi.Corey: Thank you again for being as generous with your time as you are. It's deeply appreciated.Amy: It's always fun.Corey: Amy Tobey, Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix Metal. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. 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 angry comment that tells me exactly what we got wrong in this episode in the best dialect you have of condescending engineer with zero people skills. I look forward to reading it.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.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Reliability Starts in Cultural Change with Amy Tobey

The Passionistas Project Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 11, 2022 46:37

About AmyAmy Tobey has worked in tech for more than 20 years at companies of every size, working with everything from kernel code to user interfaces. These days she spends her time building an innovative Site Reliability Engineering program at Equinix, where she is a principal engineer. When she's not working, she can be found with her nose in a book, watching anime with her son, making noise with electronics, or doing yoga poses in the sun.Links Referenced: Equinix Metal: https://metal.equinix.com Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey Personal Blog: https://tobert.github.io/ 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: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Optimized cloud compute plans have landed at Vultr to deliver lightning-fast processing power, courtesy of third-gen AMD EPYC processors without the IO or hardware limitations of a traditional multi-tenant cloud server. Starting at just 28 bucks a month, users can deploy general-purpose, CPU, memory, or storage optimized cloud instances in more than 20 locations across five continents. Without looking, I know that once again, Antarctica has gotten the short end of the stick. Launch your Vultr optimized compute instance in 60 seconds or less on your choice of included operating systems, or bring your own. It's time to ditch convoluted and unpredictable giant tech company billing practices and say goodbye to noisy neighbors and egregious egress forever. Vultr delivers the power of the cloud with none of the bloat. “Screaming in the Cloud” listeners can try Vultr for free today with a $150 in credit when they visit getvultr.com/screaming. That's G-E-T-V-U-L-T-R dot com slash screaming. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the neck! And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS, forgettaboutit! But that's where DuploCloud can help. Their comprehensive no-code/low-code software platform guarantees a secure and compliant infrastructure in as little as two weeks, while automating the full DevSecOps lifestyle. Get started with DevOps-as-a-Service from DuploCloud so that your cloud configurations are done right the first time. Tell them I sent you and your first two months are free. To learn more visit: snark.cloud/duplo. Thats's snark.cloud/D-U-P-L-O-C-L-O-U-D.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while I catch up with someone that it feels like I've known for ages, and I realize somehow I have never been able to line up getting them on this show as a guest. Today is just one of those days. And my guest is Amy Tobey who has been someone I've been talking to for ages, even in the before-times, if you can remember such a thing. Today, she's a Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix. Amy, thank you for finally giving in to my endless wheedling.Amy: Thanks for having me. You mentioned the before-times. Like, I remember it was, like, right before the pandemic we had beers in San Francisco wasn't it? There was Ian there—Corey: Yeah, I—Amy: —and a couple other people. It was a really great time. And then—Corey: I vaguely remember beer. Yeah. And then—Amy: And then the world ended.Corey: Oh, my God. Yes. It's still March of 2020, right?Amy: As far as I know. Like, I haven't checked in a couple years.Corey: So, you do an awful lot. And it's always a difficult question to ask someone, so can you encapsulate your entire existence in a paragraph? It's—Amy: [sigh].Corey: —awful, so I'd like to give a bit more structure to it. Let's start with the introduction: You are a Senior Principal Engineer. We know it's high level because of all the adjectives that get put in there, and none of those adjectives are ‘associate' or ‘beginner' or ‘junior,' or all the other diminutives that companies like to play games with to justify paying people less. And you're at Equinix, which is a company that is a bit unlike most of the, shall we say, traditional cloud providers. What do you do over there and both as a company, as a person?Amy: So, as a company Equinix, what most people know about is that we have a whole bunch of data centers all over the world. I think we have the most of any company. And what we do is we lease out space in that data center, and then we have a number of other products that people don't know as well, which one is Equinix Metal, which is what I specifically work on, where we rent you bare-metal servers. None of that fancy stuff that you get any other clouds on top of it, there's things you can get that are… partner things that you can add-on, like, you know, storage and other things like that, but we just deliver you bare-metal servers with really great networking. So, what I work on is the reliability of that whole system. All of the things that go into provisioning the servers, making them come up, making sure that they get delivered to the server, make sure the API works right, all of that stuff.Corey: So, you're on the Equinix cloud side of the world more so than you are on the building data centers by the sweat of your brow, as they say?Amy: Correct. Yeah, yeah. Software side.Corey: Excellent. I spent some time in data centers in the early part of my career before cloud ate that. That was sort of cotemporaneous with the discovery that I'm the hardware destruction bunny, and I should go to great pains to keep my aura from anything expensive and important, like, you know, the SAN. So—Amy: Right, yeah.Corey: Companies moving out of data centers, and me getting out was a great thing.Amy: But the thing about SANs though, is, like, it might not be you. They're just kind of cursed from the start, right? They just always were kind of fussy and easy to break.Corey: Oh, yeah. I used to think—and I kid you not—that I had a limited upside to my career in tech because I sometimes got sloppy and I was fairly slow at crimping ethernet cables.Amy: [laugh].Corey: That is very similar to growing up in third grade when it became apparent that I was going to have problems in my career because my handwriting was sloppy. Yeah, it turns out the future doesn't look like we predicted it would.Amy: Oh, gosh. Are we going to talk about, like, neurological development now or… [laugh] okay, that's a thing I struggle with, too right, is I started typing as soon as they would let—in fact, before they would let me. I remember in high school, I had teachers who would grade me down for typing a paper out. They want me to handwrite it and I would go, “Cool. Go ahead and take a grade off because if I handwrite it, you're going to take two grades off my handwriting, so I'm cool with this deal.”Corey: Yeah, it was pretty easy early on. I don't know when the actual shift was, but it became more and more apparent that more and more things are moving towards a world where you could type. And I was almost five when I started working on that stuff, and that really wound up changing a lot of aspects of how I started seeing things. One thing I think you're probably fairly well known for is incidents. I want to be clear when I say that you are not the root cause as—“So, why are things broken?” “It's Amy again. What's she gotten into this time?” Great.Amy: [laugh]. But it does happen, but not all the time.Corey: Exa—it's a learning experience.Amy: Right.Corey: You've also been deeply involved with SREcon and a number of—a lot of aspects of what I will term—and please don't yell at me for this—SRE culture—Amy: Yeah.Corey: Which is sometimes a challenging thing to wind up describing or putting a definition around. The one that I've always been somewhat partial to is, “SRE is DevOps, except you worked at Google for a while.” I don't know how necessarily accurate that is, but it does rile people up.Amy: Yeah, it does. Dave Stanke actually did a really great talk at SREcon San Francisco just a couple weeks ago, about the DORA report. And the new DORA report, they split SRE out into its own function and kind of is pushing against that old model, which actually comes from Liz Fong-Jones—I think it's from her, or older—about, like, class SRE implements DevOps, which is kind of this idea that, like, SREs make DevOps happen. Things have evolved, right, since then. Things have evolved since Google released those books, and we're all just figured out what works and what doesn't a little bit.And so, it's not that we're implementing DevOps so much. In fact, it's that ops stuff that kind of holds us back from the really high impact work that SREs, I think, should be doing, that aren't just, like, fixing the problems, the symptoms down at the bottom layer, right? Like what we did as sysadmins 20 years ago. You know, we'd go and a lot of people are SREs that came out of the sysadmin world and still think in that mode, where it's like, “Well, I set up the systems, and when things break, I go and I fix them.” And, “Why did the developers keep writing crappy code? Why do I have to always getting up in the middle of the night because this thing crashed?”And it turns out that the work we need to do to make things more reliable, there's a ceiling to how far away the platform can take us, right? Like, we can have the best platform in the world with redundancy, and, you know, nine-way replicated data storage and all this crazy stuff, and still if we put crappy software on top, it's going to be unreliable. So, how do we make less crappy software? And for most of my career, people would be, like, “Well, you should test it.” And so, we started doing that, and we still have crappy software, so what's going on here? We still have incidents.So, we write more tests, and we still have incidents. We had a QA group, we still have incidents. We send the developers to training, and we still have incidents. So like, what is the thing we need to do to make things more reliable? And it turns out, most of it is culture work.Corey: My perspective on this stems from being a grumpy old sysadmin. And at some point, I started calling myself a systems engineer or DevOps or production engineer, or SRE. It was all from my point of view, the same job, but you know, if you call yourself a sysadmin, you're just asking for a 40% pay cut off the top.Amy: [laugh].Corey: But I still tended to view the world through that lens. I tended to be very good at Linux systems internals, for example, understanding system calls and the rest, but increasingly, as the DevOps wave or SRE wave, or Google-isation of the internet wound up being more and more of a thing, I found myself increasingly in job interviews, where, “Great, now, can you go wind up implementing a sorting algorithm on the whiteboard?” “What on earth? No.” Like, my lingua franca is shitty Bash, and no one tends to write that without a bunch of tab completions and quick checking with manpages—die.net or whatnot—on the fly as you go down that path.And it was awful, and I felt… like my skill set was increasingly eroding. And it wasn't honestly until I started this place where I really got into writing a fair bit of code to do different things because it felt like an orthogonal skill set, but the fullness of time, it seems like it's not. And it's a reskilling. And it made me wonder, does this mean that the areas of technology that I focused on early in my career, was that all a waste? And the answer is not really. Sometimes, sure, in that I don't spend nearly as much time worrying about inodes—for example—as I once did. But every once in a while, I'll run into something and I looked like a wizard from the future, but instead, I'm a wizard from the past.Amy: Yeah, I find that a lot in my work, now. Sometimes things I did 20 years ago, come back, and it's like, oh, yeah, I remember I did all that threading work in 2002 in Perl, and I learned everything the very, very, very hard way. And then, you know, this January, did some threading work to fix some stability issues, and all of it came flooding back, right? Just that the experiences really, more than the code or the learning or the text and stuff; more just the, like, this feels like threads [BLEEP]-ery. Is a diagnostic thing that sometimes we have to say.And then people are like, “Can you prove it?” And I'm like, “Not really,” because it's literally thread [BLEEP]-ery. Like, the definition of it is that there's weird stuff happening that we can't figure out why it's happening. There's something acting in the system that isn't synchronized, that isn't connected to other things, that's happening out of order from what we expect, and if we had a clear signal, we would just fix it, but we don't. We just have, like, weird stuff happening over here and then over there and over there and over there.And, like, that tells me there's just something happening at that layer and then have to go and dig into that right, and like, just basically charge through. My colleagues are like, “Well, maybe you should look at this, and go look at the database,” the things that they're used to looking at and that their experiences inform, whereas then I bring that ancient toiling through the threading mines experiences back and go, “Oh, yeah. So, let's go find where this is happening, where people are doing dangerous things with threads, and see if we can spot something.” But that came from that experience.Corey: And there's so much that just repeats itself. And history rhymes. The challenge is that, do you have 20 years of experience, or do you have one year of experience repeated 20 times? And as the tide rises, doing the same task by hand, it really is just a matter of time before your full-time job winds up being something a piece of software does. An easy example is, “Oh, what's your job?” “I manually place containers onto specific hosts.” “Well, I've got news for you, and you're not going to like it at all.”Amy: Yeah, yeah. I think that we share a little bit. I'm allergic to repeated work. I don't know if allergic is the right word, but you know, if I sit and I do something once, fine. Like, I'll just crank it out, you know, it's this form, or it's a datafile I got to write and I'll—fine I'll type it in and do the manual labor.The second time, the difficulty goes up by ten, right? Like, just mentally, just to do it, be like, I've already done this once. Doing it again is anathema to everything that I am. And then sometimes I'll get through it, but after that, like, writing a program is so much easier because it's like exponential, almost, growth in difficulty. You know, the third time I have to do the same thing that's like just typing the same stuff—like, look over here, read this thing and type it over here—I'm out; I can't do it. You know, I got to find a way to automate. And I don't know, maybe normal people aren't driven to live this way, but it's kept me from getting stuck in those spots, too.Corey: It was weird because I spent a lot of time as a consultant going from place to place and it led to some weird changes. For example, “Oh, thank God, I don't have to think about that whole messaging queue thing.” Sure enough, next engagement, it's message queue time. Fantastic. I found that repeating myself drove me nuts, but you also have to be very sensitive not to wind up, you know, stealing IP from the people that you're working with.Amy: Right.Corey: But what I loved about the sysadmin side of the world is that the vast majority of stuff that I've taken with me, lives in my shell config. And what I mean by that is I'm not—there's nothing in there is proprietary, but when you have a weird problem with trying to figure out the best way to figure out which Ruby process is stealing all the CPU, great, turns out that you can chain seven or eight different shell commands together through a bunch of pipes. I don't want to remember that forever. So, that's the sort of thing I would wind up committing as I learned it. I don't remember what company I picked that up at, but it was one of those things that was super helpful.I have a sarcastic—it's a one-liner, except no sane editor setting is going to show it in any less than three—of a whole bunch of Perl, piped into du, piped into the rest, that tells you one of the largest consumers of files in a given part of the system. And it rates them with stars and it winds up doing some neat stuff. I would never sit down and reinvent something like that today, but the fact that it's there means that I can do all kinds of neat tricks when I need to. It's making sure that as you move through your career, on some level, you're picking up skills that are repeatable and applicable beyond one company.Amy: Skills and tooling—Corey: Yeah.Amy: —right? Like, you just described the tool. Another SREcon talk was John Allspaw and Dr. Richard Cook talking about above the line; below the line. And they started with these metaphors about tools, right, showing all the different kinds of hammers.And if you're a blacksmith, a lot of times you craft specialized hammers for very specific jobs. And that's one of the properties of a tool that they were trying to get people to think about, right, is that tools get crafted to the job. And what you just described as a bespoke tool that you had created on the fly, that kind of floated under the radar of intellectual property. [laugh].So, let's not tell the security or IP people right? Like, because there's probably billions and billions of dollars of technically, like, made-up IP value—I'm doing air quotes with my fingers—you know, that's just basically people's shell profiles. And my God, the Emacs automation that people have done. If you've ever really seen somebody who's amazing at Emacs and is 10, 20, 30, maybe 40 years of experience encoded in their emacs settings, it's a wonder to behold. Like, I look at it and I go, “Man, I wish I could do that.”It's like listening to a really great guitar player and be like, “Wow, I wish I could play like them.” You see them just flying through stuff. But all that IP in there is both that person's collection of wisdom and experience and working with that code, but also encodes that stuff like you described, right? It's just all these little systems tricks and little fiddly commands and things we don't want to remember and so we encode them into our toolset.Corey: Oh, yeah. Anything I wound up taking, I always would share it with people internally, too. I'd mention, “Yeah, I'm keeping this in my shell files.” Because I disclosed it, which solves a lot of the problem. And also, none of it was even close to proprietary or anything like that. I'm sorry, but the way that you wind up figuring out how much of a disk is being eaten up and where in a more pleasing way, is not a competitive advantage. It just isn't.Amy: It isn't to you or me, but, you know, back in the beginning of our careers, people thought it was worth money and should be proprietary. You know, like, oh, that disk-checking script as a competitive advantage for our company because there are only a few of us doing this work. Like, it was actually being able to, like, manage your—[laugh] actually manage your servers was a competitive advantage. Now, it's kind of commodity.Corey: Let's also be clear that the world has moved on. I wound up buying a DaisyDisk a while back for Mac, which I love. It is a fantastic, pretty effective, “Where's all the stuff on your disk going?” And it does a scan and you can drive and collect things and delete them when trying to clean things out. I was using it the other day, so it's top of mind at the moment.But it's way more polished than that crappy Perl three-liner. And I see both sides, truly I do. The trick also, for those wondering [unintelligible 00:15:45], like, “Where is the line?” It's super easy. Disclose it, what you're doing, in those scenarios in the event someone is no because they believe that finding the right man page section for something is somehow proprietary.Great. When you go home that evening in a completely separate environment, build it yourself from scratch to solve the problem, reimplement it and save that. And you're done. There are lots of ways to do this. Don't steal from your employer, but your employer employs you; they don't own you and the way that you think about these problems.Every person I've met who has had a career that's longer than 20 minutes has a giant doc somewhere on some system of all of the scripts that they wound up putting together, all of the one-liners, the notes on, “Next time you see this, this is the thing to check.”Amy: Yeah, the cheat sheet or the notebook with all the little commands, or again the Emacs config, sometimes for some people, or shell profiles. Yeah.Corey: Here's the awk one-liner that I put that automatically spits out from an Apache log file what—the httpd log file that just tells me what are the most frequent talkers, and what are the—Amy: You should probably let go of that one. You know, like, I think that one's lifetime is kind of past, Corey. Maybe you—Corey: I just have to get it working with Nginx, and we're good to go.Amy: Oh, yeah, there you go. [laugh].Corey: Or S3 access logs. Perish the thought. But yeah, like, what are the five most high-volume talkers, and what are those relative to each other? Huh, that one thing seems super crappy and it's coming from Russia. But that's—hmm, one starts to wonder; maybe it's time to dig back in.So, one of the things that I have found is that a lot of the people talking about SRE seem to have descended from an ivory tower somewhere. And they're talking about how some of the best-in-class companies out there, renowned for their technical cultures—at least externally—are doing these things. But there's a lot more folks who are not there. And honestly, I consider myself one of those people who is not there. I was a competent engineer, but never a terrific one.And looking at the way this was described, I often came away thinking, “Okay, it was the purpose of this conference talk just to reinforce how smart people are, and how I'm not,” and/or, “There are the 18 cultural changes you need to make to your company, and then you can do something kind of like we were just talking about on stage.” It feels like there's a combination of problems here. One is making this stuff more accessible to folks who are not themselves in those environments, and two, how to drive cultural change as an individual contributor if that's even possible. And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have thoughts on both aspects of that, and probably some more hit me, please.Amy: So, the ivory tower, right. Let's just be straight up, like, the ivory tower is Google. I mean, that's where it started. And we get it from the other large companies that, you know, want to do conference talks about what this stuff means and what it does. What I've kind of come around to in the last couple of years is that those talks don't really reach the vast majority of engineers, they don't really apply to a large swath of the enterprise especially, which is, like, where a lot of the—the bulk of our industry sits, right? We spend a lot of time talking about the darlings out here on the West Coast in high tech culture and startups and so on.But, like, we were talking about before we started the show, right, like, the interior of even just America, is filled with all these, like, insurance and banks and all of these companies that are cranking out tons of code and servers and stuff, and they're trying to figure out the same problems. But they're structured in companies where their tech arm is still, in most cases, considered a cost center, often is bundled under finance, for—that's a whole show of itself about that historical blunder. And so, the tech culture is tend to be very, very different from what we experience in—what do we call it anymore? Like, I don't even want to say West Coast anymore because we've gone remote, but, like, high tech culture we'll say. And so, like, thinking about how to make SRE and all this stuff more accessible comes down to, like, thinking about who those engineers are that are sitting at the computers, writing all the code that runs our banks, all the code that makes sure that—I'm trying to think of examples that are more enterprise-y right?Or shoot buying clothes online. You go to Macy's for example. They have a whole bunch of servers that run their online store and stuff. They have internal IT-ish people who keep all this stuff running and write that code and probably integrating open-source stuff much like we all do. But when you go to try to put in a reliability program that's based on the current SRE models, like SLOs; you put in SLOs and you start doing, like, this incident management program that's, like, you know, you have a form you fill out after every incident, and then you [unintelligible 00:20:25] retros.And it turns out that those things are very high-level skills, skills and capabilities in an organization. And so, when you have this kind of IT mindset or the enterprise mindset, bringing the culture together to make those things work often doesn't happen. Because, you know, they'll go with the prescriptive model and say, like, okay, we're going to implement SLOs, we're going to start measuring SLIs on all of the services, and we're going to hold you accountable for meeting those targets. If you just do that, right, you're just doing more gatekeeping and policing of your tech environment. My bet is, reliability almost never improves in those cases.And that's been my experience, too, and why I get charged up about this is, if you just go slam in these practices, people end up miserable, the practices then become tarnished because people experienced the worst version of them. And then—Corey: And with the remote explosion as well, it turns out that changing jobs basically means their company sends you a different Mac, and the next Monday, you wind up signing into a different Slack team.Amy: Yeah, so the culture really matters, right? You can't cover it over with foosball tables and great lunch. You actually have to deliver tools that developers want to use and you have to deliver a software engineering culture that brings out the best in developers instead of demanding the best from developers. I think that's a fundamental business shift that's kind of happening. If I'm putting on my wizard hat and looking into the future and dreaming about what might change in the world, right, is that there's kind of a change in how we do leadership and how we do business that's shifting more towards that model where we look at what people are capable of and we trust in our people, and we get more out of them, the knowledge work model.If we want more knowledge work, we need people to be happy and to feel engaged in their community. And suddenly we start to see these kind of generational, bigger-pie kind of things start to happen. But how do we get there? It's not SLOs. It maybe it's a little bit starting with incidents. That's where I've had the most success, and you asked me about that. So, getting practical, incident management is probably—Corey: Right. Well, as I see it, the problem with SLOs across the board is it feels like it's a very insular community so far, and communicating it to engineers seems to be the focus of where the community has been, but from my understanding of it, you absolutely need buy-in at significantly high executive levels, to at the very least by you air cover while you're doing these things and making these changes, but also to help drive that cultural shift. None of this is something I have the slightest clue how to do, let's be very clear. If I knew how to change a company's culture, I'd have a different job.Amy: Yeah. [laugh]. The biggest omission in the Google SRE books was [Ers 00:22:58]. There was a guy at Google named Ers who owns availability for Google, and when anything is, like, in dispute and bubbles up the management team, it goes to Ers, and he says, “Thou shalt…” right? Makes the call. And that's why it works, right?Like, it's not just that one person, but that system of management where the whole leadership team—there's a large, very well-funded team with a lot of power in the organization that can drive availability, and they can say, this is how you're going to do metrics for your service, and this is the system that you're in. And it's kind of, yeah, sure it works for them because they have all the organizational support in place. What I was saying to my team just the other day—because we're in the middle of our SLO rollout—is that really, I think an SLO program isn't [clear throat] about the engineers at all until late in the game. At the beginning of the game, it's really about getting the leadership team on board to say, “Hey, we want to put in SLIs and SLOs to start to understand the functioning of our software system.” But if they don't have that curiosity in the first place, that desire to understand how well their teams are doing, how healthy their teams are, don't do it. It's not going to work. It's just going to make everyone miserable.Corey: It feels like it's one of those difficult to sell problems as well, in that it requires some tooling changes, absolutely. It requires cultural change and buy-in and whatnot, but in order for that to happen, there has to be a painful problem that a company recognizes and is willing to pay to make go away. The problem with stuff like this is that once you pay, there's a lot of extra work that goes on top of it as well, that does not have a perception—rightly or wrongly—of contributing to feature velocity, of hitting the next milestone. It's, “Really? So, we're going to be spending how much money to make engineers happier? They should get paid an awful lot and they're still complaining and never seem happy. Why do I care if they're happy other than the pure mercenary perspective of otherwise they'll quit?” I'm not saying that it's not worth pursuing; it's not a worthy goal. I am saying that it becomes a very difficult thing to wind up selling as a product.Amy: Well, as a product for sure, right? Because—[sigh] gosh, I have friends in the space who work on these tools. And I want to be careful.Corey: Of course. Nothing but love for all of those people, let's be very clear.Amy: But a lot of them, you know, they're pulling metrics from existing monitoring systems, they are doing some interesting math on them, but what you get at the end is a nice service catalog and dashboard, which are things we've been trying to land as products in this industry for as long as I can remember, and—Corey: “We've got it this time, though. This time we'll crack the nut.” Yeah. Get off the island, Gilligan.Amy: And then the other, like, risky thing, right, is the other part that makes me uncomfortable about SLOs, and why I will often tell folks that I talk to out in the industry that are asking me about this, like, one-on-one, “Should I do it here?” And it's like, you can bring the tool in, and if you have a management team that's just looking to have metrics to drive productivity, instead of you know, trying to drive better knowledge work, what you get is just a fancier version of more Taylorism, right, which is basically scientific management, this idea that we can, like, drive workers to maximum efficiency by measuring random things about them and driving those numbers. It turns out, that doesn't really work very well, even in industrial scale, it just happened to work because, you know, we have a bloody enough society that we pushed people into it. But the reality is, if you implement SLOs badly, you get more really bad Taylorism that's bad for you developers. And my suspicion is that you will get worse availability out of it than you would if you just didn't do it at all.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and its spelled R-E-V-E-L-O. It means “I reveal.” Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Revelo has recognized is something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is absolutely not. They're exposing a new talent pool to, basically, those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes—but isn't limited to—talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability, as well as you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone overlap with what we have here in the United States, so you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service, so you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross-border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io/screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R-E-V-E-L-O dot I-O slash screaming.Corey: That is part of the problem is, in some cases, to drive some of these improvements, you have to go backwards to move forwards. And it's one of those, “Great, so we spent all this effort and money in the rest of now things are worse?” No, not necessarily, but suddenly are aware of things that were slipping through the cracks previously.Amy: Yeah. Yeah.Corey: Like, the most realistic thing about first The Phoenix Project and then The Unicorn Project, both by Gene Kim, has been the fact that companies have these problems and actively cared enough to change it. In my experience, that feels a little on the rare side.Amy: Yeah, and I think that's actually the key, right? It's for the culture change, and for, like, if you really looking to be, like, do I want to work at this company? Am I investing my myself in here? Is look at the leadership team and be, like, do these people actually give a crap? Are they looking just to punt another number down the road?That's the real question, right? Like, the technology and stuff, at the point where I'm at in my career, I just don't care that much anymore. [laugh]. Just… fine, use Kubernetes, use Postgres, [unintelligible 00:27:30], I don't care. I just don't. Like, Oracle, I might have to ask, you know, go to finance and be like, “Hey, can we spend 20 million for a database?” But like, nobody really asks for that anymore, so. [laugh].Corey: As one does. I will say that I mostly agree with you, but a technology that I found myself getting excited about, given the time of the recording on this is… fun, I spent a bit of time yesterday—from when we're recording this—teaching myself just enough Go to wind up being together a binary that I needed to do something actively ridiculous for my camera here. And I found myself coming away deeply impressed by a lot of things about it, how prescriptive it was for one, how self-contained for another. And after spending far too many years of my life writing shitty Perl, and shitty Bash, and worse Python, et cetera, et cetera, the prescriptiveness was great. The fact that it wound up giving me something I could just run, I could cross-compile for anything I need to run it on, and it just worked. It's been a while since I found a technology that got me this interested in exploring further.Amy: Go is great for that. You mentioned one of my two favorite features of Go. One is usually when a program compiles—at least the way I code in Go—it usually works. I've been working with Go since about 0.9, like, just a little bit before it was released as 1.0, and that's what I've noticed over the years of working with it is that most of the time, if you have a pretty good data structure design and you get the code to compile, usually it's going to work, unless you're doing weird stuff.The other thing I really love about Go and that maybe you'll discover over time is the malleability of it. And the reason why I think about that more than probably most folks is that I work on other people's code most of the time. And maybe this is something that you probably run into with your business, too, right, where you're working on other people's infrastructure. And the way that we encode business rules and things in the languages, in our programming language or our config syntax and stuff has a huge impact on folks like us and how quickly we can come into a situation, assess, figure out what's going on, figure out where things are laid out, and start making changes with confidence.Corey: Forget other people for a minute they're looking at what I built out three or four years ago here, myself, like, I look at past me, it's like, “What was that rat bastard thinking? This is awful.” And it's—forget other people's code; hell is your own code, on some level, too, once it's slipped out of the mental stack and you have to re-explore it and, “Oh, well thank God I defensively wound up not including any comments whatsoever explaining what the living hell this thing was.” It's terrible. But you're right, the other people's shell scripts are finicky and odd.I started poking around for help when I got stuck on something, by looking at GitHub, and a few bit of searching here and there. Even these large, complex, well-used projects started making sense to me in a way that I very rarely find. It's, “What the hell is that thing?” is my most common refrain when I'm looking at other people's code, and Go for whatever reason avoids that, I think because it is so prescriptive about formatting, about how things should be done, about the vision that it has. Maybe I'm romanticizing it and I'll hate it and a week from now, and I want to go back and remove this recording, but.Amy: The size of the language helps a lot.Corey: Yeah.Amy: But probably my favorite. It's more of a convention, which actually funny the way I'm going to talk about this because the two languages I work on the most right now are Ruby and Go. And I don't feel like two languages could really be more different.Syntax-wise, they share some things, but really, like, the mental models are so very, very different. Ruby is all the way in on object-oriented programming, and, like, the actual real kind of object-oriented with messaging and stuff, and, like, the whole language kind of springs from that. And it kind of requires you to understand all of these concepts very deeply to be effective in large programs. So, what I find is, when I approach Ruby codebase, I have to load all this crap into my head and remember, “Okay, so yeah, there's this convention, when you do this kind of thing in Ruby”—or especially Ruby on Rails is even worse because they go deep into convention over configuration. But what that's code for is, this code is accessible to people who have a lot of free cognitive capacity to load all this convention into their heads and keep it in their heads so that the code looks pretty, right?And so, that's the trade-off as you said, okay, my developers have to be these people with all these spare brain cycles to understand, like, why I would put the code here in this place versus this place? And all these, like, things that are in the code, like, very compact, dense concepts. And then you go to something like Go, which is, like, “Nah, we're not going to do Lambdas. Nah”—[laugh]—“We're not doing all this fancy stuff.” So, everything is there on the page.This drives some people crazy, right, is that there's all this boilerplate, boilerplate, boilerplate. But the reality is, I can read most Go files from top to the bottom and understand what the hell it's doing, whereas I can go sometimes look at, like, a Ruby thing, or sometimes Python and e—Perl is just [unintelligible 00:32:19] all the time, right, it's there's so much indirection. And it just be, like, “What the [BLEEP] is going on? This is so dense. I'm going to have to sit down and write it out in longhand so I can understand what the developer was even doing here.” And—Corey: Well, that's why I got the Mac Studio; for when I'm not doing A/V stuff with it, that means that I'll have one core that I can use for, you know, front-end processing and the rest, and the other 19 cores can be put to work failing to build Nokogiri in Ruby yet again.Amy: [laugh].Corey: I remember the travails of working with Ruby, and the problem—I have similar problems with Python, specifically in that—I don't know if I'm special like this—it feels like it's a SRE DevOps style of working, but I am grabbing random crap off a GitHub constantly and running it, like, small scripts other people have built. And let's be clear, I run them on my test AWS account that has nothing important because I'm not a fool that I read most of it before I run it, but I also—it wants a different version of Python every single time. It wants a whole bunch of other things, too. And okay, so I use ASDF as my version manager for these things, which for whatever reason, does not work for the way that I think about this ergonomically. Okay, great.And I wind up with detritus scattered throughout my system. It's, “Hey, can you make this reproducible on my machine?” “Almost certainly not, but thank you for asking.” It's like ‘Step 17: Master the Wolf' level of instructions.Amy: And I think Docker generally… papers over the worst of it, right, is when we built all this stuff in the aughts, you know, [CPAN 00:33:45]—Corey: Dev containers and VS Code are very nice.Amy: Yeah, yeah. You know, like, we had CPAN back in the day, I was doing chroots, I think in, like, '04 or '05, you know, to solve this problem, right, which is basically I just—screw it; I will compile an entire distro into a directory with a Perl and all of its dependencies so that I can isolate it from the other things I want to run on this machine and not screw up and not have these interactions. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about is, like, the old model, when we deployed servers, there was one of us sitting there and then we'd log into the server and be like, I'm going to install the Perl. You know, I'll compile it into, like, [/app/perl 558 00:34:21] whatever, and then I'll CPAN all this stuff in, and I'll give it over to the developer, tell them to set their shebang to that and everything just works. And now we're in a mode where it's like, okay, you got to set up a thousand of those. “Okay, well, I'll make a tarball.” [laugh]. But it's still like we had to just—Corey: DevOps, but [unintelligible 00:34:37] dev closer to ops. You're interrelating all the time. Yeah, then Docker comes along, and add dev is, like, “Well, here's the container. Good luck, asshole.” And it feels like it's been cast into your yard to worry about.Amy: Yeah, well, I mean, that's just kind of business, or just—Corey: Yeah. Yeah.Amy: I'm not sure if it's business or capitalism or something like that, but just the idea that, you know, if I can hand off the shitty work to some other poor schlub, why wouldn't I? I mean, that's most folks, right? Like, just be like, “Well”—Corey: Which is fair.Amy: —“I got it working. Like, my part is done, I did what I was supposed to do.” And now there's a lot of folks out there, that's how they work, right? “I hit done. I'm done. I shipped it. Sure. It's an old [unintelligible 00:35:16] Ubuntu. Sure, there's a bunch of shell scripts that rip through things. Sure”—you know, like, I've worked on repos where there's hundreds of things that need to be addressed.Corey: And passing to someone else is fine. I'm thrilled to do it. Where I run into problems with it is where people assume that well, my part was the hard part and anything you schlubs do is easy. I don't—Amy: Well, that's the underclass. Yeah. That's—Corey: Forget engineering for a second; I throw things to the people over in the finance group here at The Duckbill Group because those people are wizards at solving for this thing. And it's—Amy: Well, that's how we want to do things.Corey: Yeah, specialization works.Amy: But we have this—it's probably more cultural. I don't want to pick, like, capitalism to beat on because this is really, like, human cultural thing, and it's not even really particularly Western. Is the idea that, like, “If I have an underclass, why would I give a shit what their experience is?” And this is why I say, like, ops teams, like, get out of here because most ops teams, the extant ops teams are still called ops, and a lot of them have been renamed SRE—but they still do the same job—are an underclass. And I don't mean that those people are below us. People are treated as an underclass, and they shouldn't be. Absolutely not.Corey: Yes.Amy: Because the idea is that, like, well, I'm a fancy person who writes code at my ivory tower, and then it all flows down, and those people, just faceless people, do the deployment stuff that's beneath me. That attitude is the most toxic thing, I think, in tech orgs to address. Like, if you're trying to be like, “Well, our liability is bad, we have security problems, people won't fix their code.” And go look around and you will find people that are treated as an underclass that are given codes thrown over the wall at them and then they just have to toil through and make it work. I've worked on that a number of times in my career.And I think just like saying, underclass, right, or caste system, is what I found is the most effective way to get people actually thinking about what the hell is going on here. Because most people are just, like, “Well, that's just the way things are. It's just how we've always done it. The developers write to code, then give it to the sysadmins. The sysadmins deploy the code. Isn't that how it always works?”Corey: You'd really like to hope, wouldn't you?Amy: [laugh]. Not me. [laugh].Corey: Again, the way I see it is, in theory—in theory—sysadmins, ops, or that should not exist. People should theoretically be able to write code as developers that just works, the end. And write it correct the first time and never have to change it again. Yeah. There's a reason that I always like to call staging environments in places I work ‘theory' because it works in theory, but not in production, and that is fundamentally the—like, that entire job role is the difference between theory and practice.Amy: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's the problem with it. We're already so disconnected from the physical world, right? Like, you and I right now are talking over multiple strands of glass and digital transcodings and things right now, right? Like, we are detached from the physical reality.You mentioned earlier working in data centers, right? The thing I miss about it is, like, the physicality of it. Like, actually, like, I held a server in my arms and put it in the rack and slid it into the rails. I plugged into power myself; I pushed the power button myself. There's a server there. I physically touched it.Developers who don't work in production, we talked about empathy and stuff, but really, I think the big problem is when they work out in their idea space and just writing code, they write the unit tests, if we're very lucky, they'll write a functional test, and then they hand that wad off to some poor ops group. They're detached from the reality of operations. It's not even about accountability; it's about experience. The ability to see all of the weird crap we deal with, right? You know, like, “Well, we pushed the code to that server, but there were three bit flips, so we had to do it again. And then the other server, the disk failed. And on the other server…” You know? [laugh].It's just, there's all this weird crap that happens, these systems are so complex that they're always doing something weird. And if you're a developer that just spends all day in your IDE, you don't get to see that. And I can't really be mad at those folks, as individuals, for not understanding our world. I figure out how to help them, and the best thing we've come up with so far is, like, well, we start giving this—some responsibility in a production environment so that they can learn that. People do that, again, is another one that can be done wrong, where it turns into kind of a forced empathy.I actually really hate that mode, where it's like, “We're forcing all the developers online whether they like it or not. On-call whether they like it or not because they have to learn this.” And it's like, you know, maybe slow your roll a little buddy because the stuff is actually hard to learn. Again, minimizing how hard ops work is. “Oh, we'll just put the developers on it. They'll figure it out, right? They're software engineers. They're probably smarter than you sysadmins.” Is the unstated thing when we do that, right? When we throw them in the pit and be like, “Yeah, they'll get it.” [laugh].Corey: And that was my problem [unintelligible 00:39:49] the interview stuff. It was in the write code on a whiteboard. It's, “Look, I understood how the system fundamentally worked under the hood.” Being able to power my way through to get to an outcome even in language I don't know, was sort of part and parcel of the job. But this idea of doing it in artificially constrained environment, in a language I'm not super familiar with, off the top of my head, it took me years to get to a point of being able to do it with a Bash script because who ever starts with an empty editor and starts getting to work in a lot of these scenarios? Especially in an ops role where we're not building something from scratch.Amy: That's the interesting thing, right? In the majority of tech work today—maybe 20 years ago, we did it more because we were literally building the internet we have today. But today, most of the engineers out there working—most of us working stiffs—are working on stuff that already exists. We're making small incremental changes, which is great that's what we're doing. And we're dealing with old code.Corey: We're gluing APIs together, and that's fine. Ugh. I really want to thank you for taking so much time to talk to me about how you see all these things. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where's the best place to find you?Amy: I'm on Twitter every once in a while as @MissAmyTobey, M-I-S-S-A-M-Y-T-O-B-E-Y. I have a blog I don't write on enough. And there's a couple things on the Equinix Metal blog that I've written, so if you're looking for that. Otherwise, mainly Twitter.Corey: And those links will of course be in the [show notes 00:41:08]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Amy: I had fun. Thank you.Corey: As did I. Amy Tobey, Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, or on the YouTubes, smash the like and subscribe buttons, as the kids say. Whereas if you've hated this episode, same thing, five-star review all the platforms, smash the buttons, but also include an angry comment telling me that you're about to wind up subpoenaing a copy of my shell script because you're convinced that your intellectual property and secrets are buried within.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.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Amy Chin Is Helping Clients Find Calm Better Days with CBD

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 23, 2022 32:40

Amy Chin is the founder of Calm Better Days, where she educates clients on CBD, its uses, different delivery methods and figuring out the proper dosage. As someone who has suffered from anxiety and depression, she found great relief with CBD and knew she had to help and educate others. By sharing her personal findings, Amy helps clients find a tailored CBD regime based on needs and lifestyle, so they can dive into their CBD journey and live calm, better days. More about Amy Chin. More about The Passionistas Project. FULL TRANSCRIPT: Passionistas: Hi, and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast, where we talk with women who are following their passions to inspire you to do the same. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and today we're talking with Amy Chin, the founder of Calm Better Days. As someone who suffered from anxiety and postpartum depression, she found great relief with CBD and knew she had to help others understand how CBD could help them in a myriad of ways so she became a CBD educator. Calm Better Days walks clients through what CBD is, what you use it for, different delivery methods and how to find their dosage. Clients also receive a tailored CBD regimen based on the individual's needs and lifestyle, so they can dive into their CBD journey. So please welcome to the show, Amy Chin. Amy: Hi. Hi Nancy. Hi Amy. Thank you for having me on today. Passionistas: We're really excited about CBD and want to learn all about it. Tell us what's the one thing you're most passionate about. Amy: Well, it's cannabis. I'm most passionate about plant medicine. It is a gift that can heal in so many ways. And I think that, you know, as a society, we need to learn to tap into that. And I think that we are gearing into that category as we are learning that, you know, health these days is a integrated health, right. That means eating more plant-based diet, as well as doing your exercise, meditation, getting adequate sleep, all those play a role into our health. Passionistas: And so how does that translate into what you do for a living? Amy: Understanding that everything is integrative, right. I always talk to my clients and remind them that CBD will fast-track your health to where you want it to be, but will slow down depending on your other health lifestyle habits. So for example, let's say two people are battling, you know, hormonal imbalance. And if one is doing everything, having healthy habits in terms of sleep, exercise, diet, and let's say spiritually, they're going to be healthier, faster. However, if one is not adapting to those, you know, healthier lifestyle habits, it will take much longer. So that's how it all relates. And I think that we're all learning that as we go now, especially with COVID around. Passionistas: Well, let's take a little step back. Tell us where you grew up and what your childhood was like. Amy: I grew up in New York City, born and raised right in Chinatown. And being in a Chinese household, we didn't really speak much about health. We didn't speak much about feelings and emotions as well in a Chinese household. So for me, growing up now as a mom and being diagnosed with anxiety and postpartum depression was very new to me. I was very thankful it was diagnosed by my marriage therapist because I was not aware of the symptoms because we never spoke about it in my household. And that's why I love talking about it. Because now that I realize when it was diagnosed, I can then treat it. I can address it and take care of myself. When I didn't know what it was at the time, I just thought, oh, this is part of motherhood. This is something that I have to learn to deal with. And I assumed that this was just how it was. So I was very thankful it was diagnosed. And it was my marriage therapist who recommended CBD to me because I was leaning toward a more holistic life after being a mom. And I was not having good reactions from pharmaceutical meds. So I was very thankful that she did recommend something that was more holistic. And this was about eight years ago. At the time that was when you actually had to get a medical card to get CBD. And I got my card and started taking CBD. And that's when my life changed. It went from that cranky, irritable yelling mom that flew off the handle. And I hated who I was. I hated how I was with my children. And once I started taking CBD, I became so much more patient, so much more present and mindful. I was able to enjoy the time when I was interacting with my kids and realize, oh my goodness, life can be like this. It didn't have to be the way it was before. And when I felt that change in myself, it was so eye opening. I was finally able to respond to the days, you know, challenges instead of reacting. And once I felt that calm and ease, I was just like, I knew that I had to get the word out there. Because I knew that if I one, didn't also knew I had anxiety and postpartum depression, I was sure that other moms out there maybe going through the same thing, and may not be aware of it. And knowing that there's a natural alternative out there with no side effects, it is such a big, great help. And so that's how I started Calm Better Days, to help people find their calm better day. I know we go through that a lot where we're just living and, you know, suffering from something, right. Everyone's suffering from something, whether it's pain, whether it's mental, whether it's, you know, different health conditions. And that's the great thing about CBD is that it can address so many different issues, so many different health issues. You almost wonder how can it be? How can it be so wonderful that it addresses so many different health issues from anxiety, epilepsy, Alzheimers, heart disease, arthritis. It's almost too good to be true, but it really does. Passionistas: So I think there are misconceptions about what CBD is, and especially as it relates to cannabis and marijuana and people getting high and all that. So can you kind of talk about the myth of CBD and clarify for people that are listening, what it is? Amy: Absolutely. So CBD and THC, there are both cannabinoids found in a cannabis plant. And THC is the cannabinoid known to get you euphorically high and CBD does not get you euphorically high. They are however, both cycle active in the sense that if I have depression, a person who takes CBD, their moods and feelings will be elevated in terms of not feeling depressed, however, not intoxicated. So that's the big difference between CBD and THC. And because you don't get that euphoric high with CBD, a lot of people sometimes don't know when it's working. Because with THC, you know it's working when you get that euphoric high. But with CBD, because you're not getting that euphoric high people are like, well, what am I supposed to be feeling? And so I describe it as you know it's working when you're not feeling the negative symptoms that you're normally experiencing. So that can be that anxiety, right. With anxiety might come that overwhelm, that high level of stress, that tightness in your chest, or pain for some people, right. So when you're not feeling those negative symptoms anymore, that's when you know CBD is working. It makes you feel normal, not suffering. CBD is a potent bioaccumulator. So what that means is, it's going to soak up all the toxins in the soil, which can be heavy metal, fungi, mold, pesticide, mycotoxins. These are things we do not want to ingest. So always buy organic. And you know, hemp is such a potent bioaccumulator, they actually planted at Chernobyl to clean up the soil from the radiation. So if you're not buying organic and you're not looking at the certificate of analysis that every quality CBD product comes with, you can be ingesting toxins that will set off at another health condition. Passionistas: Is that what inspired you to found Calm Better Days? And what was the process of starting it? And what's your mission? Amy: I started Calm Better Days at the end of 2019, right before the pandemic started. So what happened was in 2018, the Farm Bill was passed. So CBD was federally legal and you did not need a medical card anymore to buy CBD. So that's when we saw that the market was getting saturated. We saw CBD products everywhere. And I saw two issues for new consumers. And that was one: because CBD was so new, not everyone understood how to properly use CBD to really access the benefits from the plan. And then two: because it's such a saturated market now, finding a safe and quality product was another unknown for new consumers. And so that's when I wanted to address both issues. So, what I do is... people can sign up for a virtual consultation, so it can be done anywhere, any state. And I walk people through the basics because if you don't understand the basics, you're not going to really be able to access and understand the plant fully. So when I say the basics, I mean, what is CBD? How does it work in your body that it can address so many different symptoms? And then walking the person through the different delivery methods between tinctures, edibles, vaporizers. What are their different activation times and how long they last for in your body? Understanding that makes it easier for you to develop a routine that works for you. And then also understanding your dosage. Everybody's dosage is very unique. And we're used to going to a doctor's office, let's say. And your doctor says, let's say you're starting an SSRI. We'll start you on a certain milligram. And the doctor will say, well, come back in a month and let's see how that works, and we'll adjust the dosage if necessary. And with plant medicine, it's no different, except that you're able to... if you're able to track and learn to read what your body is telling you, your body will tell you how much CBD you need. And I teach, you know, people that tracking system so that they can find out what works best for themselves. And lastly, after the education portion, I take a look at your specific health condition to recommend the best products for you. Everybody suffers from different things. And, you know, we're learning that CBD is just scratching the surface. There are other cannabinoids and other turpines that play a role in each product and, and the effect. So if you're telling me your issue is say Crohn's disease or a gut issue, then there is a cannabinoid CBG that is great for that, that will help clean up the gut, promote good gut flora, and also help with digestive issues. But let's say your issue is sleep. Then there is another cannabinoid, CBN, that is great for that. So this cuts down on time and money for the consumer because now they don't have to waste money on thinking, well, I think this product might work for me. And then also, you know, they're finding relief faster because now that they have the products in hand that are right for them, now they know how to use it as well. So that's how Calm Better Days was born and the mission behind it. I also carry about 15 to 20 different brands. And I support and focus on small farmed, women own and BIPOC owned brands. One, I believe that small farm that's where the quality is. I don't believe in, you know, huge commercial grows. The standards are very different, as well as you know, I like to look into the company's mission. I want to make sure that they're really about helping people and growing quality product. And that's why I believe that, you know, especially people new to this industry, right. They may not be aware of the history behind it and what goes on. So I want to steer them toward good quality companies that are, you know, really focus on the quality of the product and really helping people. Passionistas: So how do you go from being diagnosed, that this is a treatment that will work for you as an individual, to gaining all this knowledge that you now have, where you can help other people? What kind of studying and practices did you do to get to this place? Amy: Before I started CBD, I was a cannabis enthusiast. And once I discovered the CBD side, I was just blown away. I was like, is there anything this plant cannot do? And it was when I felt the results with CBD, that I started diving into it myself, doing all the research possible. And once I knew what I wanted to do and start my company, I then became cannabis licensed with Dr. Mary Clifton. She is a board certified internal doctor who specializes in cannabis. And the studies don't stop because every day we're now finding new studies, right? Because now we can study the plant. Before we were not able to study the plant because it was, you know, it's still a Schedule 1 drug, and that's why there are no studies beforehand. But like I was saying, now studies are coming out. So it doesn't stop. And every day there are new industry trends that I need to keep up on. But I love, I love finding out all this information. So I take what I've, you know, been consuming myself for years, as well as the studies that are now available, and apply that to people who are looking for new alternatives to health. Passionistas: Tell us a little bit about the pop-ups that you do.. Amy: So I do a lot of pop-ups. I don't have a brick and mortar store, so I do a lot of pop-ups. Especially at women networking events, because, you know, I am a mom. And I know that moms ,we take on so much that our anxiety and stress is... I think a lot of moms suffer. So I'm hoping one day we'll have a brick and mortar so that I can do more explaining and education in the store. I find that right now, although people are in need of it, I think because we're all so busy right now with COVID and everything is online, we're just too busy to sometimes even have that consultation. Or even too busy to go online to order things. So pop-ups are helpful to be right in front of them. Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington, and you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Amy Chin. To learn more about her CBD related personal events, group and individual consultations, and pop-ups, visit calmbetterdays.co. If you're enjoying this interview and would like to help us to continue creating inspiring content, please consider becoming a patron by visiting thepassionistasproject.com/podcast and clicking on the patron button. Even $1 a month can help us continue our mission of inspiring women to follow their passions. Now here's more of our interview with Amy. You talked a little bit about the different forms that people can take CBD in. Can you kind of talk a little bit more in detail about that? Amy: So back then the only, not the only, but the most common way was through inhalation, smoking a joint or a blunt. Nowadays, we have vaporizers. And I love vaporizers because one, you're not burning carcinogens. Like before with the joint you had the paper, the flour is all burning and that's consuming carcinogens. Which I want to save my throat, so I don't consume flower anymore in that form, but I do use vaporizers. There's no scent to it. There is no carcinogens in my throat, so it saves my throat. But also I love it because it provides the quickest onset. So you'll feel it within 5 to 10 minutes. And this is great for, let's say a person suffering from panic attacks or anxiety attacks, and they need that quick relief. Or maybe they have severe, intense back pain that they need real quick relief from. The vaporizer will get to that quickest. But I also understand that, you know, for some people they just don't want to inhale anything. And that's where, you know, the industry has been so innovative in the different formats that CBD comes in. So there are edibles. And edibles are gummies, honey, chocolate, anything that needs to go through your stomach and liver to metabolize. But because it has to go through your stomach, it will take much longer to kick in. So it takes about 30 to 90 minutes. But people love it because it's portable. It's easy to consume. You just, if it's a gummy, you could put it in your bag, just pop one when you need it. And, it does last much longer than a vaporizer. It can last from 4 to 6 hours, even 8 hours for some people. So when we think about different delivery methods, you want to think about what's going to make it easy for us to consume on a daily basis. Because then you make it easy as part of your routine. But if you're doing something that you don't like, and it's difficult, then it doesn't become part of your routine. So other formats are tinctures. Tinctures are CBD suspended in MCT oil. And it comes in a bottle with a dropper. And normally you want to drop it underneath your tongue. Hold it there for 60 seconds before you swallow. And that allows it to be absorbed into your bloodstream and will take about 20 to 40 minutes to activate. And will last about four hours. And when I talk about delivery methods, there is a time and place for everything. So what I mean by that is we want to think about our situation, what we need to address, and then also about the place where we're at, right? Because we want it to be easy and convenient. Once I wake up. That's when my anxiety and depression is at its worse, right. It's hard to be motivated. I'm, you know, don't want to get out of bed. And it's hard for me to be focused and productive. So I know right away in the morning, I either use my vaporizer or my tincture because I want to set the tone for my day. And I want it to be quick to get out of that slump and kind of like jumpstart my day. So, I either do one of those two things. And then after that, because I know it lasts for about four hours and I work at home, thankfully. So that's when I take an edible. I pop a gummy right before my lunch, because I know I have a long afternoon ahead and I don't want to have to think about redosing. And I take it right before my lunch, because I want it to go down with the good fat from my diet. Because then your body will absorb more of the CBD and also quicker, versus taking it on an empty stomach where your stomach acids might get to it first, or after a full meal where your liver just has to metabolize more. And then after the gummy wears off is probably around dinner time/after dinner. And it depends on what I need to do. If I need to do more, then I'll dose accordingly. But let's say, you know, I put in a hard day's work. I really want to relax. I don't want to think about work, then I can also do something relaxing, like a tea to kind of like set the mood for my night. Set myself up for good sleep and have a really relaxing night. And that's a great thing about it. Is that now with so many different products, it feels like a self treat. I can do an afternoon little chocolate piece or, you know, have my tea, right. Or maybe it's honey drizzled on top or fruit as my dessert after dinner. So there are different ways of consuming it. And not only that, but after my shower, you know, my muscles usually there's like soreness or stress from my neck down. And I love after a shower putting on a good CBD lotion just to melt all that tension, all that stress away. And that also eases me into my, you know, good nights rest. Passionistas: I think everybody associates weed with patchouli. Like these creams and the tinctures and everything. Do they smell like cannabis or do they come now in like lavender? Amy: They do. They come in so many different formats, so many different scents, and I love it. I have this one by Common Ground and it's bergamot and I love bergamot. And it goes on so smooth, so luxurious. So satiny too. I'm loving the creams that they come up with now because it doesn't smell like cannabis and it goes on so nice. It feels like any other luxurious cream, you wouldn't . Even know that it's, you know, specifically CBD. Not only does it smell great, but it really helps ease that tension, melt away any stress or pain that you may have. It's great because it's anti-inflammatory, which can be acne, rosacea, the redness, right. That's all inflammation. So that takes care of that. It also regulates your sebum control. So back then, when I was hormonally imbalanced, I had horrible cystic acne. My face would get shiny in an hour because I was over producing oil. So the CBD oil helps balance out your sebum. So instead of over-producing oil, it was balancing that out. So now my face doesn't get shiny in an hour. And also my cystic acne, it would hurt less because the CBD oil was taking care of the pain, as well as the inflammation. So CBD facial oil is also anti-aging and anti-oxidant. So it's great for the face. And I use it every day. It's cleaned up my skin regimen. Like before I used to apply so much acne medication, so many different retinals this and that. Now is just double cleanse and the facial moisturizers, CBD facial moisturizer and nothing else. It will take out the puffiness. I have an eye serum. And also for dark spots. Because it quickens the cellular turnover, so the dark spots will fade quicker as well. So it's cut down my steps and products. I love it. I recommend it for everyone. Passionistas: What if someone is on traditional medication? Are there interactions that they should speak with a doctor about before starting a regimen? Amy: Always speak with your doctor especially when you are on pharmaceutical drugs. And on my website, I have a partnership with Leaf411, which is a nonprofit organization of cannabis nurses. So what that means is you can call them and say, you know, you were referred from Calm Better Days. And that makes the call free. You do have to pay for the service, but because I have the partnership, it is free. And what you can do is say, "I am on medication X, Y, Z. Will CBD interact with it?" For the most part, CBD does not interact with most drugs. The only concern is if you are on blood thinners or blood pressure medication. Anything that interacts with grapefruit and you cannot take, CBD works like that grapefruit. It's, an enzyme inhibitor. So that you would have to watch. Passionistas: You talked a little bit about how your personal life has changed from making this discovery. But tell us a little bit more about, kind of, the transformation you personally have made since you started using CBD in this way. Amy: Well, let's see, I've been on it for about, CBD specifically, for over eight years now. Cannabis in general, probably over a decade. So I have now become a more mindful person, definitely more aware about my health. And this was also after becoming a mom, more holistic, more plant-based. Because when I was at my darkest point with anxiety and postpartum depression, that's when my health was out of balance. I was hormonally imbalanced. I wasn't eating right at that time. So during the time when I was consuming CBD was also when I was making healthier lifestyle changes in terms of my diet, more plant-based. And as a mom, you know, I know I'm supposed to exercise more and also get adequate sleep. However, it's very hard to fit those two things in as a busy mom, also running her own company. And I know that, right. And that is why I make sure to take my CBD every day. So at least then my body won't crack from not doing the things that I know I'm supposed to do. If I can, I do try to, of course do it. But in terms of lifestyle, that's how it's changed. I'm more aware of what I do need to do, as well as my mental state. I would say before CBD, I felt like my life felt like, you know, how, when you're that hamster on the hamster wheel and it's constantly going. And you just feel that you have to. And then once I took CBD, it kind of took me out of that hamster wheel and I could see, oh my gosh, I'm that hamster. And it didn't have to be like that. It allowed me to have calmness and mindfulness so I can see and be aware of what goes on in my life. And the funny thing is, you know, they always suggest therapy and all that. And I have been going to years of that and try to practice meditation and yoga, but my mind would not be still. And I just could not tap into it no matter how hard I tried. But with the CBD, I was able to finally tap into that and calm my mind and be aware of everything that was going on, so that now if I take CBD before a yoga session or a meditation, it just enhances that session because now I can really focus in and tap into that. Whereas before I just could not calm my mind to, to focus in on that. Passionistas: Do you find that people are, like who don't get it, who don't understand it personally, like are judgmental about the concept of CBD? And how do you address people who come at you in that way? Amy: Absolutely. I get a lot of people who don't understand it. And that's why I love to talk about it. And I get that they don't understand it. And sometimes it comes with, of course, you don't get it because you don't have the basic fundamentals. And, and that's why I'm here to help you understand that, because I feel that once you understand that, then everything starts clicking. And then after that is you have to experiment and try it. And you know, we've been so conditioned as a society to think that, okay, a doctor is here, they prescribe medicine. And then you just take it blindly, right? And with plant medicine, it's a different approach in that you can do it yourself, but you have to be patient. You have to be open to it and you have to be open to tracking it so that you can tell yourself, well, how much does my body need? But we haven't listened to our bodies in so long that it seems like a new practice. And we have to remember that herbs, cannabis, that was the original medicine of days long ago before pharmaceutical medicine was made in a lab. So we have to understand that that's what we started with and it's going back to that. And I understand sometimes even with the education, it may still be hard to understand. But once that person tries it and they feel it, then that is like, I'm hooked now. Now I want to understand more and dive into it more. And sometimes it's all about finding the right dosage to get you there. Or finding the right product because everyone is going to respond differently to a vaporizer versus a tincture versus an edible. You know, for some people edibles, for whatever reason, doesn't work for them, for their body, their genetic makeup. So sometimes that's when a vaporizer can really help. And I love vaporizers because I find that because of the quick onset, that people really feel it. Where sometimes when they're waiting for an edible to kick in, they forget that they're waiting and then the day goes by and then they're not mindful of, oh, my day actually went by smoother. I wasn't blowing up at everything, right. But sometimes people don't notice that because we're not mindful. We're not reading what our body is telling us. And usually we only hear what our body is telling us when it's screaming, right. And that's when it's like suffering from a pain or suffering from something that happened in our body. Passionistas: From all the people that you've worked with, is there like one specific example that you can think of as like a success story that you're especially blown away by? Amy: Well, right now, a lot of clients are coming to me for sleep issues and stress issues and actually gut issues. Well, gut and mind is all related. So that's why stress and gut health are like hand in hand. And that's why a lot of people are coming for that. But sleep. So I've seen a lot of people come back and say, you know what? I've been getting good sleep. And stress has been lowered. I've had a lot of clients who were on pharmaceutical meds for anxiety, stress, depression, and have weaned off of it. When I hear that they've weaned off of pharmaceutical meds and still feeling great, I am so happy because I know that they're feeling better because they're no longer feeling the side effects from the pharmaceutical drugs. Which was the main reason why a lot of them wanted to get off of that. So when I hear that, I just know that, you know, that makes me feel wonderful that I'm actually helping people feel better. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to our interview with Amy Chin. To learn more about her CBD related personal events, group and individual consultations, and pop-ups visit calmbetterdays.co. Please visit thepassionistasproject.com to learn more about our podcast and subscription box, filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. This quarter's box is a collaboration with the MOB Nation and features products from mom owned business. Get a free mystery box with a one-year subscription using the code SPRINGGOODIES. And be sure to subscribe to The Passionistas Project Podcast, so you don't miss any of our upcoming, inspiring guests. Until next time, stay well and stay passionate.

covid-19 new york city chinese clients alzheimer's disease cannabis cbd bipoc chernobyl thc chin chinatown crohn common ground better days cbn farm bills ssri mct cbg tinctures find calm will cbd amy well passionistas project mob nation amy so amy they passionistas project podcast

How This Stay-At-Home Mom Makes $4K/Mo Flipping Vintage Items

The Reseller Hangout Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 29, 2021 33:46

Reseller Hangout Podcast With Amy PowlisonIf you are interested to see if Flipper University is right for you - check out our FREE Workshop: https://courses.fleamarketflipper.com/flipper-university-workshop-webinar Other resources at www.fleamarketflipper.comTranscript:Rob: Awesome today, guys. We're so excited to have Amy Powlison join us. She is a Flipper U alumni. So we're very excited to dig into kind of her success story and her journey. So, Amy, thank you so much for jumping on here and joining us for the show. Amy: Thank you so much. This is exciting. Rob: Awesome. Melissa: Welcome, Amy. We're so glad that you're here and that we could spend a few minutes with you today and yeah, learn about some of your business. Rob: Cool, let's dive in, let's get into the [00:01:00] meat and potatoes of the interview for sure. Melissa: So, we'll just start off with a little bit about your background and how did you get into this whole flipping thing?Amy: I mean, it's kind of crazy. So the, the short version is that, I have a master's degree in exercise science and at some point in my life decided that didn't work and family and all those things happen. We have one seven year old. That's plenty. I don't know how you guys do like, but congrats. That's awesome.One's plenty for us. But as that kind of progressed, we decided that, you know, it didn't fit and it wasn't as lucrative as it, I needed it to be, or we needed it to be. So then I started working in restaurants, which I always did on the side, so that I managed really small places. I bartended really small places.I managed places that did $20 million a year. So I've done, like I've done one end of the spectrum to the other with that world and loved it, and then the world shut down. So, you know, the world shut down 20 [00:02:00] months ago and things changed for everyone. And one day I had a job and my owner literally said to me, you need to go online and figure out what the process is to apply for unemployment, because there's a really good chance we're going to be closed.And it was less than 24 hours later and everything was closed. So in the interim, it was one of those things where, okay. I don't, now what? Like my husband's a fireman, so his life never changed. Actually, the only thing that changed is he worked more. We saw less of him because he went to work more stayed later there, like it was crazy. I say everything works out for a reason. Like he was able to do that because I was able to be home and take care of our little and provide that virtual, I call it home schooling, but it was like that virtual education. Because I don't know what we would've done if we both would have been working.So. Then as that kind of happened, I've been saying [00:03:00] forever, I could do this. I could totally do this. Like, I've been doing yard sales since I was kid. I go to, I love a flea market, you know, like love a flea market and love a yard sale. And I buy stuff secondhand and we resell stuff on Facebook marketplace and I'm like, I can do this.So my husband finally said, "You're out of reasons, not to. You're at home. You're not like, you're home." So that's kind of how it started. I mean, prior to that, you know, I'd throw something on and forget about it and then have to find it, or like I put stuff on Facebook marketplace and you know, that that's kind of a different breed, cause it was a lot of in-person versus not.And then it was like, well, you can't meet anybody. So, it really came out of like pick yourself up by the, pick yourself up, put on your big girl pants, pull up your bootstraps and like figure it out. And here we are. So it's been a crazy ride, but a great ride. Rob: That's awesome. And yeah, we're so glad that you actually did.You, [00:04:00] you looked back on, you know, that you had done yard sales, you love flea markets and that's where you jumped in and you went feet first. So we're very, very, we're very excited for you and to see your journey for sure. Melissa: Virtual school is no joke. Rob: No, it's not. Amy: Again, one is plenty. I don't like, I literally don't know how so. Melissa: Our kids got behind for sure. Cause we, I could not put the time that I needed to, to help them on virtual school, so it was tough. Yeah. Rob: I've got a hard enough time reading myself, much less trying to teach a kid how to read. Amy: Right, right. And that's the issue, so our little is seven. So he was, he left school in March of kindergarten. And didn't return until this year in second grade. So all that like super formative, like, yeah, I can, I can sit and read with you, but to teach you how to do the... no. So it's been, it's been crazy, but. Melissa: Our middle ones is the exact same age. So she was the same, left after kindergarten. So that was definitely a tough time that happened. So how many hours a week, like, are you part-time, [00:05:00] full-time I know you're kind of you're at home. So like how many hours a week are you really? Amy: I'm definitely full-time at this point. While he was home for virtual school, I was part-time trying to be full-time. But it was really tough and I spent a lot of nights staying up, super, super late. And then I spent a lot of weekends that I just worked the whole time.Like it was when my husband could be home, I worked. Or if I could get my, our son to bed, I worked until I was like falling asleep at the computer type of stuff. So, but you know, you do what you have to do, like, but I also have worked in the bar world for so long that being up till 2:00 AM is like my normal and that's my like, go time.So for me staying up and working late, like I know some people that's, that's crazy talk, but I've done it for 20 years. So for me, that's my bread and butter. So like, let's do like jam and do it. So I was part-time all of, all of while he was home and the [00:06:00] second he went to school, I was like, all right, we got to move. So it's definitely a full-time at this point. Rob: Awesome. How many hours would you say you're full-time are you doing 40 hours? Are you doing over 40 hours? Amy: It fluctuates a little bit week by week, but I would definitely say I'm at least putting in 40 hours a week. Some weeks it's more, some weeks it's a little less, I mean, you know, family obligations and all those things, but if you, in my opinion, if you want to make it work, you have to work.So it's it's around that time, it's around that 40 ish hours a week for me. Rob: Yeah, that's awesome. And that, that's one of the beauty things about the business too, is when you do have family obligations, when you do have stuff, you're not going to lose your job by going out and taking care of your family or your kids, whatever it is, you can step away from it.And hopefully if you have stuff listed, it can be working for you while you are stepping away if you need to spend time with family, but a hundred percent, you get as much out of a business as you put into it. So if you're putting part-time hours into it, part-time effort into it. You're going to get paid part-time and when you [00:07:00] start developing the skills and going to that next level and putting full-time hours into it, that's where it'll start paying off for you.So that's awesome. That's super exciting. Melissa: Yeah. And that's another point to that is the, you know, working late nights, we did that, especially when we were going full time. We're like, okay, we gotta figure this out. We had three little kids. So, nights where our really our only option. So they were late nights. And, but that's the great job, the great thing is it can be flexible. So, which is pretty cool.Amy: Right, there's a ton of flexibility, which has also been one of the reasons why I stayed in the bar industry was because my husband's a fireman. Like he can say he's done it whatever time, and that's super cute. But the reality is if there's a fire, car accident, or all these things, like he's not coming home.So, you know, like I have to be able to be resilient on the fact that if he's supposed to pick him up from work or from work that day from school and he's stuck, you can't leave your kid at school, you know, [00:08:00] or like if I'm supposed to go to work that night and he's stuck at a three alarm fire, like you can't go to work, you know. So thank God I worked for someone who had super, who super understood. And I was super good at minimizing that interfering with my work. But I mean, there were times when it just did, you know, and you can't take a four-year-old to a restaurant, so not when you're working anyway. So, you know, having the flexibility has been one of those things where I've been employable, I don't think I'm employable anymore. Like you, I don't think of employable anymore because it doesn't, it's not conducive to our lifestyle anymore. And I kinda like it. Rob: That's awesome. And where else? I mean, I've gone and picked stuff out of the trash before when I'm on a walk and I have my nine-year-old, she's there with a camera videoing me and it's like, where else can you take your kid to work?Have them do a little [00:09:00] bit of work video on you while you're doing it. And you're still getting some work in. So no, it is. It's exciting what we're able to do with the kids right now. So, but I am curious, I'm curious. So you're doing this full-time, what is it that you are doing? Like, what is your expertise or what, what did you choose to hone in, in the reselling world to get the results that you're getting?Amy: So when I started, I started. I started by doing your Christmas challenge right in January, right before everything happened. And I was like, oh, maybe I'll make some money on the side. You know, like, who knows, who knows what'll happen, maybe I'll get rid of some stuff. And the Christmas challenge was $250, right.So we do this whole challenge and I was like, I'm making money. I'm doing this. And I didn't list a single thing on eBay cause I was terrified. So I did it all on Facebook and I was like, I don't care. I don't care. I'm just going to make this funny. I made $247.50. That's right. I came short and I was livid.I had played sports my whole life. I've been very competitive. I was in the straight a student. I have like you tell me no, that's, that's the [00:10:00] best thing you can ever tell me. So when I came short, I was like, it's my fault. Cause I didn't list on eBay. So then I went around my house, like we talked about and I listed anything and everything that we didn't use.And I was like, I don't care. Here it goes. And you want a piece of humble pie, go back and look at those photos a year later and see how horrible they were and who, who, would've bought anything from me, let alone that I was making money like atrocious, but it worked so whatever. So initially I was like, I don't even care.We'll figure it out. Like, we'll figure it out. Right? Like you just figure it out. I've decided that I'm better at stuff that's considered vintage, which I find a little funny because vintage stuff is like when we were kids, not what our parents were kids, which is what I think is actually vintage, but what do I know?Right. So I have found that I'm good at that. And I'm probably good at it because I lived through it. You know, like I know what music played [00:11:00] during that, that genre. I know what was cult classic movies. I know like that Barbie was it, you know, like, you know that stuff. And even if you don't. For me anyway, it sparks interests.Cause I'm like, man, I remember when whatever, you know what I mean? And then it goes down that road for me, or like your parents have that china or your grandmother had that sitting on her dining room table or whatever it is, you know, your grandfather had it in the shed and every time he opened the door, like you saw it on whatever.So I found that for me, That works. Now don't get me wrong. If there's something that I catch, you know, on the, on like the couple of platforms that I watch or from you guys or that I see or whatever, and I run into it, I'm getting it. Don't get me wrong, but like, if I can make money off of it, we're going to do that.But if I'm going out into the world, like in a nature search, searching and [00:12:00] sourcing by myself, it's probably going to lean towards those vintage items. Melissa: That's fine. Cause other people are looking for it. Like they want it, they live through it and they want those items. So, and they're looking for them. So they find them on your store. Rob: Yeah. Three huge points that I want to point out to your journey. So check it out. She started with the challenge. She actually got stuff listed. She did locally, but she made it a point to do it. She took that first step and you got paid, you got paid $247 to do that. Awesome. Totally awesome. You got results, but that next step you knew you saw that you were missing out on stuff that could be listed on eBay.Amazing. So you started where you were at and you look back on it now and you're like, what do they mean by these? These pictures were horrible. You know, how did I do this? The point is you just have to start to get results. You have to start now, you've grown through the last year, two years. You've gotten a lot better at it, but you stuck to it and you're getting results.And then the third point is definitely, you're doing stuff like I'm so surprised myself at the vintage stuff right now when I was a kid, the Nintendo, [00:13:00] the Atari. Those things are selling and they're selling like hotcakes Amy: He-Man, Shira, birdie, gem. Oh my gosh. And I think like if I just had my toy box, right, like.Melissa: I'm sure we have boxes of stuff in the sh the one garage. I bet we can find some stuff. Rob: But that points out that's stuff, that you knew, maybe not stuff that you were totally, well, it was stuff you were interested in when you're younger. So you had a, a foot up, or what would you say? Like a leg up? Are you, you know, you have a little bit of. Amy: Like if I see something like there's a good chance that I know that, that's probably a He-Man toy that might be teenage mutant ninja turtle that I probably need to ask my husband because I was probably playing with a Barbie. You know what I mean?Rob: That's cool. You figured out in your journey, so you started and you got better and you figured out, you know, kind of what you honed in on is that vintage stuff from when you were a kid, which is the same for me. It's that, that stuff that is really selling hot now. So those are three key points, big big points in your journey that are really cool. Melissa: Another part is that [00:14:00] you considered it a failure, even though you made $247, you were very upset, but you didn't let that stop you either. Like then you're like, okay. Game on. I'm going to do that. So, yeah. So that's fun. So what is your average? Obviously as a reseller, our income goes up and down like it fluctuates a lot. So, but what would you say your average income per month is from your reselling business? Amy: Because like you said, it does, it definitely goes up and down. And there are months that I'm like, I listed the most amazing things in the world and nobody buys them and you're like, "What?" And then there's months that you put stuff up that you've found in your basement.And you're like, I don't know how that just sold, but awesome. Right. Like it's, it's, it's crazy. But I also, I appreciate that, you know, like that keeps me interested and I would say on average, I probably make like in gross sales, I'm probably somewhere between like the $3,000 and $4,000 a month at this point, which is, I mean, it's awesome.Again, you're you're, you're going to be mad at me again. Like for [00:15:00] me, I'm like that's below where I want to be, so I'm not happy, but I was unemployed. So I do try to keep perspective of that. Like, I could be sitting here every day going, I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do, you know, because let's face it.The pandemic is still changing everything and restaurants are not the same and businesses are, unfortunately are not the same. And that's, that's long haul. That's not over, that's not even close to being over. So there are restaurants that I could go back to and work at right now and make a fraction of what I made and work twice as much.And not be available for my family. So I do like, I'm like, oh my gosh, you made like $4,000 this month. Like sit down, like, you're fine. But then I'm like, it's not where I want to be. So for me, like, I just see that there's potential to keep pushing and keep moving. And that's why when I get to that number, I'll let you know.But until then, you [00:16:00] know, I'm thankful so thankful that I'm able to supplement our income this way and that we're able to grow and that I'm able to do this and that, you know, I learned something new every day and I definitely learned different things aspects of everyday or what I did wrong and how to not do that again.And I, and I think that's part of the big thing that discourages people is that they make one big mistake shipping or one big mistake and you listed something and it sold. And then you saw somebody else selling it for three times as much. You really have to just be like, it's done. It's done, it's gone, it's over, keep going. Yeah. Yeah. Melissa: Do you know about like how much you would have had to invested to make that $4,000? Like I, in your inventory, like on average on? Amy: Oh, like all of it, like, like, so I literally sourced stuff from our house and I have a bit of a book [00:17:00] problem, so I sold. I mean, I made so little on them, but it didn't even matter.Cause it, it like, it serves such a dual purpose. It got books out of the house and I made a little bit of money and it funded the next thing and funded the next thing and funded the next night. You know what I mean? To the point where that I could actually go out and buy inventory and then sell that inventory.You know what I mean? I tried to be very specific at not spending money that I hadn't made. If I couldn't pay myself, that was fine, but at least I could roll it back in. And like, keep it going, you know what I mean? And that was really specific for me. Rob: Yeah. On, on average, when you are like on average, you're probably saying that you're bringing in $4,000, how much are you actually investing towards that? Melissa: In inventory. Rob: Exactly. When you're buying per month, like, are you spending, you know, you know, a $1,000 and that's rolling you into a $4,000 or do you roughly know?[00:18:00] Amy: I tried to buy stuff super, super cheap. I still, also, I would try to sell stuff out of my house that I keep finding. And now that it's, now that it's a thing, now that I'm just not like, oh, Amy's selling on eBay. Cause she doesn't have anything to do at home. Right? Like now that people like your family, your friends are now vested.Like people give me stuff, but like, hey, I was going to throw this away. Do you think you could make money off of it? And I'm like, I don't know, but if I can't then I'll donate it. So just bring it on over, you know what I mean? Like, so I do that and then I have this weird situation that doesn't happen for everybody. But I was super fortunate is that, so one of the guys that my husband works with his father owns a clean-out company and was like, hey, like we're looking for somebody that can help us do some more things.So I go pick through what they bring from their clean-outs and then we have our deal, you know what, like whatever that is. And, [00:19:00] I get a ton of stuff that way that I don't pay a penny for. So paying a lot for inventory and not paying a lot for inventory. What I've done though, because I don't pay a lot for inventory is I've paid for systems and processes and softwares and things and education to keep me moving forward.So like the Reseller Summit, I was like, yes, I'm going, and I'm paying for the, like the extras I'm doing that. Like Flipper University. As soon as I finished that challenge and didn't make the $250, I was like, bye. Like, come on that $250 is paying for this and we're going to keep it moving. You know what I mean?Like, so I do a lot of those types of things where I invest it back into, I say it's investing it back into the business, but it's investing it back into me being more capable of doing the business. So I probably, if I had to say like, give you a number, let's say I get, I get thrifty, and I decided I'm going to go to all the yard sales [00:20:00] versus just like going and getting stuff from the warehouse.Cause I just want to change. Let's say I spend $500 a month. Like that's, that's a lot for me, but if I do that, it's probably because I've sourced some ridiculous thing that you're going to help me put on a pallet at some point, you know what I mean? Like, hi, I'm like, I just want to, I went and bought a crazy stove because why would I not?And then I went and bought this like crazy this, because why would I not? And then like, I bring it home and then my husband goes "What?" And I'm like, fine. It's totally fine. We're going to make money. It's totally fine. You know what I mean? And, that's kind of what I do like, so I either spend very, very little, or I will spend specifically to either build the brand and my company or I know I'm going to make a serious amount of money off of an item. So, I mean, it's kind of all, I'm a little, all, [00:21:00] all over the place, but I feel like you have to be, and having those contexts is so good. Melissa: We definitely believe in those, like you can. That's awesome. Rob: Yeah. One thing that I wanted to go back to that you were talking about was definitely that you, you're appreciative for where you're at.A lot of people in this game can look at other people's even right now, seeing that you're making. $4,000 a month. Somebody can look at that and they're only making 700 to a thousand dollars and compare themselves to you. You can't do that. You can't play the comparison game. You have to get better than you were just like where you started out in that first month, you know, making $247.That's where you have to start and you have to look at these cents 50 cents and make sure the next month that you're getting a little bit better and keep comparing yourself to your, I mean, keep comparing yourself to who you were yesterday or last month and keep growing and getting better. So, and that's part of your investment as well.You're investing into your knowledge, you're investing into your business, you're trying to grow and get better at what you're doing. So you can make more money and get better at your craft. [00:22:00] Amy: I mean, the other thing that I did too early on is that I would list anything. And I do mean like if I could make 50 cents, it was going up, you know what I mean?Like. That's because I wanted to create standards and platforms. Like I wanted to have the rating and I wanted the review and I wanted to knock your socks off with how I shipped it and how pretty it was and this, that, and the they're not pretty anymore. They go in a box. They go, I mean, they're well wrapped, but like I was.I was over the top. Like I was, I was running like a gift shop store on the side, like, you know, cause I just wanted it to, I wanted to wow people so that I would get good reviews and they would up my rating and it would up my visibility and it would up my, so I didn't care what it cost. Like I didn't care if I was making 25 cents.I just wanted the sale. So I think that's the other thing too, is that people get very caught up in like, you know, we live in a world where everything's so accessible, so you can see YouTube and videos and this and that and this and the [00:23:00] podcasts, whatever it is. And you see somebody doing whatever amount they're doing anything.Well, if I'm not doing that, then I'm not doing anything. And like, you just have to stay in your lane. Whatever that lane is, you have to figure out what that is and just be comfortable with it. And like, So for me, it was, I'm going to list everything under the sun and then it became, okay, my time and worth is a little more valuable than that now, only because I'm making money. So now I'm going to raise that level and I'm not going to list something if it's not, if I can't sell it at this price. And then when I started with this, cause like working with this guy, it was like, well, I'll say so, anything that's his at any price, just to show him that I can sell stuff.And then it was like, okay, well, now that I've proven to him that I can sell stuff, like now we're going to raise that bar. Now I've read both the bars. If I'm not going to make this number in my head, approximately it grows. I probably have other things I should probably be doing today. You know what I mean?And that's, and it's okay to not be there. Like it's [00:24:00] okay. If you make 5 cents on an item. Awesome. Roll that into something else. I mean, you know, Stacy, you started with 50 cents, you know, and she's crushing it. So it's not a matter of necessarily like, oh, I didn't my first item wasn't a pallet shipping of like a, you know, like $50,000 item.Yeah, no, it probably shouldn't be.Melissa: What was one of your most memorable flips? Amy: I've had a bunch of both that have gone right and wrong. The wrong always sticks out more for me because I'm so competitive. Like I want to fix it and be better next time. But one that went really right for me, that was like, nobody believed it is that.So when everything, the world was shut down, right. Once in a while I could sneak into the warehouse and like sort stuff when nobody was there. And like, I didn't have to worry about seeing people and things. And I found an item and I was like, I think this is a chess set. And I was like a queen's [00:25:00] gambit, chess is up over a thousand percent.It's everywhere in the news. They're running out of chess sets, you can't even get them, can't even find them. So I like, you also have to keep your ear to the ground, like what's happening right now, you know? So. I brought it home and was like, all right, let's just, let's just see. Right. So I started looking it up and I was like, it is, it's a chess set, it's totally a chest set that, but it looked like nothing you'd ever seen.It was super long in this box that had like a blue apatite, like over the front of it. And it like slid back with like, a wooden drawer. It had spots in the back for a hook. You'd like, hang it on the wall and display it. Right. Like, they were like this big and they were very mid, modern, vintage word, right.That mid modern, like look to them. And I kept looking at I'm like, I know it's a chest set. So we started looking, we as an I'm looking and I'm telling my husband, I know it's a chest set. [00:26:00] Okay, whatever crazy lady, like you just brought home the most random thing ever, right? Yeah. That random things sold for a thousand dollars in two weeks, it was actually a mid modern chess set.As I suggested, made out of tin and each piece was made out of one piece of metal. It wasn't cut piece together from this particular artist who did a series of chess sets. And that's why they had the hooks in the back because you could hang them as display because he was an artist, not a chess maker.The only reason I knew that the only reason I even, well, for two reasons, my dad played, we played chess as a kid. I played chess young. So, you know, like when the chess thing became hip again, I was like, man, I totally know how to play chess. Right. And then w just happened upon this. And I was like, I think it's chess.We're going to find out. Like right then and there any. [00:27:00] It was the first big item I sold, like the first big dollar item I sold not size, but dollar item, I sold. And when I sold that, my husband was like, whatever we need to do. You know what I mean? Like after that, he's like, yeah, yeah, cute. Make some money.Don't be bored when you're not trying to teach your child, like do what you do get some stuff out of the house. I'm in. Get stuff out of the house. Yes. I came home with that thing and sold it and he was. Whatever we need to do it. Melissa: Or you had, how much did you pay for it or you? Amy: I sourced it for free from my contacts.Melissa: Awesome. Amy: Crazy. Right. So. Melissa: A thousand bucks. That's so fun. Rob: But one thing that you did say about that is your ear to the ground. You know, what's going around you that's when the big series of the Queen's Gambit, is that what it was that was going on? People were on there looking for stuff we did. But even right now, there's problems in manufacturing for stuff that people can not get there [00:28:00] months and months on back order for stuff.That's where you keep your ear to the ground. Right now, you figure out what it is. Appliances are huge right now for us. You can get appliances and sell them for so much money because people can't get them they're on back order and they can't do it. So that's a very good point for everybody to take.What is going on around you take advantage of that stuff. That's going on around you and try to look in those areas. So to find stuff that you can resell. So that's a that's amazing point. Great point. Amy: Wall Street Journal just released an article and I'm not a big, like, I don't read the paper, I don't watch the news. I like, I catch things. And then if they spark my interest, I, I vet them out. I source them. Right. So. I don't spend a ton of time doing that. I'm just aware of what's happening in the world. A little, you know, Wall Street Journal released an article. It was over the weekend that said, retailers are telling you if you have not already significantly completed your Christmas list, it's not going to happen. It's, it's what day is it? It's November eighth. Melissa: They're going [00:29:00] to go to eBay. Amy: I got you like vintage toys. Let's do it. You know what I mean? Like, whatever it Melissa: It's Christmas. Amy: Exactly. Rob: Yeah, absolutely. I love it. I love it. Melissa: So, so have you had any, one last one, have you had any flops that you can think of? Everybody likes to hear the, you know, like it's all exciting and good, but what are some like maybe something that you learned from? Amy: I like to sit in my misery and sort through it and figuring out how to fix it. If, if not for anything else, I mean, those are the things that stick out for me. I thought I was going to make a gazillion dollars off of selling books from the dollar store. Let me just, let me help you out, the answer's no, you are much better off to take whatever's on your bookshelf and make some money because you've already bought and paid for it. That was like, I knew I was going to get rich that way. Like that was the silliest thing I've ever done. You know what I mean, dollars. I have made enormous mistakes in [00:30:00] shipping, like enormous.I mean, we talked about shipping stuff as, as soon as yesterday, like I have made enormous mistakes in shipping and not always because you did something wrong, like they changed their prices. They changed the size, but like, and I say they is in the three big, like without doing freight, like FedEx, UPS and, and USPS, like they changed what their cost is going to be.They change what their measurements are going to be for whatever price range. They change availability, P.S. They don't have people working, so you can't get anything out. You know what I mean? Like I've had enormous flops because of that. And things that I've lost money on like significant money on where you literally have to make a decision that you're going to like sit and wallow, which okay, cool.And get up or sit and wallow and be like, I can't do this. It's too hard. Guess what? Every single job is [00:31:00] hard. I don't care who you work for, what you do, what it is. If you like 80 to 85% of what your job is, you've done well. If that 10 to 15% like, isn't great, guess what the rest of the world has that. So like you get to pick, what's going to be hard.Like, is it going to be hard cause you messed up or is it going to be hard cause you went to work and messed up for somebody else and maybe got fired? And now like you don't have a job. Like I didn't have a job, you know what I mean? Like, so it just, you have to pick your heart. So shipping has been probably my biggest. But it's my mistake it's stuff that I like. I've made mistakes and you just learn from it and you just move forward from it. Rob: Yeah. That is a huge point because people do, and that is what hangs people up is they do make a mistake in whether it's shipping, whether it's listing, they listed something too cheap and then they figured out, hey I sold that too cheap.There's a lot of mistakes that you can make. But you have to go back on this business as a whole. Where else are you going to be able to have the control of your time? Where else are you gonna be able to take care of your kids while you're doing it? [00:32:00] And if you take those mistakes, just like you said, you're not wallowing. You're not sitting there and meditating on that mistake. You're figuring out what can I learn from this? How do I not make the same mistake next time? And that's how you continue to grow. So that's awesome that you've already realized that, and you're, you're, you're using it. You're, you're doing what you're, you're preaching you're you're not sitting in it and thinking about it, you're actually getting to that next level and you're growing, you're continuing to grow, which is huge in any business that you're working with.Amy: And I want to savor that. It's okay to not be okay. It's okay to like that sucked. Like I messed that up and that sucked. Okay, cool. Have your moment do what you need to do. Walk away from it for a day. Well I've taken full weekends when I'm like, I'm not even opening Ebay app, like I'm not even like I'm turning off notification. If it sells over the weekend, I can deal with it on mine.Like I'm not even looking, but you're better to do that. And then refocus and go back then just walk away. Rob: Absolutely. I totally agree. Well, cool. Well, Amy, [00:33:00] let's wrap this up. We totally appreciate you doing this. You've given some great, great information for people who are out there starting out and even going to that next level.A huge, huge list of amazing things that you're implementing in your business. So thank you for jumping on here with us. Thank you for giving this, amazing information to everybody. So, yeah. Thank you so much. This has been awesome.

Managing to Balance the Unicycle with Amy Chantasirivisal

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 9, 2021 52:09

About AmyAmy (she/her) has spent the better part of the last 15 years in the tech start-up world, starting off as a front-end software engineer before transitioning into leadership. She has built and led teams across the software and product development spectrum, including web and mobile development, QA, operations and infrastructure, customer support, and IT.These days, Amy is building the software engineering team at EdTech startup, Unicycle, and challenging the archetype of what a tech leader should be. She strives to be a real-life success story for other leaders who believe that safe, welcoming, and equitable environments can exist in tech. Links: Unicycle: https://www.unicycle.co AmyChanta: https://twitter.com/AmyChanta 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: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. 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Visit Qtorque.io today and learn how you can spin up application environments in about the same amount of time it took you to listen to this ad.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A famous quote was once uttered by Irena Dunn who said, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Now, apparently at some point, people just, you know, looked at the fish without a bicycle thing, thought, “That was overwrought. We can do a startup and MVP it. Why do two wheels? We're going to go with one.”And I assume that's the origin story of Unicycle. My guest today is Amy Chantasirivisal who is the Director of Engineering at Unicycle. Amy, thank you for putting up with that incredibly tortured opening. But that's okay; we torture metaphors to death here.Amy: [laugh]. Thank you for having me. That was a great intro.Corey: So, you are, at the time of this recording at least, a relatively new hire to Unicycle, which to my understanding is a relatively new company. What do you folks do over there?Amy: Yes, so Unicycle is not even a year old, so a company born out of the pandemic. But we are building a product to reimagine what the digital classroom looks like. The product itself was thought up right during a time during the pandemic when it became very clear how much students and teachers are struggling with converting their experience into online platforms. And so we are trying to just bring better workflows, more efficiency into that. And right now we're starting with email, but we'll be expanding to other things in the future.Corey: I am absolutely the wrong person to ask about a lot of this stuff, just because my academic background, tortured doesn't really begin to cover it. I handle academia about as well as I handled working for other people. My academic and professional careers before I started this place were basically a patchwork of nonsense and trying to pretend I was something other than I was. You, on the other hand, have very much been someone who's legitimate as far as what you do and how you do it. Before Unicycle, you were the Director of Engineering at Wildbit, which is a name I keep hearing about and a bunch of odd places. What did you do there?Amy: [laugh]. I will have to follow up and ask what the odd places are but—so I was leading a team there of engineers that were fully distributed across the US and also in Europe. And we were building an email product called Postmark, which some of your listeners might use, and then also a couple of other smaller things like People-First Jobs and Beanstalk—not AWS's Beanstalk, but a developer repository and workflow tool.Corey: Forget my listeners for a minute; I use Postmark. That's where I keep seeing you on the invoices because it's different branding. As someone who has The Duckbill Group, but also the Last Week in AWS things, it's the brand confusion problem is very real. That does it. Sorry. Thank you for collapsing the waveform on that one. And of course, before that you were at PagerDuty, which is a company that most folks in the ops space are aware of, founded to combat the engineer's true enemy: sleep.Amy: Absolutely. It's the product that engineers love to hate, but also can't live without, to some degree. Or maybe they want to live without it, but uh… [laugh] are not able to.Corey: So, I have a standing policy on this show of not talking to folks who are not wildly over-represented—as I am—and effectively disregarding the awesome stuff that they've done professionally in favor of instead talking about, “Wow, what's it like not to be a white guy in the room? I can't even imagine such a thing. It sounds hard.” However, in your case, an awful lot of the work you have done and are most proud of centers around DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Tell me about that.Amy: Absolutely. I would say that it's the work that I've spent my time focusing on in recent years, but also that I'm still learning, right, and as someone who is Asian American, and also from a middle-class socioeconomic background, I have a bunch of privileges that I still have to unpack and that show up in the way that I work every day, as well. And so just acknowledging that, you know, while I spend a lot of time on DEI, still have just barely scratched the surface on it, really, in the grand scheme of things. But what I will say is that, you know, I've been really fortunate in my career in that I started in tech 15 or so years ago, and I started at a time when it wasn't super hard for someone who has no CS degree to actually get into some sort of coding job. And so I fell into my first role; I was building HTML and CSS landing pages for a marketing team, for an ISP that was based in San Francisco.So, I was cobbling together a bunch of technical skills, and I got better and better. And then I reached this point in my career where I didn't really have a lot of mentors, and so I was like, “I don't know what's next for me.” But then I am also frustrated that it is so hard for our team to get things done. And so I took it upon myself to figure out Scrum and project management type of stuff for my team, and then made the jump into people management from there. So, people management and leadership through project management.But when I look back on my career, I think about, “Oh, if I had a mentor, would that still have been my fate? Would I have continued down this track of becoming a very senior technical person and just doing that for my whole career?” Because letting go of the code was definitely a hard, hard thing. And I was lucky enough that I really did enjoy the people and the process side of all of this. And so [laugh] this relates to DEI in the fact that there's research and everything that backs this up, but that women and women of color generally tend to get less mentorship overall and get less actionable feedback about their job performance.And you think about how that potentially compounds over time, over the course of someone's career and that may be one of the reasons why women and people of color get pushed out of tech because they're not getting the support that they need, potentially. They're not getting feedback, they're not being advocated for in meetings, and then there's also all the stuff that you can add on around microaggressions, or just aggressions period, potentially, depending on the culture of the team that you're working on. And so all of those things compounded are the types of things that I think about now when I reflect on my own career and the types of teams that I want to be building in the future.Corey: Back when I was stumbling my way through piecing my career together. I mean, as mentioned, I don't have a degree; I don't have a high school diploma, as it turns out, and—that was a surprise when I discovered midway through my 20s that the school I had graduated from wasn't accredited—but I would tell stories, and I found ways to weasel my way through and I gave a talk right around 2015 or 2016, about, “Weasel Your Way to the Top: How to Handle a Job Interview,” and looking back, I would never give that talk again. I canceled it as soon as someone pointed out something that was only obvious in hindsight, that the talk was built out of things that had worked for me. And it's easy to sit here and say that, well, I had to work for what I have; none of this was handed to me. And there's an element of truth to that, except for the part where there was nothing fighting against me as I went.There was not this headwind of a presumed need for me to have to prove myself; I am presumed competent. I sometimes say that as a white guy in tech, my failure mode is a board seat and a book deal, and it's not that far from wrong. It takes, I guess, a lot of listening and a lot of interaction with folks from wildly different backgrounds before you start to see some of these things. It takes time. So, if you're listening to this, and you aren't necessarily convinced that this might be real or whatnot, talk less, listen more. There are a lot of stories out there in the world that I think that it's not my place to tell but listen. That's how I approach it.What's interesting about your pathway into management is it's almost the exact opposite of mine, where I was craving novelty, and okay, I wanted to try and managing a team of people. Years later, in hindsight—I'm not a good manager and I know that about myself, and I explicitly go out of my way these days to avoid managing people wherever possible, for a variety of reasons, but at the time, I didn't know. I didn't know that. I wanted to see how it went.First, I had to disabuse myself of this notion that, oh, management is a promotion. It's not. It's an orthogonal skill.Amy: Yes.Corey: The thing I really learning—management or not—now, is that the higher in the hierarchy you rise, if you want to view it that way, the less hands-on work you do, which means everything that you are responsible for that—and oh, you are responsible—isn't something you can jump in and do yourself. You can only impact the outcome via influence. And that was a hard lesson to learn.Amy: Right. And there are some schools of thought, though, where you can affect the outcome by control. And that's not what I'm about. I think I'm more aligned with what you're saying in terms of, it's really the influence and the ability to clear the way for people who are smarter than you to do the things that they need to do. Just get out of their way, and remove the roadblocks, and just help give them what they need. That's really, sort of like, my overall approach. But I know that there are some folks out there who lead the opposite way of, “It's my way, and I'm going to dictate how things should be done, and really you're here to take and follow orders.”Corey: It's always fun interviewing people to manage teams. “So, why do you want to be a manager?” It's, “Oh, I want to tell people what to do.” And I have to say that as an interviewer, there is nothing that takes the pressure off nearly as well as a perfectly wrong answer. And, yes, that at least to my world, is a perfectly wrong answer to this. There aren't that many pass-fail questions, but you can fail any question if you try hard enough.Amy: [laugh]. Oh, gosh, yeah, it's true. But also, at the same time, I would say that there are organizations that are built that way. Because—all it takes is the one person who wants to tell people what to do, and then they start a company, and then they hire other people who want to tell people what to do. And so there are ways where organizations like that exist and come into being even today, I would say.Corey: The question that I have for you about engineering leadership is, back when I was an engineer, and thinking, all right, it's time for me to go ahead and try being a manager—let's be clear, I joke about it, but the actual reason I wanted to try my hand at management was that I found people problems more interesting than computer problems at that point. I still do, but these days, especially when it comes to, you know, cloud services marketing and such, yeah, generally, the technical problems are, in fact, people problems at their core. But talking to my manager friends of how do I go and transition from being an engineer into being a manager, the universal response I got at the time was, “Ehh, I don't know.” Every person I knew who'd had made that transition was in the right place at the right time, and quote-unquote, “Got lucky.”Amy: Absolutely.Corey: And then once they had management on their resume, then they could go and transition back to being an IC and then to management again. But it's that initial breakthrough that becomes a challenge.Amy: Absolutely. And I fell into it as well. I mean, I got into it, partially for selfish reasons because I was, an IC, I was doing development work, and I was frustrated, and I had teammates who were coming to me and they were frustrated about how hard it was for us to get our work done, or the friction involved in shipping code. And so I took it upon myself to say, “I think I see a pattern about why this is happening, and so I will try to solve this problem for the team.” And so that's where the Agile and Scrum thing come in, and the project management side.And then, when I was at this company—this was One Kings Lane; this was, like, the heyday of flash sales websites and stuff like that, so it was kind of a rocket ship at that time—and because we were also growing so fast and I was interviewing folks as well, I just fell into this management role of, “Well, if I'm interviewing these people, then I guess I should be [laugh] managing them, too.” And that happens for so many people, similar stories of getting into management. And I think that's where it starts to go wrong for a lot of organizations because, like you said, it's not an up-leveling; it's a changing of your role, and it requires training and learning and figuring out how to be effective as a manager. And a lot of people just stumble their way through it and make a lot of mistakes—myself included—through that process.And that becomes really troubling knowing that you can make these really big mistakes, but these mistakes that you make don't affect just yourself. It's the careers of the people that you manage as well and sort of where they're headed in their lives. And so it's troubling to think that most leaders that are out there today have not received any sort of training on how to be a good manager and how to be effective as a manager.Corey: I would agree with that wholeheartedly. It seems that in many cases, companies take the best engineer that they have on their team and promote them to manager. It's brilliant in some respects in just how short-sighted it is. You are taking a great engineer and trading them for a junior and unproven manager, and hoping for the best. And there is no training on any of these things, at least—Amy: Right.Corey: —not the companies that I ever worked at. Of course, there are ways you can learn to be a better manager; there are people who specialize in exactly this. There are companies that do exactly this. But tech has this weird thing where it just tries to solve itself from first principles rather than believing for a minute that someone might possibly have prior experience that could be useful for these things. And—Amy: Absolutely.Corey: —that was a challenge. I had a lot of terrible managers before I entered management myself, and I figured, ah, I'll do the naive thing and I'm just going to manage based upon doing the exact opposite of what those terrible managers all did. And I got surprisingly far with it, on some level. But you don't see the whole picture when you're an individual contributor who's writing code—crappy in my case—most of the time, and then only seeing the aspects of your manager that they allow you to see. They don't share—if they're any good—the constraints that they have to deal with, that they're managing expectations around the team, conflicting priorities, strategic objectives, et cetera because it's not something that gets shown to folks. So—Amy: Absolutely.Corey: —if you bias for that, in my experience you become an empathetic manager to the people on your team, but completely ineffective at managing laterally or upwards.Amy: Mm-hm, absolutely. And you know, I'm exploring this idea of further. Being at a very small company, I think allows me to do that. And exploring this idea of, does it have to be that way? Can you be transparent about what the constraints are as a leader while still caring for your team and supporting them in the ways that they need and helping them grow their careers and just being open about one of the challenges that you have in building the company?And I don't know, I feel like I have some things to prove there, but I think it's possible to achieve some sort of balance there, something better or more beyond just what exists now of having that entire leadership layer typically be very opaque and just very unclear why certain decisions are made.Corey: The hard part that extends that these to me beyond that is it's difficult to get meaningful feedback, on some level, when you're suddenly thrust into that position. I also, in hindsight, realize that an awful lot of those terrible managers that I had weren't nearly as terrible as I thought they were. I will say that being on the other side of that divide definitely breeds empathy. Now that I'm the co-owner of The Duckbill Group, and we're building out a leadership team and the rest, hiring managers of managers is starting to be the sort of thing that I have to think about.It's effectively, how do I avoid inadvertently doing end-runs around people? And oh, I'm just going to completely undermine a manager by reaching out to one of their team and retasking them on something because obviously whatever I have in mind is much more important. What could they possibly be working on that's better than the Twitter shitpost I'm borrowing them to help out with? Yeah, you learn a lot by getting it wrong, and there becomes a power imbalance that even if you try your best to ignore it—which you should not—I assure you, the person who has less power in that relationship cannot set that aside. Even when I have worked with people I consider close friends, that friendship gained some distance during the duration of their employment because there has to be that professional level of separation. It's a hard thing to learn.Amy: It's a very hard line to walk in terms of recognizing the power that you have over someone's career and the power over, you know, making decisions for them and for the team and for the company, and still being empathetic towards their personal needs. And if they're going through a tough time, but then you also know from a business perspective that X, Y, or Z needs to happen, and how do you push but not push too hard, and try to balance needs of people who are humans and have things that happen and go on sometimes, and the fact that we work in a capitalist society and we still need to make money to make the business run. And that's definitely one of the hardest things to learn, and I am still learning. I definitely don't have that figured out, but I err on the side of, let's listen to what people are saying because ultimately, I'm not going to be the one to write the code. I haven't done that in years, and also I would probably suck at it now. And so it behooves leaders to listen to the people who were doing the work and to try, to the best of their abilities in whatever role whether that's exec-level leadership or mid-level… sort of like, middle management type of stuff to do what is in your power to help set them up to succeed.Corey: I want to get back a little bit to the idea of building diverse teams. It's something that you spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on. I do too. It's one of those areas where it's almost fraught to talk about it because I don't want to sound like I'm breaking my arm by patting myself on the back here. I certainly have a hell of a lot to learn, and mostly—and I'm ashamed to admit this—I very often learn only by really putting my foot in it sometimes. And it's painful, but that is, I think, a necessary prerequisite for growth. From your perspective, what is the most challenging part of building diverse teams?Amy: I think it's that piece that you said of making the mistakes or just putting yourself in a position where you are going to be uncomfortable. And I think that a lot of organizations that I've been in talk about DEI on a very surface level in terms of, “Oh, well, you know, we want to have more candidates from diverse backgrounds in our pipelines for hiring,” and things like that. But then not really just thinking about, but how do we work as a team in a way that potentially makes retention of those folks a lot harder? And for myself, I would say that when I was earlier on in all of this in my learning, I would say that I was able to kickstart my learning by thinking about my own identity, the fact that I was often the only Asian person on my team, the only woman on my team, and then more recently, the only mom on my team. And that has happened to me so many times in my career. More often than not.And so being able to draw on those experiences and those feelings of oh, okay, no one wants to hear about my kid because everyone else is, you know, busy going out to drink or something on the weekends. And like that feeling of, you know, that not belonging, and feeling of feeling excluded from things, and then thinking about how then this might manifest for folks with different identities for myself. And then going there and learning about it, listening, doing more listening than talking, and yeah, and that's, that's really just been the hardest part of just removing myself from that equation and just listening to the experiences of other people. And it's uncomfortable. And I think a lot of people are—you have to be in the right mindset, I guess, to be uncomfortable; you have to be willing to accept that you will be uncomfortable. And I think a lot of folks maybe are not ready to do that on a personal level.Corey: The thing that galls me the most is I do try on these things, and I get it wrong a fair bit. And my mistakes I find personally embarrassing, and I strive not to repeat them. But then I look around the industry—and let's be clear, a lot of this is filtered through the unhealthy amount of time I spend on Twitter—but it seems that I'm trying and I'm failing and attempting to do better as I go, and then I see people who are just, “Nope. Not at all. In fact, we're not just going to lean into bias, we're going to build a startup around it.”And I look at this and it's at some level hard to reconcile the fact that… at first, that I'm doing badly at all, which is the easy cop-out of, “Oh, well, if that is considered acceptable on some level, then I certainly don't even have to try,” which I think is a fallacy. But further it's—I have to step beyond myself on that and just, I cannot fathom how discouraging that must be, particularly to people who are early in their careers because it looks like it's just a normal thing that everyone thinks and does that just someone got a little too loud with it. And it's abhorrent. And if people are listening to this and thinking that is somehow just entrenched, and normalized, and everyone secretly thinks that… no. I assure you it is not something that is acceptable, even in the quote-unquote, “Private white dude who started companies” gathering holes. Yeah, people articulating sentiments like that suddenly find themselves not welcome there anymore, at least in every one of those types of environments I've ever found myself in.Amy: Yeah, the landscape is shifting. It's slow, but it is shifting. And, myself on Twitter, like, I do a lot of rant-y stuff too sometimes, but despite all of that, I feel like I am ultimately an optimist because I have to be. Otherwise, I would have left tech already because every time I am faced with a job search for myself, I'm like, “Should I—is this it? Am I done in tech? Do I want to go do something else? Am I going to finally go open that bakery that I've always wanted to open?” [laugh].And so… I have to be an optimist. And I see that—even in the most recent job search I've done—have seen so many new founders and new CEOs, really, with this mindset of, “We want to build a diverse team, but we're also doing it—and we're using diversity as a foundation for what we want to build; it's part of our decision-making process and this is how we're going to hold ourselves accountable to it.” And so it is shifting, and while there are those bad actors out there still, I'm seeing a lot of good in the industry now. And so that's why I stick around; that's why I'm still here.Corey: I want to actually call something out as concrete here because it's easy for me to fall into the trope of just saying vague things. I'll be specific about something, give us a good example. We've done a decent job, I think, of hiring a diverse team, but—and this is a problem that I see spread across an awful lot of companies—as you look at the leadership team, it gets a lot wider and a lot more male. And that is an inherent challenge. In our particular case, my business partner is someone who I've been close friends with for a decade.I would not be able to start a business with someone I didn't have that kind of relationship with just because your values have to be aligned or there's trouble down the road. And beyond that, it winds up rapidly, on some level, turning into what appears to be a selection bias. When you're trying to hire senior leaders, for example, there's a prerequisite to being a senior leader, which is embodied in the word senior, which implies tenure of having spent a fair bit of time in an industry that is remarkably unfriendly in a lot of different ways to a lot of different people. So, there's a prerequisite of being willing to tolerate the shit for as long as it takes to get to that level of seniority, rather than realizing at any point as any of us can, there are easier jobs that don't have this toxicity inherent to them and I'll go do that instead. So, there's a tenure question; there's a survivorship bias question.And I don't have the answers to any of this, but it's something that I'm seeing, and it's one of those once you see it, you can't unsee it any more moments. At least for me.Amy: Yeah, absolutely.Corey: Please tell me I'm not the only person who see [laugh]—who is encountering these problems. Like, “Wow, you just sound terrible.” Which might very well be a fair rejoinder here. I'm just trying to wrap my head around how to think about this properly.Amy: Yeah. I mean, this is why I was saying that I am very optimistic about [laugh] new companies that are coming—like, up-and-coming these days, new startups, primarily, because you're right that a lot of people just end up quitting tech before they get to that point of experience and seniority, to get into leadership. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of bias and discrimination that happens at those leadership levels, too, but I will say that, you know, it's both of those things. There are also more things on top of that. But this is why I'm like, so excited to see people from diverse backgrounds as founders of new companies and why I think that being able to be in a position to potentially either help fund, or advocate, or sponsor, or amplify those types of orgs, I think is where the future is that because ultimately, I think a lot of the established companies that are out there these days, it's going to be really hard for them to walk back on what their leadership team looks like now, especially if it is a sizable leadership team and they're all white men.Corey: Yeah. I'm going to choose to believe we say sizable leadership team that it's also not—we're talking about the horizontal scaling that happens to some of us, especially during a pandemic as we continue to grow into our seats. You're right, it's a problem as well, where you can cut a bit of slack in some cases to small teams. It's, “Okay, we don't have any Black employees, but we're three people,” is a lot more understandable-slash-relatable than, “We haven't hired any Black people yet and we're 3000 people.” One of those is acceptable—or at least understandable, if not acceptable—the other is just completely egregious.Amy: Yes. And I think then the question that you have to ask if you're looking at, you know, a three-person company, or [laugh] I guess, like in my case, I was looking at the seven-person company, is that, “Okay. There are currently no Black people on your team. And why is that?” And then, “What are you doing to change that? And how are you going to make sure that you're holding ourselves accountable to it?”Because I think it's easy to say, “Oh, you know, the first couple of hires were people we just worked with in the past, and they just happened to, you know, look like us and whatnot.” And then you blink becau—and you do that a handful of times, and you blink, and then suddenly you have a team of 25 and there are no people of color on your team. And maybe you have, like, one woman on the team or something. And you're like, “Huh. That's strange. I guess we should think about this and figure out what we can do.”And then I think what ends up happening at that point is that there are so many already established behaviors, and cultural norms, and things like that, that have organically grown within a team that are potentially not welcoming towards people from different backgrounds who have different backgrounds. So, you go and attempt to hire someone who is different, and they come in, and they're just sort of like, “This is how you work? I don't feel like I belong here.” And then they don't stay, and then they leave. And then people sit there and scratch their heads like, “Oh, what did we do wrong?” And, “I don't get it.”And so there's this conversation, I think, in the industry of like, “Oh, it's a pipeline problem, and if we were just able to hire a lot of people from diverse backgrounds, the problem is solved.” Which really isn't the case because once people are there and at your company, are they getting promoted at the same rate as white men? Are they staying with the company for as long? And who's in leadership? And how are you working to break down the biases that you may have?All those sorts of things, I think, generally are not considered as part of all of this DEI work. Especially when, in my experience in startups, the operational side of all that is so immature a lot of the times, just not well developed that deeper thought process and reflection doesn't really happen.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: I do my best to have these conversations in public as frequently as is practical for me to do, just because I admit, I get things wrong. I say things that are wrong and I'm doing a fair bit of learning in public around an awful lot of that. Because frankly, I can withstand the heat, if it comes down to someone on Twitter gets incredibly incensed by something I've said on this podcast, for example. Because it isn't coming from a place of ill intent when someone accuses me of being ableist or expressing bias. My response is generally to suppress the initial instinctive flash of defensiveness and listen and ask.And that is, even if I don't necessarily agree with what they're saying after reflection, I have to appreciate on some level the risk-taking inherent in calling someone out who is in my position where, if I were a trash fire, I could use the platform to turn it into, “All right. Now, let's go hound the person that called me out.” No. I don't do that, full stop. If I'm going to harass people, it's going to be—not people, despite what the Supreme Court might tell us—but it's going to be a $2 trillion company—one in particular—because that's who I am and that's how I roll.Whenever I get a DM—which I leave open because I have the privilege to do that—from folks who are early career who are not wildly over-represented, I just have to stop and marvel for a minute at the level of risk-taking inherent to that because there is risk to that. For me, when I DM people, the only risk I feel like I'm running at any given point is, “Are they going to think that I'm bothering them? Oh, the hell with it. I'm adorable. They'll love me.” And the fact that I'm usually right is completely irrelevant to that. There's just that sense of I don't really risk a damn thing in the grand scheme of things compared to the risk that many people are taking just living who they are.Amy: Yeah. And someone DMs you and you suppress that initial sort of defensiveness: I would say that that is an underrated skill. [laugh].Corey: Well, a DM is a privilege, too. A call in—Amy: Yes.Corey: —is deeply appreciated; no one owes it to me. I often will get people calling me out on Twitter and I generally stop and think about that; I have a very close circle of friends who I trust to be objective on these things, and I'll ask them, “Did I get this wrong?” And very often the answer is yes. And, “Well, I thought the joke was funny and I spent time building it.” “Yeah, but if people hear a joke I'm making and feel bad about it, then is it really that good of a joke or should I try harder?” It's a process, and I look back at who I was ten years ago and I feel a sense of shame. And I believe that if anyone these days doesn't, either they were effectively a saint, or they haven't grown.Amy: Yes.Corey: And that's my personal philosophy on this stuff, anyway.Amy: Yeah, absolutely. And that growth is so important. And part of that growth really is being able to suppress your desire to make it about you, [laugh] right? That initial, “Oh, I did something bad,” or, “I'm a horrible person because I said this thing,” right? It's not about you, there's, like, the impact that you had on someone else.And I've been giving this some thought recently, and I—you know, I also similarly have a group of trusted friends who I often talk about these things with, and you know, we always kind of check ourselves in terms of, did we mess something up? Did we, you know, put our foot in our mouths? Stuff like that. And think what it really comes down to is being able to say, “Maybe I did something wrong and I need to suppress that desire to become defensive and put up walls and guard and protect myself from feeling vulnerable, in order to actually learn and grow from this experience.”Corey: It's hard to do, but it's required because I—Amy: Extremely, yes.Corey: —used to worry about, “Ohh, what if I get quote-unquote, ‘canceled?'” well, I've done a little digging into this and every notable instance of this I can find is when someone is called out for something crappy, they get defensive, and they double-down and triple-down and quadruple-down, and they keep digging a hole nice and deep to the point where no one with a soul can really be on their side of this issue, and now they have a problem. I have never gotten to that point because let's be honest with you, there are remarkably few things I care that passionately about that I'm going to pick those fights publicly. The ones that I do, I am very much on the other side [laugh] of those issues. That has not been a realistic concern.I used to warn every person here before I hired them—to get this back to engineering management—that there was a risk that I could have a bad tweet and we don't have a company anymore. I don't give that warning anymore because I no longer believe that it's true.Amy: Mm-hm. Mm-hm. I also wonder about, in general, because of the world that we live in, and our history with white supremacy and oppression and all those things, I also wonder if this skill of being able to self-reflect and be uncomfortable and manage your own reaction and your emotions, I wonder if that's just a thing that white people generally haven't had a lot of practice for because of the inherent privileges that are afforded to white people. I wonder if a lot of this just stems from the fact that white people get to navigate this world and not get called out, and thus don't have this opportunity to exercise this skill of holding on to that and listening more than talking.Corey: Absolutely agree. And it gets piled on by a lot of folks, for example—I'll continue to use myself as an example in this case—I live in San Francisco. I would argue that I'm probably not, “In tech,” quote-unquote, the way that I once was, but I'm close enough that there's no discernible difference. And my social circle is as well. Back before I entered tech, I did a bunch of interesting jobs, telemarketing to pay the bills, I was a recruiter for a while, I worked construction a couple of summers.These days, everyone that I engage with for meaningful periods of time is more or less fairly tech adjacent. It really turns into a one-sided perspective. And I can sit here and talk about what folks who are not living in the tech bubble should be doing or how they should think about this, but it's incredibly condescending, it's incredibly short-sighted, and fails to appreciate a very different lived experience. And I can remind myself of this now, but that lack of diversity and experience is absolutely something where it feels like the tech bubble, especially for those folks in this bubble who look a lot like me, it is easy to fall into a pattern of viewing ourselves as the modern aristocracy where we deserve the nice things that we have, and the rest. And that's a toxic pattern. It takes vigilance to avoid it. I'm not saying I get it right all the time, by a landslide, but ugh, the perils of not doing that are awful.Amy: Agreed. And it shows up, you know, getting back to the engineering manager and leadership and org building piece of things, that shows up even in the way that we talk about career development and career ladders, for those of us in tech, and software engineering specifically for me, where we've kind of like come up with all these matrices of job levels, and competencies, all that, and humans just are so vastly different. Every person is an individual, and yet we talked about career ladders and how to advance your career in this two-dimensional matrix. And, like, how does that actually work, right?And I've seen some good career ladders that account for a larger variety of competencies than just, “Can you code?” And, “What are your system design skills?” And, “Do you understand distributed systems?” And so on and so forth, but I think a lot gets left behind and gets left on the table when it comes to thinking about the fact that when you get a group of people together working on some sort of common cause or a product, that there's so much more to the dynamic than just the writing of the code. It's how do you work with each other? How do you support each other? How do you communicate with each other? And then all my glue work—that is what I call it—like, the glue work that goes into a successful team and building products, a lot of that is just not captured in the way that we talk about career development for folks. And it's just incredibly two-dimensional, I think.Corey: One last question that I have for you before we wrap the episode here is, you spend a lot of time focusing on this, and I have some answers, but I'm very interested to hear yours instead because I assure you, the world hears enough from me and people who look like me, what is the biggest mistake that you see companies making in their attempts to build diverse teams?Amy: I would say that there's two major things. One is that there have been a lot of orgs in my own past that think about diversity, equity, inclusion as a program and not a mindset that everyone should be embracing. And that manifests itself into, sort of like, this secondary problem of stopping at the D part of D, E, and I. That's the whole, “We're going to hire a bunch of people from different backgrounds and then just we're going to stop with that because we've solved the problem.” But by not adopting that mindset of the equity, the inclusion, and also the welcoming and the belonging piece of things internally, then anyone that you hire who comes in from those marginalized or minority backgrounds is not going to want to stay long-term because they don't feel like they fit in, they don't feel like they belong.And so, it becomes this revolving door of you hire in people and then those people leave after some amount of time because they're not getting what they need out of either the role or for themselves personally in terms of just emotional support, even. And so I would say that's the problem that I see is not a numbers game—although the metrics and the numbers help hold you accountable—but the metrics and the numbers are not the end goal. The end goal is really around the mindset that you have in building the org and the way that people behave. And the way that you work together is really core to that.Corey: What I tend to see on the other side is the early intake funnels. People will reach out to me sometimes, “Hey, do you know any diverse speakers we can hire to do a speaking engagement here?” It doesn't… work that way. There's a lot more to it than that. It is not about finding people who check boxes, it is not about quote-unquote, “Diversity hires.”It's about—at least in my experience—structuring job ads, for example, in ways that are not coded—unconsciously in most cases, but ehh—that are going to resonate towards folks who are in certain cultures and not in others. It's about being more equitable. It's about understanding that not everyone is going to come across in a job interview as the most confident person in the room. Part of the talk that I gave on how to handle job interviews, there was a strong section in it on salary negotiation. Well, turns out when I do it, I'm an aggressive hard-charger and they like that, whereas if someone who is not male does that, well, in that case, they look like they're being difficult and argumentative and pushy and rising above their station. It was awful.One of the topics I'm most proud of was the redone version of that talk that I gave with a friend, Sonia Gupta, who has since left tech because of how shitty it is, and that was a much better talk. She was a former attorney who had spent time negotiating in much higher-stakes situations.Amy: Yeah.Corey: And it was terrific to see during the deconstruction and rebuilding of that talk, just how much of my own unconscious bias had crept in. It's, again, I look back at the early version of those talks and I'm honestly ashamed. It wasn't from ill will, but it's always impact over intent as far as how this has potentially made things worse. It's, if nothing else, if I don't say the right things when I should speak up, that's not great, but I always prefer that to saying things that are actively harmful. So—Amy: Absolutely.Corey: —it's hard. I deserve no sympathy for this, to be clear. It is incumbent upon all of us because again, as mentioned, my failure mode is a non-issue in the world compared to the failure mode for folks for against whom the deck has been stacked unfairly for a very long time. At least, that's how I see it.Amy: Right. And that's why I think that it's important for folks who are in positions of power to really reflect on—even operationally, right, you were mentioning your job ads, and how to structure that to include more inclusive language, and just doing that for everything, really, in the way that you work. How do decisions get made? And by whom? And why? How do you structure things like compensation? Even, like, how do you do project planning, right?Even in my own reflections, now when I think back towards Scrum and Agile and all of that, I think that the base foundation of all of that was like was good, but then ultimately the implementation of how that works at most companies is problematic in a lot of ways as well. And then to just be able to reflect and really think about all of your processes or policies—all of that—and bring that lens of equity, really, equity and inclusion to those things, and to really dig deep and think about how those things might manifest and affect people from different backgrounds in different ways.Corey: So, before we wrap, something that I think you… are something of an empathetic party on is when I see companies in the space who are doing significant DE&I initiatives, it seems like it's all flash; it feels like it's all sizzle, no steak to appropriate a phrase from the country of Texas. Is that something that you see, too?Amy: I do think that it is pretty common, and I think it's because that's… that's the easy route. That's the easy way to do it because the vanity metrics, and the photo of the team that is so diverse, and all these things that show up on a marketing website. I mean, there—it's, like, a signal for someone, potentially, who might be considering a job at your company, but ultimately the hard work that I feel like is not happening is really in that whole reflecting on the way you do business, reflecting on the way that you work. That is the hard work and it requires a leadership team to prioritize it, and to make time for it, and to make it really a core principle of the way that you build an org., and it doesn't happen enough, by far, in my opinion.Corey: It feels like it's an old trope of the company that makes a $100,000 donation and then spends $10 million dollars telling the world about it, on some level. It's about, “Oh, look at us, we're doing good things,” as opposed to buckling down and doing the work. Then the actual work falls to folks who are themselves not overrepresented as unpaid emotional labor, and then when the company still struggles with diversity issues, those people catch the blame. It's frustrating.Amy: Yeah. And as an organization, if you have the money to donate somewhere, that's great, but it can't just stop at that. And a lot of companies will just stop at that because it's the optics of, “Oh, well, we spent x millions of dollars and we've helped out this nonprofit or this charity or whatnot.” Which is great that you're able to do that, but that can't be it because then ultimately, what you have internally and within your own company doesn't improve for people from those backgrounds.Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time to chat with me about these things. Some of these topics are challenging to talk about and finding the right forum can be difficult, and I'm just deeply appreciative that you were able to clear enough time to have that chat with me today.Amy: Yeah, thank you for having me. I mean, I think it's important for us to recognize, even between the two of us that, I mean, obviously, you as a white man have benefited a lot in this space, and then even myself as, you know, that model minority whole thing, but growing up very adjacent to white people and just being ingrained in that culture and raised in that culture, you know, that we have those privileges and there's still parts of the conversation, I think, that are not captured by [laugh] by the two of us are the nuances as well, and so just recognizing that. And it's just a learning process. And I think that everyone could benefit from just realizing that you'll never know everything. And there's always going to be something to learn in all of this. And yes, it is hard, but it's something that is worthwhile to strive for.Corey: Most things worthwhile are. If people want to learn more about who you are, how you think about these things, potentially consider working with you, et cetera. Where can they find you?Amy: So, I am on Twitter. I am the queen of very, very long threads, I should just start a blog or something, but I have not. But in any case, I'm on Twitter. I am AmyChanta, so @A-M-Y-C-H-A-N-T-A.Our website is unicycle.co, if you're thinking about applying for a role, and working with me, that would be awesome. Or just, you know, reach out. I'd also just love to network with anyone, even if there's not an open position now. I just, you know, build that relationship and maybe there will be in the future. Or if not at Unicycle, then somewhere else.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:48:13]. Thank you so much, once again. I appreciate your time.Amy: Thanks for having me.Corey: Amy Chantasirivisal, Director of Engineering at Unicycle. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. 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 a comment pointing out that it's not about making an MVP of a bicycle that turns into a unicycle so much as it is work-life balance.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.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2021 59:06

Amy: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy! I'm Amy McPhie Allebest. All of us have heard or used the term “mansplaining” - that thing that happens when a man explains something to you that he assumes you don't know, when you do know what you're talking about because of your professional expertise or your own lived experience. These interactions reveal that this man thinks that instead of being your peer he is in a role of your dad or your teacher or your boss. The author Rebecca Solnit published an essay online in 2008 called, “Men Explain Things to Me,” which went viral and has become a touchstone for feminist thinkers and everyday women, and it now appears on many “essential reading” lists, which is why we're discussing it today! This essay inspired the coining of the term “mansplain”, although the essay doesn't say the word and Solnit herself says she doesn't use it. Solnit says she has mixed feelings about the word, as I do I, but before we talk about the word, and about this essay and some others in Solnit's collection, I want to welcome back to the podcast Malia Morris. Hi, Malia!! Malia: Hi, Amy! Amy: Listeners will remember Malia from our very first episode after the introduction, The Chalice and the Blade. So excited to have you back, Malia!! Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, Malia, maybe review some of your key stats and then tell us a story or anecdote that illustrates who you are? Malia: Amy: Before we talk about these essays, let's learn a bit about Rebecca Solnit. Malia - Bio: Rebecca Solnit was born in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeport,_Connecticut (Bridgeport, Connecticut) in 1961, to a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish (Jewish) father and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Catholic (Irish Catholic) mother. When she was 5 years old her family moved to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novato,_California (Novato, California), where she grew up. She said of her childhood: "I was a battered little kid. I grew up in a really violent house where everything feminine and female and my gender was hated.” She enrolled in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, and after that she passed the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Educational_Development (General Educational Development) tests and skipped high school altogether. She enrolled in junior college, and then when she was 17, she went to study in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris (Paris). She returned to California to finish her college education at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_State_University (San Francisco State University) and then received a master's degree in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism (journalism) from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Berkeley (University of California, Berkeley) in 1984. She has been an independent writer since 1988, and has written many many books and essays, including a memoir in 2020 entitled Recollections of My Nonexistence, and has won several prestigious writing awards. Amy: So let's talk about these essays. Solnit starts out with a story, so let's start there. She talks about attending a party with her friend Sallie when she was about forty years old, at a cabin-mansion in Aspen that was owned by a wealthy older man. The whole crowd at the party was older and wealthy, and as Rebecca and her friend were preparing to leave the party, the host found them and said “No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you.” He said “So I hear you've written a couple of books,” and she replied that she had written several. And I'll read the rest of the interaction. “He said, in the way you encourage your friend's seven-year-old to describe flute practice, “And what are they about?” They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of...

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LGBTQ History Part 3: The Trouble With Normal, by Michael Warner

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2021 86:26

Amy: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy! I'm Amy McPhie Allebest. A few years ago I was traveling in Asia and we took a bus out to a large lake where there was a floating village. As we took a boat out onto the lake and the shore disappeared behind us, I felt as far from home as I have ever felt, and a friend I was with was even more out of her element and visibly very uncomfortable. She leaned over and said “why are we here?” Right as she asked that, a tiny boat floated up alongside ours, and a woman looked at me and we locked eyes. We were about the same age, and I had a profound sense of shared humanity. My heart swelled beyond what I felt my body could hold as this woman looked right into my eyes, and I thought, I'm here because these people are real - as real as I am. I want to know about all the people I share this planet with not only because I am curious and I want to learn as much as I possibly can, but also because I love all my siblings, not just the ones who look like me or live like me. And also, as I talked about on our previous episodes, sometimes if we don't make meaningful connections with people beyond our communities and our comfort zones, we might unwittingly harm them. We might support a war that kills and maims them or sanctions that impoverish them. We might unthinkingly use slang that demeans them. We might support policies and vote for legislation that limits their civil rights. Connecting with others' ideas and others' lives, in person and in books, helps us to make more informed choices, to make bonds with our siblings in this big human family, and to realize that we are not the center of the universe. SO. With the books I read for these last two episodes, I traveled farther from home than I had yet on this podcast! I'm so glad I did, and I'm so grateful to have my dear friend Matthew Nelson here to guide the conversation again. Welcome, Matthew! Matthew: Great to be back, this time surveying the wildest lands of queerdom. Matthew, you'll remember that when we were talking about doing an episode on Obergefell v. Hodges, you suggested that we expand the conversation beyond marriage equality, and suggested some critical queer theory texts. And I must admit: sometimes I did find myself feeling so far out into unknown territory - so far from my home assumptions and beliefs, I thought “wait, why am I here?” and I had to remember “because my siblings live here” and it was a powerful experience for me to spend time inhabiting - via these books - a queer world, where queerness is central and I was the outsider. So thank you for holding my hand on this journey!! Matthew: I too can feel out of sorts reading these queer theory texts of liberation. I am a cisgender male still learning how to hold my privilege responsibly, working toward an anti-racist, gender egalitarian future. The queer theory on offer today also accosts me as a married man. Have I capitualited to an assimilationist agenda, supplanting the true political legacy of Stonewall? How might these texts embolden me to challenge my own assumptions of queer futures and democratic ideals? Personally, how might these texts move me off a gender performative binary, to a deeper embodiment of selfhood? Like all good books -- from the Good Book to Karl Marx's Das Capital -- we really need to be shaken from the rigidity of ideology, certainty, and comfort as much as we can. Amy: So let's dig in… we'll review Michael Warner today, and Lee Edelman and Jose Esteban Munoz on our next episode. Michael Warner is considered one of the founders of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_theory (queer theory). He was born in 1958, and received two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Arts (Master of Arts) degrees, one from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Wisconsin%E2%80%93Madison (University of Wisconsin–Madison) and one from...

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The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2021 105:13

Amy: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy! I'm Amy McPhie Allebest. I remember one time several years ago, my husband and I were getting ready to go out somewhere fancy. I took a shower, shaved my legs and underarms, dried off, moisturized with one lotion for my body and one lotion for my face, blow-dried my recently-color-treated hair to make it straight (it naturally dries in small curls), then used a curling wand to make it have big curls. Then I put on a bra to lift my boobs higher than they naturally are, Spanx to suck my torso to look smaller than it actually is, a dress, and high heels to make me look taller than I am. Then on my face I did a little concealer to make my skin look a more consistent color than it really is, eyeshadow and eyeliner to alter the appearance of my eyelids, mascara to make my eyelashes look longer and thicker and black (when they're really just brown) eyebrow gel to darken my eyebrows, (but first I tweezed them to be a different shape than they really are.) Then some bronzer to make me look like I was blushing and some lip gloss to make my lips look shinier than they are naturally. And of course a little jewelry for some added sparkle. Next to me, my husband took a shower, dried off, put on his suit and flat shoes, and, okay, he did put lotion on his face and hands and put in one dab of one hair product in his hair. And he was ready to go. And I thought - wow. I just altered almost every aspect of my body in order to measure up to society's beauty standards for women - and I spent a lot of time and thought and money on each and every one of the products that enabled me to meet those standards. And my husband altered nothing, and spent no extra money, and absolutely no extra thought. And I thought: I have been sold something here. Todays' book is called The Beauty Myth, written by Naomi Wolf in 1991, and I am super excited to discuss it with my reading partner, Vanessa Loder. Hi, Vanessa! Vanessa: Hi, Amy! I am really thrilled to be here supporting you and this podcast. I have been trying to unwind all the ways I've internalized the patriarchy for the last decade and the layers of that onion just keep peeling back and go deeper than I ever realized. Amy: I met Vanessa in 2005, when my husband and Vanessa were assigned as table partners during their MBA at Stanford. Vanessa was like a 20,000 watt lightbulb - whip smart, hilarious, intimidatingly accomplished in her education and her career already even before business school, and drop-dead gorgeous. And yet she was also just so approachable and kind, she was impossible not to love, and we've actually become closer friends during the past few years at reunions and weddings and retreats and stuff, and I just adore you and am soooo grateful that you're here today to talk about this book! Vanessa: (I'm saving all my mushy truths about you so I can surprise you and make you blush!) ;) Amy: So could you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself? Who you are, where you're from, what makes you you. Vanessa: Bio.. Will do! Amy: I also like to ask my reading partners what interested them in Breaking Down Patriarchy. Vanessa: Why you agreed to do this :) As a feminist spiritual teacher, this is at the heart of who I am and the work I do in the world. But really, it comes from my own pain points. They say you teach what you most want to learn and that has definitely been the case for me. There are so many ways that I have accidentally internalized messaging I really don't believe in by going along with mainstream messaging, culture, family and community beliefs and attitudes, and it hasn't made me happy or fulfilled. It feels like some of the biggest and most important work of my life to intentionally unwind all the ways I've inadvertently internalized the patriarchy, and then carry that out into the world to create external change too. So yeah, this podcast couldn't...

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A Conversation between Cloud Economists with Amy Arambulo Negrette

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2021 35:01

About AmyWith over ten years industry experience, Amy Arambulo Negrette has built web applications for a variety of industries including Yahoo! Fantasy Sports and NASA Ames Research Center. One of her projects modernized two legacy systems impacting the entire research center and won her a Certificate of Excellence from the Ames Contractor Council. More recently, she built APIs for enterprise clients for a cloud consulting firms and led a team of Cloud Software Engineers. Amy has survived acquisitions, layoffs, and balancing life with two small children. Links: The Duckbill Group: http://duckbillgroup.com/ @nerdypaws: https://twitter.com/nerdypaws 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: Your company might be stuck in the middle of a DevOps revolution without even realizing it. Lucky you! Does your company culture discourage risk? Are you willing to admit it? Does your team have clear responsibilities? Depends on who you ask. Are you struggling to get buy in on DevOps practices? Well, download the 2021 State of DevOps report brought to you annually by Puppet since 2011 to explore the trends and blockers keeping evolution firms stuck in the middle of their DevOps evolution. Because they fail to evolve or die like dinosaurs. The significance of organizational buy in, and oh it is significant indeed, and why team identities and interaction models matter. Not to mention weither the use of automation and the cloud translate to DevOps success. All that and more awaits you. Visit: www.puppet.com to download your copy of the report now!Corey: And now for something completely different!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by my colleague, Amy Arumbulo Negrette, who's a cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. Amy, thank you for taking the time to, basically, deal with my slings and arrows instead of the ones that clients throw your way.Amy: It's perfectly fine. It's not as if we are… not the kindest people within the Slack channels anyway. So, I am totally good. [laugh].Corey: [laugh]. So, you've been at The Duckbill Group, as of the time of this recording, which when you're releasing things in the future, it's always a question of how long will you have been here by then? No. We're playing it straight here from a perspective of, as of the time of this recording, you've been here six months, all of which, of course, have been during the global pandemic. So first, what's that been like?Amy: It has been very loud. And that's to say, I live in a house with five other people in it, so it's one thing for me to be a remote worker and just being at my desk, working quietly, but also having to manage noise that you can't really control, it's been an extra level of stress that I could possibly do without. It's fine. [laugh].Corey: One of the whole problems with the pandemic, from our perspective, has been that we've run this place as a full remote operation since it was started, and people come at this from a perspective of, “Well, this whole experience we've had with working remote is awful. It's terrible. No one likes it. I'm not productive.” Let's be very clear here. There's been a global pandemic; this is not like most years, and there are stressors and things that absolutely suck about this that don't normally impact the remote work story quite the way that they have.Amy: I totally agree. At least before, in one of my previous companies had an office in Chicago, so I would be there once a week, but effectively I was remote because that was an all meetings type of day. And the difference between that and now is that you had very explicit work hours; you had client hours; your work sometimes brought you out the house, if you had to go on travel, or on-site. This is just everything is done within the same ten feet of basically where you work, and you eat, and you sleep, if you have really unhealthy living habits like I do. And while I'm trying to get better at it, I'm also not the best at having time-based boundaries. I'm only good with physical boundaries. So, I have to turn off the work computer, to turn on the fun computer, which are physically next to each other, but I have to look in a different direction. And that is as close as I get.Corey: Yeah. It's the good screen versus the bad screen model of, “Oh, yeah, we're going to stop doing work now and just move our gaze slightly to one side and look at the fun screen and work on those things instead.” And at first, I was trying to be militant when we started the whole pandemic thing and working full remote of booting people of, “Hey, all right, it's quitting time. Go home and stop it.” The other side of that, though, is some people are, in some ways, using work to escape.So, we've modified our approach to get the work done. If you're working consistently more than 40 hours to get it done, let us know; that's a problem. But let people work when they want to work, how they want to work and be empathetic humans. And that carries surprisingly far. Now, the question, of course, becomes, does this scale to a company that has 50,000 employees? I don't know. That's never been a problem that anyone has asked me to solve. But it works for us at small scale.Amy: I find that the attitude working here has been really understanding as to, we know what our lives are like and we know what kind of work that we actually have to get done within a certain time period. And all of us make those. We don't feel the need to explain how we were able to get that work done or what time slots happen. You'll see me and Jesse—one of the other cloud economists—it's like we'll be hitting document at the same time at—for my time would be closer to later in the evening, but that's just because I spent most of the day either taking care of kids or handling house management sort of duties. So, having that flexibility on where my schedule goes without having to answer that question of, “Well, why were you working at that hour?” I feel gives me a lot more control and takes one less thing away that I have to worry about.Corey: One approach that we've always taken here has been that we treat people functionally like adults. And that's sort of an insulting way to frame it. Like, “What are you saying. That a lot of employers treat their staff like kids?” Well, basically, yes, is the short answer, where it's, “great, we're going to trust you with root in production, or a bunch of confidential customer data, but we're also not going to trust you to make a $50 purchase on the company credit card without a bunch of scrutiny because we don't trust that you're not embezzling.”The cross-incentives of different organizational structures are so twisted at that point that it's very hard to self-correct. I mean, our approach going into this was always never to go down that dark path, and so far, so good. Will it bite us someday if we continue to grow to that 50,000 person company? Undoubtedly. But I have to believe it can be done.Amy: I would also think the pressure of managing 50,000 people would break every single person in this company. Just thinking about it gives me panic.Corey: Oh, yeah. When every person becomes effectively, what, 500 people, that's divisional stuff. I don't think that anyone wants to stick around and see a small company go through those kinds of transformations because functionally, it becomes such a radically different place. For better or worse, that's not something we have to worry about, at least not anytime soon.Amy: We work really well with our fairly tight teams, I think. And it's I think it's one of the virtues of the type of work that we do. You don't need a team of 15 people looking at one document.Corey: No. And invariably, it seems like that tends to slow things down. Let's talk a little bit about something that makes you a bit of an outlier insofar as when you are only dealing with a small number of people everyone's inherently an outlier. You're the only cloud economist at The Duckbill Group with a background as a software engineer.Amy: Yeah. I did not realize that when I was joining. So, this deal with my infrastructure background is that I've only ever done enough infrastructure to support my applications. Like, Pete, I come from a startup background initially in my career, where you had to manage your application, you had to manage your own routes, you had to manage your own database connections, your own storage connections, and all of that, which, looking back on it and saying it out loud, sounds like a really bad idea now, but this was life before infrastructure as code and it was the quote-unquote, “Wild West” of San Francisco startups, where you can make a product out of basically anything. And the anything I went into was fantasy football of all things.So, I always made sure to have enough knowledge so that if I knew something broke, that I could blame it on networking, and then I would be able to show the paper trail to prove it. That was the extent of my knowledge. And then I started getting into the serverless space, where I started building things out of cloud services, instead of just spinning up more EC2 because I was young and impressionable. And that gave me a lot more understanding of what infrastructure engineering was like. But beyond that, I build APIs, I do business logic; that's really where my comfort levels are.Corey: For the rest of us, we seem to come from a background of grumpy Unix sysadmin types where we were running infrastructures, but as far as the code that was tied into it, eh, that was always the stuff we would kind of hand-wave over or we'd go diving into it as little as possible. And that does shape how you go through your career. For example, most companies are not going to wind up needing someone in that role until they've raised at least a Series B round, whereas in many cases, “Oh, you're an engineer. Great, why don't you start the company yourself?” From a software engineering perspective. It's a different philosophy in many respects, and one that I think is a little bit on the strange side if that makes sense.Amy: It is. It's extremely strange how completely dependent the two are on each other, yet the mindset to get into either and of that level of engineering is completely different. My husband and my father are both on the infrastructure side, and they've tried to explain networking to me my entire life, and I just—the minute the word subnet comes up, my brain is gone. It's like I'm replaying Star Trek episodes in my head because I can no longer handle this [laugh] conversation.Corey: That's how a lot of us feel about various code constructs at some point. For better or worse, we've made our peace with it, and let's be very direct here for a minute, we've learned to talk our way around customer questions that go too deep into the software engineering space, by and large. What's it like on the other side of that, where there's an expectation that you have a lot more in-depth infrastructure experience than perhaps you do? Or isn't there at that expectation?Amy: There is, I think a lot of that is just because of the type of industry this is. Cloud consulting is always infrastructure first because that is what the cloud is selling; they are selling managed infrastructures. They are giving you data center alternatives, but they're not giving you are full-blown apps. And whenever they do—let's say Lightsail—it's an expensive thing that you, somewhere in your mind go, “I could build that cheaper. Why am I paying for this service?”So, when I am on the phone with clients and they have a situation that is obviously going to be a software solution, where their infrastructure is growing, but it's because their software has a specific requirement, either for logging, or for surge, that they're using either Elasticsearch, or Kubernetes, or CloudWatch Metrics for, and it's turning into an expensive solution, it gives me an inside, “Well, this is the kind of engineering effort that's going to need to happen in order for you to write all of these problems and to reduce these costs. And these aren't as simple as hitting an option within AWS console to bring all of that down.” It's always going to be seen as more of an effort, but you also get a bit of empathy from the engineers you're talking to because you now are explaining to them that you understand what they built. You understand why they built it a specific way, and you're just trying to give them a path out.Corey: You mentioned the now antiquated idea of going on-site and talking to clients. I mean, before pandemic, Mike and I would head out to a lot of our clients for the final wrap-up meeting, or even in some cases kickoffs, because it made sense for us to do it and get everyone in the same room and on the same page. And over the past year, we've found ways to solve for these problems in ways that I don't necessarily know are going to go away once the pandemic is over. Is it more effective for us to travel somewhere and sit down in the same room with people, who in many cases have to travel in for wherever they live themselves? I don't know. There is going to be a higher bandwidth story there, of course, and the communication is going to be marginally more effective, but is it going to be so effective that it's worth more or less throwing a wrench into everyone's schedule for that meeting? That leaves me somewhat unconvinced.Amy: One of the strange things is that previously, I would go on-site to clients and fly out to where they are because as many startups as there are within Chicago, and the [unintelligible 00:13:10], and within Illinois, I'm always being sent to New York, or Atlanta, or Denver, for some reason because they're far and there're planes there. But we always end up having to talk to some amount of people that don't even work in that time zone, or maybe even then in this country, so we're talking to resources in Asia, resources in Europe, which meant we were flying people in to be on somebody else's phone. And I'm glad to not do that. I'm glad to not have to hang out in an airport, there is a burrito place in O'Hare that I truly enjoy, but that is the one thing I miss about traveling. I almost have my punch card done and it stopped right before then, but I'm kind of okay with that.Corey: I was chasing the brass ring of airline status and all the rest for a long time. I can't wait to finally go and hit the next tier and the rest, and where, well, the pandemic through all of that into a jumble and I take a step back and look at it and, you know, I don't miss it as much. What I do miss is that the opportunity, in my case, to get away from everyone that I spend all of my time with now, just for a day or two, and clear my head and recenter myself. But there are probably ways to do that that doesn't keep me on the road for 140,000 miles a year.Amy: I think, or at least I hope, that this will give us a chance to as an industry just reevaluate how we treat travel. A lot of clients treated it as essentially a status level that came with your engagement where we need you on-site so we can show off we have consultants coming in on-site so frequently to give us personal reports, even though we are all in a room on a conference call with other people. So hopefully, even if they're not forcing that every other week—sometimes weekly, depending on what your engagement is—type of cadence on travel, then maybe it'll just increase the quality of life for some of us. It would be nice. It would be super nice. I honestly don't see them forcing that anytime soon, but once everyone gets vaccinated, and there's a successful pediatric vaccine that comes out, it's like, I don't see them, just letting us stay at home and continue doing our job the way we have been for the past year, going on two years.Corey: So, dialing back into the mists of the distant past, it's always a question of where do cloud economists—or clouds economist, depending upon how we choose to mis-pluralize things—come from. And everyone here is a different story and there's not a whole lot of common points between those stories. You, for example, spent some time doing work with NASA. What was that about?Amy: There's a lot of misconceptions about working for NASA like you need to be a doctor. [laugh]. And trust me, you don't. I knew a lot of people who work there that they basically got their degree, and then they just did code work forever and they are lifers there. And it's such an interesting place to be because, on one hand, you have that mission of space and exploration and trying to do better by the world, but also, it's still a federal agency and there's still a lot of problems with federal agencies in that how you get paid is essentially at the beginning of the year, that's when all the budgets are done.So, you can't do the startup thing where you go, I'm going to try a bunch of things, and if one doesn't work, I'm going to pivot to something else because you're essentially answering taxpayers and they don't let you do that. No one wants their taxes going to someone who tried a thing and then found out they messed up. Which is unfortunate, but also a really hard reality of the way these work.Corey: I really love installing, upgrading, and fixing security agents in my cloud estate! Why do I say that? Because I sell things, because I sell things for a company that deploys an agent, there's no other reason. Because let's face it. Agents can be a real headache. Well, now Orca Security gives you a single tool that detects basically every risk in your cloud environment -- and that's as easy to install and maintain as a smartphone app. It is agentless, or my intro would've gotten me into trouble here, but it can still see deep into your AWS workloads, while guaranteeing 100% coverage. With Orca Security, there are no overlooked assets, no DevOps headaches, and believe me you will hear from those people if you cause them headaches. and no performance hits on live environments. Connect your first cloud account in minutes and see for yourself at orca.security. Thats “Orca” as in whale, “dot” security as in that things you company claims to care about but doesn't until right after it really should have. Corey: I must confess that I'm somewhat disappointed that you opened with, “You don't really need to be a rocket scientist to work at NASA,” just because, honestly, I was liking the mystique of, “Oh, yeah. You need to be a rocket scientist to understand AWS billing constructs.” But I suppose if I'm being honest, that might be a slight overreach.Amy: I knew a lot of people there who had multiple PhDs, and they could barely keep their computer on, so really, I'm finding that I respect very smart people, but it also does not imply your world intelligence anywhere else outside of that very specific field. One of the really weird things about having worked there—I worked at NASA Ames as part of their IT department—one of the things we did as outreach was, we did a booth over at SiliCon Valley Comic Con once, and it was great. We had a vintage display of old electronics, like CRT monitors, and full keyboards, and all of this nonsense, and kids would go, “These are so old. Why would anyone use this? It's so boring.” [laugh].And the entire IT department showed up to volunteer. We're like, “No, you don't understand why it's interesting. It's great.” It was so, so hard to watch young people just [laugh] not be interested in what the past of digital devices were. Very sad. And on the other hand, we did get a lot of interest, but it was also having to have that conversation in real life can be a little disheartening.Corey: It really is.Amy: But it was fun because it was one of the few things that you don't really get to see NASA at a comic book convention, so that was actually a really cool thing to do. Also, we got free tickets, so that was great.Corey: So, what was your background before you got to the point of, “You know what I want to do? Work for a consultancy, whose entire mascot is a platypus, and from there, go ahead and fix AWS bills,” which sounds like, to folks who aren't steeped in it, the worst thing ever? What series of, I guess, decisions led you here?Amy: I know you don't remember this, but we actually met at Serverlessconf, and you opened your talk with, “I am a cloud economist, a title I completely made up.” Your talk was right before mine, so that's why you didn't remember I was there because I was actually on the backstage getting prepared for my talk.Corey: That's right. I would have been breathing into a paper bag right before or right after my talk, trying not to pass out. People say, “Oh, you won't be nervous once you give enough talks.” I'm still waiting.Amy: It never happens. I did finally stop having blackouts, so that's an improvement. It gets better, but it never goes away. And when you told me that, and I saw the listing, I'm like, “I don't know what this job is. There's an easy way to find out what the job is, and that's to apply.”And that is when I started going through the process of applying, and then you hired me some months afterwards. And the thing that I found out about looking through AWS billing is that I found out I have a very specific skill set, in trying to find a discount while looking through receipts. This is a thing I thought only applied to my personal life because I don't really like paying retail prices for anything, so I'm always looking for a way to squeeze out another 20, 30% out of something because 10% is really just taking taxes off of stuff. And the fact that I was able to apply that very specific skill set to an actual technical job is so much fun for me because I like being able to tell stories out of what people spend, just because it is—as we say around here—it's the sum of all of your engineering decisions. Because everything you do, there's a price tag on it. And knowing how you got there, and that you can optimize the architecture by looking through the bill is super fascinating to me.Corey: So, now that it's been six months, is the job what you expected it to be? Is it something radically different? Is it something else?Amy: The tone of our engagements have actually changed within the past six months, partially because of the way AWS has made some organizational changes internally as far as we can tell. But really, it's also what types of companies are finding out that they need a service like this. Before, when I was interviewing, and when I started, I was talking to Pete and Jesse about the types of engagements you do. It was for larger companies; they're looking for some amount of savings, and then we run some tooling and then we get back to them. And now it's turning into… some are relatively small companies, companies that wouldn't get use out of an EDP, for example, because they're spending so low.But also other companies, they don't even really want this saving specifically, they want validation on what the process is like, they want validation on their unit economics and what the cost allocation strategies are. So, it's fascinating what people actually want now that they understand that that option is out there.Corey: One thing that you mentioned a minute ago, was the idea of going and giving talks—in the before times, at Serverlessconf and things like that—how do you find that that has changed for you over the past year? And how are you viewing a slow, but effectively guaranteed in the long enough timeframe, return to normalcy?Amy: So, when everything went virtual, it was a really hard transition for a lot of communities. I'm part of AWS Chicago, I'm an organizer at a meetup group called Write/Speak/Code where our whole deal was to give women and people of underrepresented genders the opportunity to learn how to do open-source, how do you learn how to do technical speaking, we helped them with their CFPs, and all of that required a physical community in order for us to be able to give each other that type of support. Well, we can't do that anymore. The last big event we did was specifically around getting everyone set up into the organization. So, we do one big one every year where we tell you how to do slides, we tell you how to do everything, and then the rest of the year smaller meetups where we do feedback and prompts and other types of support events.Now, that we can't do that, we found that a lot of the people who ran these events, they're extroverts and they're social to begin with, so they got burnt out very quickly, which meant we not only had to find new ways of supporting them but also reaching out to members and making sure everyone could still do the types of thing we promised we'd help them to do. The other issue is that with things going virtual, there used to be clear lines on the types of events you could apply to, which were events that I could reach, that my company would pay for, what have you. But now everything's virtual, I accidentally applied to a meetup that I spoke at that was based in Australia, which meant I was talking at 10 o'clock at night, just because I explained to them the mix-up and essentially begged to get an earlier slot. And it's interesting because it presents both a wide array of opportunities, but it also means that there's now so much noise, and so much burnout and fatigue from these one direction types of conferences, which are long Zoom meetings, which is basically everyone's workday now, which is just full day's worth of Zoom meetings. And it's hard to get people interested.And really, what these events did best was give people who generally don't have that type of visibility—like me—who, I am a female engineer, and I am a person of color, so my opportunities aren't always going to be as well as they could be, but this visibility also gave me a boost. So, when we lost out on physical events, my organization personally lost out on a lot of things that we could do for those people, which is unfortunate, but it's also what was happening, really, everywhere. Now, we're gearing more towards how to do less Zoom meeting type of events, and we're now using a tool called gather.town, which lets everyone go into a space, you can walk around, you can drop in and out of conversations like you would in a hallway, and it has this cute little eight-bit kind of avatar feel to it so it looks kind of like a game, but it's also—if you go around a large group of people, it pulls up everyone's picture and then you're suddenly speaking to each other over voice without having to physically join in or wait for a breakout room or wait to be let into a different room. So, it's been difficult to try to find ways of managing it, but it's also been very interesting seeing the tools that had come out of this.Now, once we start going back to physical events and on-site events, personally, I have a lot of anxiety about that just because my allergies and everything makes it hard for me to do travel in the first place, but also, I'm not really sure how everyone's going to react being in the same space anymore, or how full they're going to be. So, to me, it does cause me a little bit of anxiety and I'm going to wait a little until things are more settled and are a little more stable than they are right now. That said, I believe AWS Midwest is doing something physical at the end of this year. But I'm not entirely positive about that.Corey: One of the things I want to avoid is going back to an old style of re:Invent, where it's only open to folks who are able to spend $2,000 on a ticket, travel to Las Vegas, and get the time off and afford the hotel stay and the rest. One thing I loved about the 2020 version of that was that everyone was coming from a baseline of its full remote. There was no VIP ticket option that got you a better experience than anyone else had. And I do worry, on some level, that as soon as they can, they're going to go running back to a story like that. I hope not.Amy: I hope not, too, because one of the great things about virtual re:Invent was everyone saw the same things at the same time. And you didn't have to give up one panel because you're too busy being in line for another panel. And I've never liked that type of convention activity where you know you're actively giving something up just because the line for the thing you want to get to is so super long. That said, they could have done better a bit on the website. The website was really hard to navigate and confusing and the schedule was weird.If they get that kind of usability fixed and a little more reasonable so that things are surprisingly searchable and easier to navigate, and they have more social type of events instead of AWS is going to—it's going to announce another service that they're calling a product, even though it's just… it's a service enhancement, and that's all it is. I would like for all of that to kind of be streamlined so it's not just more announcements. I can read announcements. I don't need to watch two hours' worth of announcements.Corey: I really hope that at some point, some of the AWS service teams learn that, “Hey. We could announce services anytime of the year,” rather than in a three-week sprint that leaves no one able to pay attention because there's just too much.Amy: And it's hard because it's hard when you have to hold a release because re:Invent's coming up. Or you have to be part of their Developer Relations Group where you have to do all of your training and all of your docs right beforehand, just so that it's prepared for this launch that people may not hear about because it gets drowned out in all the other noise.Corey: And that's sometimes part of the entire problem.Amy: Yeah.Corey: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. As always, it's a pleasure. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you?Amy: They can hire me for engagement here. [laugh] but also—Corey: Good answer.Amy: —I do technical talks. I don't have anything lined up right now, just because it's spring in my brain took a break, like everyone else did. I'm on Twitter as @nerdypaws because that was a handle I had since college and have not changed.Corey: Excellent. And we will, of course, leave a link to that in the [show notes 00:31:10], as we always do. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. It's always a pleasure, and it's deeply appreciated.Amy: It's always a good time talking to you, Corey.Corey: Amy Arumbulo Negrette, cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. 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 a comment telling me why you do in fact need to be a rocket surgeon in order to properly work on AWS bills.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.This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

new york amazon chicago australia europe las vegas work state san francisco phd zoom illinois nasa excellence cloud star trek vip yahoo economists slack wild west certificates puppets screaming aws apis crt devops invent kubernetes fantasy sports series b unix nasa ames research center elasticsearch edp ec2 cfps corey quinn lightsail silicon valley comic con amy it duckbill group orca security amy so chief cloud economist write speak code last week in aws amy they humblepod

AWS Account Teams and You

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 9, 2021 17:56

LinksPete and Jesse Talk Account ManagersTranscriptCorey: If your mean time to WTF for a security alert is more than a minute, it's time to look at Lacework. Lacework will help you get your security act together for everything from compliance service configurations to container app relationships, all without the need for PhDs in AWS to write the rules. If you're building a secure business on AWS with compliance requirements, you don't really have time to choose between antivirus or firewall companies to help you secure your stack. That's why Lacework is built from the ground up for the Cloud: low effort, high visibility and detection. To learn more, visit lacework.com.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: And I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today, we're going to be talking about, really, a couple things; building your relationship with AWS, really. This stems from one of the questions that we got from a listener from a previous event. The question is, “How do the different companies that we've worked with work with AWS? Is the primary point of contact for AWS at a company usually the CTO, the VP of engineering, an architect, an ops person, a program manager, or somebody from finance, a [unintelligible 00:01:00] trainer? Who ultimately owns that relationship with AWS?”And so we're going to talk about that today. I think there's a lot of really great content in this space. Pete and I, back in the day, recorded an episode talking about building your relationship with your account manager, and with your TAM, and with AWS in general. I'll link that in the show notes. That's a great precursor to this conversation. But I think there's a lot of great opportunities to build your relationship and build rapport with AWS, as you work with AWS and as you put more things on the platform.Amy: I think one of the things we always say right off the bat is that you should introduce yourself and make a good relationship with your account manager and your technical account manager, just because they're the ones who, if you need help, they're going to be the ones to help you.Jesse: Yeah, I think one of the things that we should also take a step back and add is that if you are listening to this and you're saying to yourself, “I don't have an account manager,” that's actually wrong; you do have an account manager. Anybody who's running workloads on AWS has an account manager. Your account manager might not have reached out to you yet because usually speaking, account managers don't reach out unless they see that you're spending a certain amount of money. They usually don't start a conversation with you unless you specifically are spending a certain amount of money, have reached a certain threshold, and then they want to start talking to you about opportunities to continue using AWS, opportunities to save money, invest in AWS. But you definitely have an account manager and you should definitely start building that rapport with them as soon as possible.Amy: First question. How do you actually engage your account manager?Tim: So, there's a couple ways to do it. If you have reached a certain spend threshold where your account manager will reach out to you, it's real simple: you just reply back to them. And it kind of depends. The question most people are going to have is, “Well, why do I need to reach out to my account manager? If I just have, like, a demo account, if I'm just using free tier stuff.”You probably don't ever need to reach out to your account manager, so what are the things, typical things that people need to reach out to their account manager for? Well, typically because they want to grow and want to see what kind of discounts are offered for growth, and I want to see what I can do. Now, you can open a support ticket, you can open a billing ticket, but what will end up happening is once you reach a spend threshold, your account manager will reach out to you because they want to talk to you about what programs they have, they want to see how they can help you grow your account, they want to see what things they can do for you because for them, that means you're going to spend more money. Most account managers within a little bit of time of you opening your account and reaching a lower spend threshold, they're going to send you an email and say, “Hey, this is my name, this is how you reach me,” et cetera, et cetera. And they'll send you some emails with links to webinars or other events and things like that, and you can typically reply back to those and you'll be able to get your account manager sometimes as well. But like I said, the easiest way to get a hold of your account manager or find out who it is, is to start increasing your spend on AWS.Jesse: So, then if you're a small company, maybe a startup or maybe just a student's using AWS for the first time, likely that point of contact within a company is going to be you. From a startup perspective, maybe you are the lead engineer, maybe you are the VP of engineering, maybe you are the sole engineer in the company. We have seen most organizations that we talk to have a relationship with AWS, or build that relationship or own that relationship with AWS at a engineering management or senior leadership level. Engineering management seems to be the sweet spot because usually, senior leadership has a larger view of things on their plate than just AWS so they're focused on larger business moves for the company, but the engineering manager normally has enough context and knowledge of all of the day-to-day specifics of how engineering teams are using AWS to really be involved in that conversation with your account manager, with your technical account manager, or with your solutions architect, or whatever set of folks you have from AWS's side for an account team. And I think that's another thing that we should point out as well, which is, you will always have an account manager; you won't always have a technical account manager.The technical account manager generally comes in once you have signed an enterprise discount program agreement. So, generally speaking, that is one of the perks that comes with an EDP, but obviously, there are other components to the EDP to be mindful of as well.Tim: So, let me clarify that. You get a technical account manager when you sign up for enterprise support. You don't have to have an EDPs to have enterprise support, but when you sign up for enterprise support, you automatically get a technical account manager.Jesse: And, Tim, if you could share with everybody, what kind of things can you expect from a technical account manager?Tim: So, a technical account manager, I mean, they will do—like, all TAMs everywhere pretty much can liaise with support to escalate tickets or investigate them and see what's going on with them, try and, kind of, white-glove them into where they need to be. AWS TAM's, they also have the same—or a lot of the same access to the backend. Not your data because no one at AWS actually has access to your data or inside your systems, but they have access to the backend so they can see API calls, they can see logs, and they can see other things like that to get insight into what's going on in your system and so they can do analytics. They have insight to your billing, they can see your Cost Explorer, they can see what your contract spends are, they can see all the line items in your bills, they have access to the roadmaps, they have access to the services and the service teams so that if you need to talk to someone at a particular service team, they can arrange that meeting for you. If you need to talk to specialists SAs, they can arrange those meetings for you.With a TAM, you—and if you have enterprise support, and they're looking you for an EDP, you can have what's called an EBC or an Executive Briefing Council, where they, in non-pandemic times, they will bring you to Seattle, put you up for a couple of days and you'll have a couple of days of meetings with service teams to go over, kind of like, what the roadmap looks like, what your strategy for working with those teams are or working with those services are. And you can get good steps on how to utilize these services, whether it's going to be some more deep dives on-site, or whether it's going to be some key roadmap items that the service team is going to prioritize and other things like that. And the EBC is actually pretty neat, but you know, you have to be larger spender to get access to those. Another thing that a TAM can do is they can actually enter items on the roadmap for you. They have access to and can provide you access to betas, or pilot programs, or private releases for various services.You'll have access to a weekly email that include what launches are pending, or what releases are pending over the next week or two weeks. You'll have access to quarterly or monthly business reviews where you get access to see what your spend looks like, what your spending trends are, support ticket trends, you know, usage and analytics, and things like that. So, a TAM can be quite useful. They can do quite a lot for you, especially in the realm of cloud economics. That said, every TAM has their specialty.I mean, depending on how many customers they have, the level of engagement you may get. And, you know, some TAMs are super, super, really good at the financial aspects, some are better at the technical aspects. So, to be fair because the TAM org is so large at AWS, you don't always have the same experience with all your TAMs, and the level of depth to which they can dive is going to vary somewhat.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. You could run Elastic Search or Elastic Cloud or Open Search, as they're calling it now, or a self hosted out stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you've come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for App performance monitoring, cyber security. If you're using ElasticSearch consider not running ElasticSearch. They're also available now on the AWS market place, if you prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count toward your EDP commitment. Discover what companies like, Klarna, Equifax, Armor Security and Blackboard already have. To learn more visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm yet again. Amy: So, let's say we got the best TAM—even though he technically works for us now—when trying to envision what our relationship with the world's best TAM is going to be—and I just imagine that as a nice little block text on a white mug—what is that relationship going to look like? How are we going to engage with them? And even, how often should we talk to them?Jesse: I used to work for an organization that had, I believe, quarterly meetings with our account manager and our TAM, and every time we met with them, it felt like this high stakes poker game where we didn't want to show our cards and they didn't want to show their cards, but then nobody really was able to do anything productive together. And I have to say that is the exact opposite of how to engage your account manager and your TAM.Tim: Yeah, that doesn't sound great.Jesse: No, it was not great. I do not recommend that. You want to have an open, honest conversation about your roadmap, about what you want to do with AWS.Amy: They're not getting that mug.Tim: No, no.Jesse: [laugh].Tim: So, if you have a super-engaged TAM—and I will use my own experience as a TAM at AWS—that we had office hours, routinely, bi-weekly. One customer I had, I would have onsite office hours at their offices in LA, and I would have virtual office hours in offices in London. And those office hours, sometimes I'd have—we—that—we would use those to bring in, whether it was specialist SAs, whether we go over roadmap items, or tickets, or something like that, or we do architectural reviews, or cost reviews, we would schedule quarterly business reviews aside from that, typically sometimes the same day or on the same group of days, but there was typically be different than office hours. I was in their Slack channel so they needed to ping me on something that's not a ticket but a question, we could have conversations in there. A couple of their higher points of contact there had my phone number, so they would call me if something was going on. They would page me—because AWS TAMS have pagers—if they had a major issue, or, like, an outage or something [unintelligible 00:11:05] that would affect them.Jesse: I'm sorry, I just have to ask really quick. Are we talking, like, old school level pager?Tim: No, no, no. Like on your phone, like PagerDuty.Jesse: Okay, okay. I was really excited for a minute there because I kind of miss those old-school pagers.Tim: Let me say, it was like PagerDuty; it wasn't actual PagerDuty because AWS did not actually use PagerDuty. They had something internal, but PagerDuty was the closest analog.Amy: Internal PagerDuty as a Service.Tim: Something like that.Jesse: Oh, no.Amy: So, you know, if you have a very engaged TAM, you would have regular, several times a week, contact if not daily, right? Additionally, the account team will also meet internally to go over strategy, go over issues, and action items, and things like that once or twice a week. Some accounts have multiple TAM, in which case then, you know, the touchpoints are even more often.Jesse: I feel like there's so much opportunity for engagement with your AWS account team, your account manager, your TAM. It's not entirely up to you to build that relationship, but it is a relationship; it definitely requires investment and energy from both sides.Tim: And I would say in the context of who's working with a TAM, ideally, the larger contact paths you have at an org with your TAM, the better off it's going to be. So, you don't want your TAM or account team to only talk to the VP of engineering, or the DevOps manager, or the lead architect; you want them to be able to talk to your devs, and your junior devs, and your finance people, and your CTO, and other folks like that, and pretty much anyone who's a stakeholder because they can have various conversations, and they can bring concerns around. If they're talking about junior devs, your TAM can actually help them how to use CloudFormation, and how to use a AWS CLI, or do a workshop on the basics of using Kubernetes, or something like that. Whereas if you're going to have a conversation with the VP of engineering, they're going to talk about strategies, they're going to talk about roadmap items, they're going to talk about how things can affect the company, they're going to talk about EDPs and things like that. So ideally, in a successful relationship with your TAM, your TAM is going to have several people in your org are going to have that TAM's contact information and will talk with them regularly.Jesse: One of the clients that we worked with actually brought us in for a number of conversations, and brought their TAM in as part of those conversations, too. And I have to say, having the TAM involved in those conversations was fantastic because as much as I love the deep, insightful work that we do, there were certain things about AWS's roadmap that we just don't have visibility into sometimes. And the TAM had that visibility and was able to be part of those conversations on multiple different levels. The TAM was able to communicate to multiple audiences about both roadmap items from a product perspective, from a finance perspective, from an engineering architecture perspective; it was really great to have them involved in the conversation and share insights that were beneficial for multiple parties in that meeting.Tim: And oftentimes, too, involving your TAM when you do have this one thing in your bill you can't figure out, saying, “We've looked and this spend is here, but we don't know exactly why it is.” Your TAM can go back and look at the logs, or go back and look at some of the things that were spun up at the specific time and say, “Oh, here was the problem. It was when you deploy this new AMI, it caused your CPU hours to go way, way up so you had to spin up more instances.” Or a great one was a few years back when Datadog changed its API calls and a lot of people's CloudWatch costs went through the roof. And then several TAMs had to through and figure out, it was this specific call and this is how you fix that and give that guidance back to their customers to reduce their spend. So, being able to have that backend access is very, very useful, even when you are working with an optimization group like ourselves or other folks, to say, “Hey, we've noticed these things. These are the line items we want to get some insight into.” I mean, your TAM can definitely be a good partner in that.Jesse: All right, folks, well, that'll do it for us this week. If you've got questions that you'd like us to answer, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. Fill out the form; we'd be happy to answer those on a future show. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review. Give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us, did Tim pronounce the shortening of ‘Amazon Machine Image' correctly as ‘ah-mi' or should he have said ‘A-M-I?'Amy: I heard it and I wasn't going to say it. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Amy: I was just going to wait for someone to send him the t-shirt.Tim: Just to note, if you put beans in your chili, you can keep your comments to yourself.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: You're just going to keep fighting about everything today, is all I'm—[laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. Oh, no.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Title IX

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 6, 2021 60:26

Amy: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy! I'm Amy McPhie Allebest. Today's text is Title IX, which is the most well-known portion of the https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States (United States) https://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Education_Amendments_of_1972&action=edit&redlink=1 (Education Amendments, passed in 1972). This is an incredibly important piece of legislation, and we're going to get into its history, the way it impacts people's lives, and the way it is or isn't enforced effectively. All of this based on just one sentence. And just so listeners are aware, we are going to be talking about sexual assault later in the episode - not a graphic description, but a true story on a sensitive and difficult topic, so please be advised of that. Before we begin our discussion, I want to introduce my reading partner for today, Whitney McPhie Griffith. Hi, Whitney! Whitney: Hi, Amy! Amy: Whitney and I are sisters, and we have had the great fortune of living near each other several times in our lives, but sadly we live far away from each other right now. So it's been so wonderful to work on this project together. I'm so very grateful that you were willing to talk about Title IX and share your experience and your wisdom. Thank you so much for doing this. Whitney: I'm happy to be here! Amy: So could you tell us a little about yourself? Where you come from, who you are, etc.? Whitney: Yep! I'm from Colorado, mostly. I lived in many different places, but I spent my childhood in CO, then slowly made my way to the west coast. My husband and I moved to Portland from California two years ago, and I really really love it here. I'm a pianist and multidisciplinary artist, and I'm currently working on a graphic design degree. My husband started a company a couple years ago, so I'm also a sort of creative director, editor, photographer, digital content manager, web designer, morale coach, etc for his company. It's fun. Amy: And then I also like to ask my reading partners what interested them in this project. What brought you to Breaking Down Patriarchy? Whitney: I love breaking down patriarchy! I think it's so important to discuss what patriarchy is-- a complex topic that I don't think is understood well enough. I'm grateful to join you in this conversation on Title IX, as I have some personal experience with it. Amy: Thanks so much, Whit. Again, I'm so grateful to have you here today and to hear your perspective as we talk about this document. So we are going to structure our conversation by explaining Title IX itself, talking about who the major players were in getting Title IX passed, and what its impacts have been. So Whit, could you start us off by explaining a bit about Title IX? Whitney: Sure! The official website of the US Department of Education says: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Then it goes on to talk about the scope of Title IX: “Title IX applies to institutions that receive federal financial assistance from the Department of Education, including state and local educational agencies. Educational programs and activities that receive Department of Education funds must operate in a nondiscriminatory manner. Some key issue areas in which recipients have Title IX obligations are: recruitment, admissions, and counseling; financial assistance; athletics; sex-based harassment; treatment of pregnant and parenting students; discipline; single-sex education; and employment.” ---- Amy: Thanks, Whit. So any listeners who heard the episode on the book, Keep the Damned Women Out, about United States universities excluding women from educational opportunities, will know why this legislation was needed. And you...

united states california education colorado portland federal educational us department title ix whit education amendments amy so

Should I Attend re:Invent?

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 25, 2021 20:52

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways that we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today on the show, we are going to be talking about AWS re:Invent. Now, I know that most of you know what re:Invent is, but I just would love to set the playing field level for everybody really quick. Amy, Tim, what is AWS re:Invent.Tim: AWS re:Invent is AWS's week-long corporate conference. It's not really a user conference; it's certainly not, like, a community conference, but it's a week-long sales pitch in the desert. It's like the worst version of a corporate Burning Man you could ever imagine because they even have a concert.Jesse: It is in Las Vegas. Now, I personally have mixed feelings about going to Las Vegas in general, but this adds so much to the conference in general because it's not just in a single conference venue that's centrally located near the hotels. Is it is across the strip—Amy: It's the entire strip.Jesse: It's the entire strip. So—Amy: They block every hotel and they buy every piece of ad space.Jesse: Yes. There is no escaping AWS re:Invent for the entire week that you're there. And sometimes that's a good thing because you do want to be involved in what's going on, but other times, it is a lot.Tim: So, I'm trying to figure out which LP that ‘buy the entire Las Vegas trip' covers because it's certainly not be frugal.Amy: No. [laugh].Jesse: No, not at all. But we do have new information. We decided to do this episode specifically because new information was just released about re:Invent for this year. Amy, what is that information? What do we know?Amy: They've decided, in having to go virtual last year, due to some kind of horrible global crisis, to return in person to the world's most densely packed tourist spot, Las Vegas, and host this huge event from November 29th to December 3rd—that's right after Thanksgiving—and just, what do they say? Return to normal. Return to normal.Tim: That way everybody can get exposed to COVID before they go home for the holidays.Jesse: [laugh].well, you at least get one holiday in, if you celebrate or recognize Thanksgiving, and then you get to bring everything back after that.Amy: Yeah, people bring enough things back from Vegas. I'm not sure we'd have to find more reasons. [laugh].Tim: [laugh].Jesse: I know that there's that great marketing tactic of, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” but—Tim: That's not what they say at the clinic.Jesse: Nope. Mm-mm. Now, I will say, I know that almost every conference event was completely virtual last year due to the pandemic, and this year, a lot of conferences are still trying to straddle that line between what's acceptable, can we do maybe smaller events in person, some kind of a hybrid online/in-person thing. I have mixed feelings on this. I appreciate that I can still attend AWS re:Invent from home this year digitally, I can still watch a lot of the main keynote events and a lot of the other information that is being shared, but I don't know, it's always hard because if you do a hybrid event, you're automatically going to miss out on any of that in-person socializing and networking.Tim: Well. So, I think it's interesting. AWS re:Invent suffers from the same issue that pretty much all other conferences suffer from is that there's not really value-add in the talks, at least for attending.Jesse: Yeah.Amy: If you're going to be able to see those talks afterwards if the announcements are going to be publicized afterwards which, that is true in both cases, then what's the point of spending the money, and the time, and the possible exposure to go watch them in person? So, then the other thing is, “Well, we want to go for some of the training seminars,” or some of these other things. Well, those are also offered online, often. Or, like, copies of them online. These are the same kinds of tutorials like that that you can have your TAM or SA run if you're an AWS customer currently; that's what they're doing there.The other thing is, too, those in-person sessions get filled up so quickly that there's no guarantee [unintelligible 00:05:08] anyways. And that's one of the complaints they've had about re:Invent in the past is that you can't get into any of the sessions. And so, you couple all that along with most of the reason going being—if it's not the talks and is not the sessions, it's the hallway track. And then you got to kind of wonder, is the hallway track going to be valuable this year because if it's hybrid, what percent of the people that you would normally talk to you are going to be there and what percentage aren't? And so there's a lot of calculus that's got to go into it this year.Jesse: I've always struggled with any vendor-sponsored event, all the talks feel either like a sales pitch, or they feel like a use case that just doesn't fit for me. And that may just be where I'm at in my professional journey; there's definitely reasons to go if you want to see some of these talks or see some of this information live, or be the first person to talk about it. Or even the people who are going to be the news sources for everybody else who want to be the first person to talk about, “Oh, we attended, and we saw these things and were live-tweeting the entire conference.” If that's your shtick, I fully support that, but I always struggle going to any kind of vendor conference because I just feel like the value that I get from the talks, from training if I go to training, just doesn't feel like enough for me, personally.Amy: So, I've done some of the AWS-led training when Summit was in Chicago, a couple years ago, and I'll be honest, you lose a lot in these large AWS-led trainings because these classes, it's not going to be like the ones that you would sign up for even being hosted either by your company or by your local user group chapter where you will have at max 100 people. You have well over that. You have an entire conference room full of people, and they're asking questions that are across the level of expertise for that topic. I went for one of the certification training seminars and straight-up 15 minutes was spent talking about what a region is. And given that's page one of any training material, that was a waste of $300.Jesse: Yeah.Tim: I think you run into the problem because it is, in fact, I mean, let's be honest, it's a multi-day sales pitch. It's not a user conference, it's not user-generated content. It's cherry-picked by the powers-that-be at AWS, the service groups. Is a big push for account executives to encourage high-level or high-spend accounts to participate in those so they get logo recognition. And so that becomes more of the issue than the actual cool user stories.And that's fine if you're using it literally just a sales conference because it's very compelling sales material, your account executive will go there and try and close deals, or close bigger deals, or sign EDPs or something like that, but from an engineering standpoint, from a technical standpoint, it's remarkably uncompelling.Jesse: Yeah, I think that's one other thing to call out, which is, there is definitely this networking opportunity that we talked about from a hallway track perspective, but there's also a networking and business opportunity to meet with your account manager, or your TAM, or your SA in person and have conversations about whatever things you want to talk about; about future architecture, or about closing an EDP—or I should say, about an EDP because the account manager will try to close that EDP with you—and then basically use that as next steps for what you want to do with AWS. But again, all of those things can be done without flying you to Las Vegas and being amongst all these other people.Tim: I mean, let's not take away, there's a certain synergy that happens when you have face-to-face contact with folks, and a lot of these conversations you have in hallways are super, super organic. And so I think that's indicative of conferences as a whole. One of the things that we learned in the pandemic is that, yeah, you can have talks where people just, like, look at a screen and watch talks, and a lot of conferences have done that. But that's not why people want to go to the conference; they want to go to the conference to talk to people and see people. And if you want to have a conference where people talk to people and see people, and that's the whole point of doing it, then the business model behind that looks dramatically different, and the content behind that looks dramatically different.You just have a bunch of birds-of-feather sessions or a bunch of breakout sessions. You do a keynote at the beginning, you do a keynote at the end, and then you just let people mingle, and maybe you have some led topics, but you don't generate content; you shut up and you let the people innovate.Jesse: I also want to add to that. It is one thing to have a conference that is in one venue where everybody is going to be gathered in the same space, creating conversation, or creating easy opportunities—Amy: Five miles worth of content isn't exciting for you?Jesse: Yeah. So, in Las Vegas because the entire conference is spread across the entire strip, you're going to have opportunities to network across the entire strip basically, and sometimes that means you're going to only spend time networking with the people who are in the same hotel as you at the time of the track that you are waiting for, or the time of the event that you are waiting for. It is unlikely that you are going to run all around the strip just to be able to network with everybody that you run into.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more visit lumigo.io.Amy: The other issue I have, not just with re:Invent, but this is really any larger conference or conferences that rely on the kind of content where it is a person speaking at you and you don't get to meet these people, is that without any level of Q&A or interactivity—and this is true especially for AWS-led events—is that it is no different than watching someone on video. You can go to these talks, and you can perhaps have conversations with people as they filter out of the room, but there's no way you're going to be able to talk to that person who was delivering that content, unless you can track them down amongst the sea of people in re:Invent or [unintelligible 00:12:16] in Las Vegas.Tim: What typically has to happen is that after someone has given a compelling talk and you really want to talk to them, you have to go and talk to your account manager; your account manager will then set up a meeting that will happen at a later time where you're going to all call in over Chime, and then you will quote-unquote, “Meet” that person virtually. And if that's the case, you could have just stayed home and watched [laugh] the talk online, and then done the same thing.Amy: Conferences need more Chime. That's what [laugh] the problem is.Jesse: [laugh]. I think my eye just started twitching a little bit as soon as you said that, Amy.Amy: I'm glad. So, then why would people go? There's the hallway track, but is that worth the heavy price tag of going to Vegas? A lot of us live in areas where there is either going to be an AWS Summit or there are AWS user groups. What do you get from going to a larger event such as re:Invent and having that level of communication that you can't get from those smaller groups?Tim: I mean, the importance of networking cannot be overstated. It is extremely important, whether it's for laying groundwork for future deals, laying groundwork for future collaborations. I've been at conferences where a hallway track, just folks meeting up in the hallway and having a really organic discussion turned into a product within three months. So, those kinds of things are important. And, unfortunately or unfortunately, they do happen better quite often, when people are in-person and they've had a chance to talk, maybe even a couple of drinks or whatever.So, I mean, people ink deals, they shake hands, they get, you know, a lot of work done when it comes to maintaining and managing relationships, and to some people, that is worth it. But I do think that you have to be very, kind of, eyes-open about going into this. It's like, you're not going to go in there to get a lot of technical insight, you're not going to go in there to talk to a whole bunch of people unless you really have a relationship or establish some kind of rapport with them beforehand. Because just to go up and blindly like, “Hey, I'm going to grab you in the hallway, and this is who I am,” that's not always great, especially nowadays, when people are, kind of, already averse to, you know, talking to strangers, sometimes.Jesse: I've always struggled with talking to strangers in general at conferences because I'm predominantly introverted, so if I don't have an open introduction to someone through a mutual third party or mutual friend, it's just not going to happen. And I've gotten better at that over the years as I go to conferences, but it's going to be especially tough now in cases where folks are not just averse to, I don't want to say strangers, but averse to physical contact and adverse to people just, kind of, approaching them out of the blue. It's tough. I want to be more mindful of that and I want to be better, but it's hard, especially in cases where you're in a crowd of hundreds of people or, you know, thousands of people across the strip, that it just gets overwhelming really quickly for some folks.Amy: I do want to loop this round, if anything, just for a poll for Twitter. Do not close an EDP in Vegas. You're probably not of the right mind [laugh] and have the right people to do that. Wait till you get back to work. Please. That's just me. [laugh].Jesse: I would also like to add—we talk about why people go; I think that there's definitely a solid contingent of folks who attend re:Invent because it is the one time a year that the company sanctions them getting away from their family for a couple of days, getting away from, you know, the day-to-day routine of whatever work is going on for a couple days, and go to Vegas. Now, I know that the company is not going to sponsor them drinking every night, or gambling, or whatnot, but they're likely going to be doing those things anyhow, so it is this company-sanctioned opportunity to just go experience, you know, something different; go take a vacation, basically, for a couple days.Amy: Corporate Burning Man.Tim: Corporate Burning Man, exactly. A vacation in Vegas.Amy: I am not a fan of ever working in Vegas. If I'm on the clock, I cannot be in Vegas, not because I'm prone to excessive behavior when I'm on my own, but more that I cannot be productive in that much noise and that much flaky internet. It drives me absolutely batty, and I'm only going to be, as far as implementations, so productive in a crowd that large.Tim: I will say this, especially in regards to Vegas, there are other places you can go, other places that need the money more. AWS wants to rent a city, rent a city that needed the money. Put that money where it could be to used, where it really makes a difference. I don't know if Vegas is the right place for that, if I'm being honest, especially after all we've learned and dealt with in 2020. And so that's why in 2021, yeah, no for me, continuing to have re:Invent in Vegas is very, very tone-deaf.Jesse: I still think, Amy, you and I just need to—actually sorry, all three of us should attend and basically keep a running Waldorf and Statler commentary through the entire conference. I don't know if we can get that little, you know, opera booth that's kind of up and away from all the action, but if we can get something like that and do some sports commentary—ohh, maybe on the expo hall—Amy: That would be great. That would be great if we don't get banned. [laugh].Tim: I think what would be even more fun is to give a MST3K—Jesse: Ohhh.Tim: —treatment of the keynotes afterwards, you know what I mean?Jesse: Yeah.Amy: Yes.Jesse: I mean, Amy and I had also talked about playing some Dungeons and Dragons while we were there, and I feel like if we can find some, I'm going to say, tech-themed RPG—I realize that is a broad category, and everybody's going to spam me afterwards for this, but—Amy: I got that. Don't worry about it.Jesse: Yeah, I'm on board. I feel like anything that we can do to create a roleplaying game out of this conference, I'm down.Tim: I'm still waiting for you to explain to the audience in general who Waldorf and Statler were?Jesse: Oh, yes, that is fair. Okay. Waldorf and Statler are two characters from the old-school Muppets Show, which is amazing and delightful. It's on Disney+; I highly recommend it. They are basically—Amy: They're two grumpy old muppets, and they have been roasting people since the 70s. That is—that's all it is. [laugh].Tim: All they do is they sit up in the upper booth and they throw shade, and I love it.Amy: Yes. And they just show up in random parts in different movies. They'll be, like, on a park bench, and there'll be a serious moment, and then they'll just start talking crap for no reason. And it's great.Jesse: They're the best. They're absolutely fantastic. I adore them. I hope to be them one day.Amy: One day.Tim: Really, both of them? I don't, I don't know how that's going to work.Jesse: I am hoping to clone myself. One of me is going to have fabulous hair and one of me is going to be balding. Probably the clone is going to be balding; sorry about it, future me. But—Amy: [laugh].Tim: Well, I mean, and have just a magnificent chin, right?Jesse: Yes, yes, that's the trade-off. Losing the hair up top but absolutely fantastic chin.Tim: Here's what I want to see. I want to see the listeners submit things that you think should be on the re:Invent bingo cards.Amy: Ohh, yes.Jesse: Yes.Amy: I would love to see that.Jesse: So, for those of you listening, you've got two options for submitting things that you'd like to be on the re:Invent bingo cards. The ideal option is going to lastweekataws.com/QA. Fill out the form and let us know what you think should be on the bingo card. You can also respond to the social media post that will be posted for this content, and we can take a look at that as well. But that'll be a little bit harder for us to follow because I'm unfortunately not like Corey. I can't absorb all of Twitter in a day; it takes me a longer time to read all that content.Jesse: If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review. Give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us what you think about AWS re:Invent.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Balancing Cost Optimizations and Feature Work

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2021 15:28

Links:The cloud economist starter kit: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/cloud-cost-management-starter-kit-2/ TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Jesse: This is the podcast within the podcast where we like to talk about all the ways we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today, we're going to be talking about balancing cost optimization work against feature work.Amy: Buckle up everyone. I've got a lot of thoughts about this. Just kidding. It's just the one: don't.Jesse: You heard it here first, folks. Don't. Amy Negrette just says, “Don't.”Amy: Don't. [laugh].Jesse: So Amy, does that mean, don't balance the work?Amy: More like don't choose. It's always hard to make the argument to take an engineer off of feature work. This goes for all sorts of support tasks like updates and documentation, and as a group, we figured out that trying to put those off until an engineer has time to do it is not going to be a thing that becomes prioritized, it eventually gets deprioritized, and no one looks at it. And that's why DocOps is the thing. It's a process that now gets handled as part of and in parallel with software development.Jesse: Yeah, I've had so many conversations in previous companies that I've worked for, where they basically said, “Well, we don't have time to write documentation.” Or they will say, “The code is the documentation.” And, to their credit, there are a lot of places where the code is very cleanly documented, but if somebody is coming into this information for the first time and they don't have technical knowledge or they don't have deep expertise in what you're looking at, they need documentation that is clear, understandable, and approachable. And it is so difficult to find that balance to actually make sure that that work is part of everything that you do.Amy: And I think what the industry has decided is that if you make it a requirement for pull requests that if you're going to make a change, you have to document that change somewhere, and that change if it has any kind of user impact, it will be displayed alongside it. That's the only way to make it a priority with software. And cost optimization has to be treated in a similar respect.Jesse: Yeah, so let's talk about cost optimization as a process. To start, let's talk about when to do it. Is this something that we do a little bit all the time, or do we do it after everything's already done?Amy: I know I just cited CostOps as a good model for this, even though that's literally what we cannot do. We can't treat cost optimization as something we do a little bit along the way because, again, speaking as an engineer, if I'm allowed to over-optimize or over-engineer something, I'm going to take that opportunity to do that.Jesse: Absolutely.Amy: And if we're going to do project-wide cost optimization, we need to know what usage patterns are, we need to have a full user and business context on how any system is used. So, if we do a little at each step, you get stuck in that micro-optimization cycle and you're never actually going to understand what the impact of those optimizations were. Or if you spent too much time on one part over-optimizing another part.Jesse: It's also really hard if this is a brand new workload that you've never run in the cloud before. You don't necessarily know what the usage is going to be for this workload. Maybe you have an idea of usage patterns based on some modeling that you've done or based on other workloads that you're running, but as a whole, if this is a brand new workload, you may be surprised when you deploy it and find out that it is using twice the amount of resources that you expected, or half the amount of resources that you expected, or that it is using resources and cycles that you didn't expect.Amy: Yeah. We've all been in the situation, or at least if you work with—especially with consumer software—that, you're going to run into a situation where the bunch of users are going to do things that you don't expect to happen within your application, causing the traffic patterns that you predicted to move against the model. To put it kindly. [laugh].Jesse: Yeah. So, generally speaking, what we've seen work the best is making time for cost optimization work maybe a cycle every quarter, to do some analysis work: to look at your dashboards, look at whatever tooling you're using, whatever metrics you're collecting, to see what kind of cost optimization opportunities are available to you and to your teams.Amy: So, that comes down to who's actually doing this work. Are we going to assign a dedicated engineer to it in order to ensure it gets done? Anyone with the free cycles to do it?Jesse: See, this is the one that I always love and hate because it's that idea of if it's everyone's responsibility, it's no one's responsibility. And I really want everybody to be part of the conversation when it comes to cost optimization and cloud cost management work, but in truth, that's not the reality; that's not the way to get this work started. Never depend on free cycles because if you're just waiting for somebody to have a free cycle, they're never going to do any work. They're never going to prioritize cost optimization work until it becomes a big problem because that work is just going to be deprioritized constantly. There's a number of companies that I worked for in the past who did hackathons, maybe once a quarter or once every year, and those hackathons were super, super fun for a lot of teams, but there was a couple individuals who always picked up feature work as part of the hackathon, thinking, “Oh, well, I didn't get a chance to work on this because my cycles were focused on something else, so now I'll get a chance to do this.” No, that's not what a hackathon is about.Amy: You don't hack on your own task list. That's not how anything works.Jesse: Exactly. So instead, rather than just relying on somebody to have a free cycle, kind of putting it out there and waiting for somebody to pick up this work, there should be a senior engineer or architect with knowledge of how the system works, to periodically dedicate a sprint to do this analysis work. And when we say knowing how the system works, we're really talking about that business context that we've talked about many, many times before. A lot of the cloud cost management tooling out there will make a ton of recommendations for you based on things like right-sizing opportunities, reservation investments, but those tools don't have the business context that you and your teams do. So, those tools don't know those resources that are sitting idle in us-west-2 are actually your disaster recovery site, and you actually kind of need those—even though they're not taking any work right now, you need those to keep your SLAs in check in case something goes down with your primary site.Or maybe security expects resources to be set up in a certain way that requires higher latency times based on end-to-end encryption. There's lots of different business context opportunities that a lot of cloud cost management tools don't have, and that's something that anybody who is looking at cloud cost optimization work should have and needs to have those conversations with other teams. Whoever does this cloud cost optimization work, or whoever makes the cloud cost optimization recommendations to other teams needs to know the business context of those teams' workloads so that the recommendations they make are actually actionable.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more visit lumigo.io.Amy: And they should also have the authority to do this work. It's easy to deliver a team a list of suggestions saying, “Oh, I've noticed our utilization is really low on this one instance. We shouldn't possibly move it,” or what have you. And because they're not the ones making the full architectural decisions, or leading that team, or in charge of that inventory, they actually don't have the authority to tell anyone to do anything. So, whoever gets tasked with this really needs to be an architect on that team—if you're going to go with this embedded resource type of person—where they have that authority to make that decision and to act on it and move things.Jesse: Yeah. It's really important that teams stay accountable to the resources that they're running. And some teams don't know any of the resources that they're running; they, kind of, deploy into the cloud as a black box. And that is a perfectly fine business model for some organizations, but then they also need to understand that if the senior engineer or architect who is focused on cloud cost optimization work for this group says, “Hey, we need to tweak some of these workloads or configurations to better optimize these workloads,” the teams need to be willing to have that conversation and be a part of that conversation. So, we've talked about a couple different ideas of who this person might be that does this work. This could be a DevOps team that attaches a dedicated resource to doing this analysis work, to making these recommendations, and then delegates the cost optimization work to the engineering teams, or it could be a dedicated cloud economist or cloud economist team who does this work.Amy: We did touch on having someone in DevOps do this, just because they have a very broad view and the authority to issue tasks to engineering teams because if they see an application or an architecture, where resources are being—or are hitting their utilization cap, or if they realize there are applications that need more or less resources, they're able to do those types of investigations. Maybe someone on that team can take up this work and have a more infrastructure-minded view on the entire account, see what's going on on the account and make those suggestions that way.Jesse: Absolutely. It's so important. Or if there is a dedicated cloud economist or maybe a cloud economist team that is able to make these recommendations, that has the authority to make these recommendations, maybe that's the direction your group should go.Amy: If only we spent an entire podcast talking about this.Jesse: [laugh]. Huh, if only we spent an entire podcast talking about how to build a cloud cost team and talk about how to get started as a cloud economist. Hmm…Amy: Please check out the cloud economist starter kit that we all have already published.Jesse: Yes, several weeks ago. We'll post the episode link in the [show notes 00:12:38] again. So, Amy, we've talked about when to do this work, who should do this work. What I want to know is how do these teams come together to have these conversations together? I'm thinking about best practices here. I'm thinking about how do teams start building best practices around this work so that each team isn't working in a silo doing their own cost optimization work?Amy: If you're lucky, someone in your company has already done this work. [laugh]. And you can just steal their work.Jesse: Absolutely.Amy: Or borrow. Or collaborate. Whatever word you want to use.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: See if you can see how the project went, how they structured it. Maybe they ran into a process issue like they weren't able to get the kind of access they needed without jumping through a whole bunch of red tape and hoops. That's a good thing to know going into one of these projects, just being able to see the resources that you're going to be looking at, and making sure you have access to them.Jesse: Absolutely. This is part of why we also harp so much on open and clear communication across teams about the cloud cost management work that you're doing. If you are trying to solve a problem, it's likely that another team in the organization is also trying to solve that same problem, or ideally has already solved that problem, and then they can help you solve the problem. They can explain to you how they solved the problem so that you can solve it faster so you don't have to waste engineering cycles, trying to reinvent the wheel essentially. It's a really, really great opportunity to build these best practices, to have these conversations together, maybe to build communities of practice within the organization, depending on how large your organization is, around the best ways to use these different tools and resources within the organization.Jesse: Well, that will do it for us this week. If you've got questions that you would like us to answer on an upcoming episode, go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us how you integrate cost as a component of your engineering work.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Build vs. Buy

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2021 13:04

Transcript Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Negrette.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we’ve seen AWS used and abused in the wild. With a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today, we’re going to be talking about build versus buy. I feel like this is really kind of a classic engineering conversation. Amy, what is the build versus buy idea?Amy: It’s really the idea of whether you decide to use a managed service or SaaS product versus rolling your own and building yourself. It’s very easy to do these days with a few watches on YouTube, maybe some blog articles. You can also do repairs on my house, which is why I always have to get repairs done on my house. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. Yeah, I feel like as much as I love the world of HGTV and the DIY network, I think I can do more than I actually can and I feel like it’s probably a lot safer to just let a professional take the reins. I mean, there’s so many certification programs that teach you how to build and manage your own engineering things, your own distributed databases, your own Kubernetes clusters, your own streaming data platform, and it’s really great to understand the fundamental building blocks of these systems, it’s really great to understand how they work so that ultimately if you are consuming from them or managing them, that you understand the ins and the outs of the system. But the question becomes, do you really need to be the one that’s managing that system? Do you really need to be the one spending your time managing that system on top of writing code for your microservices, on top of managing the architecture, the application, all of the components of your service that are critical?Amy: So, I guess what we really want to decide is, in what use cases is it okay to build something from scratch, and when is it okay to, essentially, just go to the market and look for something that’s made already?Jesse: Yeah. And I think that’s the main question that a lot of folks ask: what is the defining line? What are the questions they should think about as they are choosing to build versus buy?Amy: I think if you want to really look at building a product, and really from the ground up—you have this product in mind and you want to do all the architecture, control it end-to-end—unless this is your core product feature or you’re going to package it for either internal or public release, you almost always—you don’t want to build this yourself because someone has probably built it in a way that’s not going to cause your engineers time or money. Unless it is going to directly make you money, then yes. If this is tied to your product income and your product revenue, please build it yourself. It avoids a lot of licensing issues, you do get to control how it works, how you want it to work. But that said a lot of products, just a bunch of assassins in a trench coat anyway, so—Jesse: [laugh].Amy: —it really depends on what’s important to you.Jesse: Yeah, I feel like this is one of the biggest pitfalls that I see in a lot of organizations where they think about how they want to build out an architecture and they choose that a solution like, stateful distributed service is going to be the right thing that they want. And one of the developers says, “Oh, that’s easy. I can build that in a weekend.” And then they go off and build it, and then they’re stuck managing that system for all of eternity when that’s not the primary purpose of the team that they’re working on, that’s not the primary purpose of the product that they’re working on. So, if you’re going to build something that is directly related to your product, directly related to your business use case, directly related to how your company is making money, something that is absolutely your bread and butter, you definitely want to build that rather than buying that off the shelf.Because building it will give you that great opportunity to focus on controlling all the ins and outs of the system, understanding all the parts of the system, finding the flexibility when you need flexibility, really fine-tuning and honing all the parts of the system in the way that you need it to work so that ultimately your organization is getting the best bang for their buck out of the system, whereas in a lot of cases, you’re not going to get the same level of flexibility from an off the shelf solution.Amy: And especially if you’re going to go in and planning to build your own supporting product, make sure—and I said this before, I’ll say it again—you do check the licenses of any libraries and any SaaS products you use to build it because I reinvented the wheel plenty of times in my career, specifically because I worked in a place where the licensing we were allowed to use would not allow us to use very specific products.Jesse: Yeah. That’s such a critical business risk and something that I think not every engineer is fully aware of. And to be clear, I don’t think that’s the engineer’s fault. I think that’s part of best practices that every organization can get better at to make sure that everybody understands, what are our limitations on using modules, using open-source solutions from the internet? How can we make sure that we ultimately aren’t creating additional unnecessary business risk?Amy: When do we go shopping?Jesse: [laugh]. Yeah, let’s go shopping. Let’s say you’ve decided that the piece of software that you want is not part of your bread and butter, like we were saying. If it’s not part of your organization’s primary product, primary use case, don’t waste engineering time building it for yourself, pay a vendor or a subject matter expert to build it for you—or to manage it for you, even—and then call it a day. It is absolutely worth those trade-offs. The additional cost of paying somebody else to manage it for you is absolutely worthwhile because you then get the opportunity to stay focused on the things that are most important to your team and your business.Corey: If your mean time to WTF for a security alert is more than a minute, it’s time to look at Lacework. Lacework will help you get your security act together for everything from compliance service configurations to container app relationships, all without the need for PhDs in AWS to write the rules. If you’re building a secure business on AWS with compliance requirements, you don’t really have time to choose between antivirus or firewall companies to help you secure your stack. That’s why Lacework is built from the ground up for the cloud: low effort, high visibility, and detection. To learn more, visit lacework.com.Amy: You also don’t end up trapped by having to make sure the product is appropriately upgraded or patched. And then you also have that nice little space of liability, saying we just bought this off the shelf. They said it was safe, and we trusted them. [laugh].Jesse: Yeah, again, business risk conversations, there is absolutely that opportunity for third-party liability rather than internal liability in some of those security risks. I also feel like it’s important to add that AWS, for example, has tons of managed services that give you ease of use by removing that administrative overhead. Yes, we’re primarily focused on AWS, obviously, this is an AWS focused podcast, there is definitely going to be a best and worst use case for these products so I’m not saying that you should go out and start using these all immediately without thinking about your overall goal and use case, but in a lot of cases, again, if the solution that you want is not something that you need to manage yourself, that you need to focus on building and running yourself, give it to AWS, they have tons of these managed solutions available to you built into the ecosystem.Amy: And that’s true of all the large cloud providers. They have managed services to make the things that you do not have the staffing to be an expert in and do all that work for you. And it’s not as if you are locked into these solutions. When you buy into either a SaaS product or a managed service, you can migrate off if you feel like you can build it better, and you actually have spent the time in R&D, and you spent the time building out a minimum viable product, and you know that this use case works for you, and then you can either clear out overhead or fees, and you can actually come in under what you’re spending right now, then make that move. But do it after you already know what it is you want.Jesse: Yeah, I think that’s a really great use case example, Amy. One other thing that I want to talk about is that this build versus buy a conversation so far has been focused on your organization thinking about if they want to build something internally, or if they want to buy it from a third-party vendor. But this conversation can also happen internally, in a single organization, between teams. I’m thinking about some organizations that I’ve worked for where I’ve seen one team build and manage a central platform solution, like a central CI/CD pipeline that every other team is going to be using and consuming from. But then, one team decides that the CI/CD platform that everybody’s using doesn’t really do all the things that they want it to do, so they decide to go off and build their own CI/CD platform internally for their team instead, rather than working with the team that is actually owning this sort of centralized CI/CD platform to make sure that everybody is getting the benefits of these additional features, these additional solutions, these additional bug fixes that the team was asking for.Amy: It’s really hard when you can’t see the forest for all the silos.Jesse: Yes. Absolutely. It is so, so critical to think about building these feedback loops into your internal tools. Because if your customers are internal to your organization, they’re going to want to provide that feedback in some capacity to help you understand when the service that you’re building is fantastic and when the service that you’re building is awful. And it’s so, so critical to make sure that you have those easy feedback loops so that you can continue to iterate on the things that you choose to build internally and hone them and make them better.If you’ve got questions that you’d like us to answer go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us the criteria you think about when considering whether you should build or buy.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Keep the Damned Women Out: The Struggle for Coeducation, by Nancy Weiss Malkiel

Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2021 87:27

Amy: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy! I'm Amy McPhie Allebest. Today we will be discussing a book by Princeton professor Nancy Weiss Malkiel called Keep the Damned Women Out: The Struggle for Coeducation. This book is a fascinating in-depth look at the process that allowed women into American and British universities which were historically male, and I must say I was shocked to learn how recently that process happened. But before we blow your minds with the sexism that plagued higher education so very recently, I want to introduce today's reading partner, Christie Skousen. Hi, Christie! Christie: Hi, Amy! Amy: Christie and I met in 2008 when we were both living in Los Altos, CA, and we were peas in a pod right from the very beginning. We were running partners in Los Altos for years - I don't know how many hours we spent talking and running in the Los Altos hills - and you nudged me to do a couple of ½ marathons with you, although you ended up running a few full marathons so I worship at your feet! You're also one of the smartest, most interesting people I have ever known, and one of the funniest. You're always teaching me and helping me grow and see things in new ways, so I'm really excited to have you here today. And now can you talk a little bit about yourself as well? Tell us where you're from and what makes you you. Christie: Bio My ancestors are from… Mormon stock Dad was a professor - big presence in your life Mom was piano prodigy, tell about her career/mother balance a bit. Debuted with you in her belly at Carnegie hall I had two brothers and probably didn't even realize a gender difference between us until puberty hit. I grew up as a competitive classical pianist and gave my Carnegie Hall debut at age 18. I have had the the opportunity to perform as a soloist and with orchestras throughout the United States, Europe and Russia. Peabody/Fleisher I served on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory Preparatory Division Teach students around the world online in partnership with ArtistWorks. I am the founder and Director of the Peery Piano Academy in Mountain View,CA and the author of the Peery Piano Curriculum, which is a certification and training system for piano teachers. Maybe a sentence about work/family balance Married with four kids Amy: And I'd love it if you could talk about what drew you to the “Breaking Down Patriarchy” project. Christie: Like all of us, we are raised only knowing what we know, and as I have experienced more life it has been useful for me to take a few steps back and try to observe some of the systems I have supported and agreed to without really realizing it. One of these systems is patriarchy. Patriarchy is something that has been buzzing around mostly unconsciously in my life in various capacities - my family of origin, my temple marriage, my chosen church. Patriarchy is something that was always just accepted as something that is without my ever choosing it, or understanding why it was or how it came about. My interest in this project is to help me better understand those things so I can have a clearer understanding about my own choices going forward. Amy: So let's learn just a bit about the author of this book, and then we'll dive into the text. Christie: Bio of Nancy Weiss Malkiel Nancy Weiss Malkiel was born in 1944. She was educated at Smith College, obtaining her B.A. summa cum laude and graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1965, and she went on from there having won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to Harvard University for her M.A. (1966) and her Ph.D. (1970). She joined the Princeton University Department of History faculty as Nancy Weiss in 1969, where she rose through the ranks from assistant professor to associate professor to professor. Nancy's career as a writer and teacher has been a distinguished one. When she came to Princeton, she was...

united states women american director history europe british struggle russia teach married harvard university damned patriarchy carnegie hall mountain view smith college phi beta kappa los altos debuted artistworks amy so nancy weiss malkiel woodrow wilson fellowship

On Trusting Little Kids To Eat

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 28, 2021 25:45

Welcome to Burnt Toast, a newsletter from Virginia Sole-Smith, which you can read about here. If you like what you read today, please subscribe and/or share it with someone else who would too.This week, I’m trying out my first audio newsletter! If that’s a confusing concept for you, I get it. Technology is so extra. Think of this as a podcast in your email. You can listen to the episode right here and now, or you can add it to the podcast player of your choice and listen whenever. And just in case you don’t like listening, or that’s not accessible to you, I’m including a full transcript (edited lightly for clarity) below. I’d love to know what you think of this conversation, and of the whole audio newsletter idea — should we do more? (Leave a comment or hit reply to let me know.) I really miss my old podcast (more on that below), and I’d love to bring you more of my conversations with favorite researchers, activists, weight-inclusive healthcare providers and other writers I love.For now, here’s my conversation with Amy Palanjian, the creator of Yummy Toddler Food. She answers your questions about picky 1-year-olds, ice cream-shaming 3-year-olds, raising intuitive eaters with food allergies, and more. Virginia Hello, and welcome to the first audio version of Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a feminist writer and author of The Eating Instinct. And joining me today is Amy Palanjian, the creator of Yummy Toddler Food. Amy, welcome! Amy Hello! Virginia Thank you for being here with me. For those of you who don’t know, Amy and I are also best friends. And we are co-hosts of the currently-on-hiatus podcast Comfort Food. But Amy is also many other things. So Amy, why don’t you tell people about yourself and your work? Amy Sure. So my primary work right now is on YummyToddlerFood.com. I do recipes, feeding advice, sanity — sanity for parents with little kids...Virginia I thought you were gonna say “sanity” full stop. And I was like, that’s amazing.Amy I wish! I am also the author of a kids cookbook called Busy Little Hands: Food Play. And what else? I have three little kids. I live outside of Des Moines, in Iowa. And I’m, you know, so tired of cooking like everybody else.Virginia And she’s not getting a dog because we were just talking about that and about how I have a dog that maybe I shouldn’t have. But she’s smarter than me. So I mean, we used to do this podcast Comfort Food, and we hope to someday do it again, when there’s not a pandemic, and we have more reliable childcare than we have in our lives these days. But if you guys like this conversation, and you want more of me and Amy, you can find, I don’t know, like 80 episodes or so, that we did over at ComfortFoodPodcast.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I’ll do that plug. And of course, all of Amy’s work is YummyToddlerFood.com. So the reason I wanted to have Amy on is because lots of folks have been sending in questions that are very small-child-specific. And while I have parented small children, I don’t consider myself an expert at feeding them. But Amy, not only parents them, but also, you know, has helped thousands and thousands of parents figure this stuff out. So the first question we’re going to answer is one that I think every parent has, at some point, which is: My baby used to eat everything. And now at 13 months, 15 months, 19 months, it seems like she’s dropping foods every week. Am I really supposed to just let her decide how much to eat?Amy Well, you don’t have to... but you maybe should. Okay, so this is an incredibly common question. I think the thing that most parents don’t realize is that 1-year-olds grow less slowly than they did as babies. And so they are naturally less hungry, even though they are more mobile and all over the place. And so your baby, as a baby might have eaten all sorts of things, because their hunger and just what else was going on in their life was very different. And now as a toddler, they may be less hungry, and more interested in all the other things that they now realize they can do. And so parents often see this as picky eating, when, if they’re just less hungry, they’re not going to eat as much or as many foods. And it can sort of snowball, if you then put yourself in the position of trying to figure out what they’ll eat. Because even if they’re not actually hungry, they may still eat some favorite snacky foods because those are easy to eat. And they’re comforting, they taste really good. But they may not eat other foods that you want them to eat. And so then you’re like narrowing the list of foods that they may eat. So what I recommend instead is just continuing with the Division Of Responsibility, which, if anyone follows Virginia, you probably know what this is. But it’s where it’s clearly delineated what your job is, at meals, your job is to decide what’s served, your job is to decide when the meal is and where it happens. And then we leave the kids to decide which foods and how much of them to eat, if at all. And by doing that, you really free yourself up from worrying about how many bites they took. Because as you know, as an adult, if anyone tells you how much to eat, or ask you to eat more or less, you’re going to have an immediate emotional reaction that is very disconnected from actual hunger. And so the less we can make that happen with this age, in particular, when all they really want is control, the better. And I think the saner everyone will feel during mealtimes. That may mean that your kids eat a lot less than you expect. But it also means that you’re not going to be fighting with them to get them to take a certain amount of bites at every meal.Virginia Which is exhausting and crazy-making. Amy And I think too, if you can consider what they’re eating over the course of a week or even two weeks, it’s probably going to look a lot better than what they didn’t eat for lunch today. Because they may eat a ton of breakfast and then not eat a lot of dinner. Or every other Tuesday, they may eat seven meals. There’s no one right way for kids to eat. And I think a lot of times, we’re trying to force them into this mode of eating certain amounts of food groups at every meal. And that’s just not the way that kids naturally eat.Virginia Yeah. And this phase can go on for many years, we should say, too. I mean, I have a 7-year-old, you have an 8-year-old, and we still see, you know, not this exactly. But versions of this from time to time. So don’t feel bad, if you’re listening and have an older kiddo still in this phase. Amy Well, and at least as they get older, they can verbalize more. And you can suss out what the true issue is. With 1-year-olds, it’s really hard because even if they can talk, they cannot always use the right words, or explain things exactly. And so it’s the combination of all of those challenges that make 1-year-olds tricky. And also, it can just be really jarring for parents to give their kid dinner, and then they just don’t want any of it. Virginia Yes. It is super maddening. For sure. Okay, that is really helpful. And for anyone who’s like Division Of Responsibility?! I will link to some stuff in the transcript. So those words that I just said, probably have a link on them if you’re reading this, and you can learn more. So okay, next question. And this, I think, is going to kind of build on what we were just talking about: How do you get kids to eat the stuff their body needs without them thinking all the "other stuff" is bad? One of mine won’t eat veggies unless I sing each body part saying thank you, like her eyes sing thank you when she eats a carrot.I don’t mean to be laughing at the mom who sent in this question. But I do feel like you’re making your meals harder than they need to be? Or perhaps just more musical. Yeah. Amy over to you!Amy So my initial response is: How do you know exactly how much their body needs? Does anyone know exactly how much anyone’s body needs? Virginia It’s not X number of carrots achieve eyesight. Amy Right. I think when we see portion size recommendations, and we see charts, and we see plates with servings on them, we assume that that is the perfect amount that our child needs. But it may or may not be. And so a lot of times we’re chasing these very arbitrary amounts that may or may or may not be what our kids actually need. So I think it’s very difficult in the culture that we live in, to not feel this pressure. Because we’re getting it from all sides. Like all day long, I feel like my inbox is filled with pitches for kids products that are like going to do all of you know, all of the things.Virginia Get them into Harvard and make a ton of money. Amy You know, I see products developed by neuroscientists. But food doesn’t really work that way. And so I think, honestly, if you just don’t worry about that, and you serve a range of foods, with a range of flavors, and a range of textures, and colors, you’re going to get all of that stuff in what you’re offering your kids without having to do math, without having to count grams, or percentages of vitamin A. And it’s much more pleasant to, to come at it from the side of, “food is delicious, in all of these many ways.” How can I prepare this in a way that that’s easy for my kids to eat? That has a flavor that they like, and that I want to eat, too? You don’t need a master’s degree in nutrition science. I think we’ve like lost the plot a little bit on what matters, sort of big picture when we’re feeding our kids. Because this anxiety is not helpful to anyone. It’s not helpful to that mom, I bet she’s not enjoying her meals, and it’s certainly not helpful for that kiddo. And those nutrition messages for little kids are incredibly confusing. And I just think are beyond comprehension for the age group.Virginia Agreed, agreed. That said, if the carrot song was really good, I kind of want to hear it? But yeah, I feel like, unless you’re, I don’t know, very musically inclined, this is maybe more work than you need to be doing. But I think what this question kind of also gets at, and that you’ve touched on a little bit, is that we have this idea of how our kids should eat, which is not based in the reality of how kids really eat or how most families can really manage to eat. And it really mostly comes from diet culture, right? It comes from, as you said, these people sending press releases for crazy products, or the influencers we see on social media claiming that this is the perfect way to eat. So can you connect the dots on some of the subtle ways you see diet culture showing up but family mealtimes?Amy Sure. A big part of it is the control. It’s the question of, can I really just let my child eat fill in the blank, and really trust them to eat according to their own hunger. It's the doubt. We just don’t believe that our kids are capable of this. We’ve been told that we’re not capable of it. And so why on earth would we trust tiny little kids to do something that we can’t do? And so that’s one thing. Another is the pressure to have, quote, unquote, balanced meals. I remember seeing a post that was like, “an apple is not a balanced snack,” and you have to add all these other things. And that’s great. But that doesn’t mean your kid’s going to want to eat all those other things…Virginia Or sometimes you just want an apple, right?Amy And that’s not a bad thing. Just because you don’t eat a protein at every meal or snack, does it mean that you’ve done something wrong? I think about all of those subtle messages about the way in which we’re serving foods, that some things are not right, or that some things are not good enough. I mean marketing, yes, is one thing. But I sort of think that the way that we talk to each other about food is even worse. It’s the way that someone in your family, their relationship with food, might influence you, in ways that are less overt than a message on a package about it not being junk food or something. It’s much harder. That’s sort of a depressing road to go down, because it’s harder to deal with. But I think the subtlety of those messages that we’re hearing, just in our day-to-day life, are really hard to block out. And they really make feeding kids confusing when it doesn’t have to be.Virginia Yes. I think, as parents, we often need to sit with: Am I really worried about my kids intake here? Or am I worried about how I’m being perceived as their parent because we tie so much of our self-worth as a parent to their eating performance in a way that’s problematic. And if it’s more that you’re like, “Grandma’s gonna make a comment” or “my friends’ kids all eat XYZ and my kids don’t.” I think that’s a good way of being able to tell that this is more of a cultural noise thing.Amy I mean, even just think about — well, this isn’t gonna apply to you, because I know you don’t care about this the way a lot of people do. But let’s say, you have a meal, like a dinner, and there’s no vegetable —Virginia It is Wednesday at my house. Continue.AmyFor many, many people, the immediate feeling is that you’ve somehow failed, you somehow didn’t do it right. And that meal is incomplete. But that’s not true. I think, if we’re trying to check off boxes of “I got my protein in today, I got all of these like macronutrients,” I just think we're going to make ourselves crazy. VirginiaEspecially with kids who, as you said, their intake varies over a day over a week, like this might not be a day when they’re eating vegetables, right? Amy I have sometimes have to almost force myself to just give them mac and cheese. And to just prove to myself that everyone is fine. Sometimes you just need to see it to believe that it’s fine. And then the next day, your kids might eat all the broccoli. You know, there’s other messaging around like feeding babies, where if they eat certain foods as babies, that will [supposedly] prevent picky eating, or if you feed them a certain way with solids, you’ll skip the picky eating phase all together. And it’s not true. And it’s incredibly damaging to parents who have more challenging kids, because it just sets you up to feel like you did something wrong.Virginia Yeah, totally. I think that’s so true. It’s really sad. Okay, this question is maybe a little bit diet culture and a little bit manners, and I just didn’t even really know what to say, so I’m making you answer it. Okay. She writes: Before COVID, I met my boyfriend’s cousins and their children for the first time. It was a birthday party celebration with lots of food. I had a piece of cake and was also offered a packaged ice cream sandwich, which I accepted. [Virginia: That sounds like a great combination.] The 3-year-old daughter of one of the cousins took it from me to put back in the freezer, because I already had a piece of cake and two desserts wasn’t healthy for me. I was pretty shocked but didn’t insist on eating the ice cream sandwich. I haven’t seen them since. But I expect we’ll get together late this summer when we’re all vaccinated. If a situation like this happens again, how would you suggest I handle it?Amy Maybe you invite them over and have a dessert bar, and everyone gets to eat as much as they want? Just, take it to the other extreme? I don’t know. I mean, I totally understand like, in the moment, that would be difficult to react to if you had no inkling that it was coming. Virginia Yeah, if a 3-year-old just stole your ice cream sandwich and also shamed you for it. Yeah.Amy I think, if it were to happen again, you can say something like, “These both sound really delicious to me, I’m going to eat them!” The End. Or “This is what I’m having for dessert!” The End.Virginia I like that you’re making it about your own choice versus like, needing to sort of chastise the child who, let’s be honest, is being pretty rude in that moment.Amy Mind your own business?Virginia Yeah. But you don’t want to make it into a parenting thing. You don’t have to parent that child around this issue.Amy Right. I think that that’s where you would probably get into a very murky territory. But if you can just claim it as, “This is mine. It is not yours, and you don’t need to worry about it.” I mean, then that goes with anything that’s on your plate, or your life, or whatever. Virginia So many of us are thinking about family gatherings that haven’t happened in a long time now. And I hear a lot of folks worried about, “my mother always makes this comment about what I eat,” or other relatives weighing in on things. So it’s helpful to just be able to set that boundary of what’s on my plate is my business. Amy Yeah, I always like to do a very short sentence, and then change the subject. So, “This is what I’m having. What color are your shoes?”Virginia That works for mothers and 3-year-olds. Amy Because 3-year-olds are really great at redirection. You can totally change the direction of their attention.Virginia It’s so true. Just ask a completely random other question.Amy “Where is your baseball bat?”Virginia “What are you being for Halloween?” Never mind that it’s summertime. Yes, absolutely. That’s really great. For parents — it’s hard to give advice for parents in that situation. But I mean, as a general rule, like, do you feel like it’s important to communicate to your kids that we don’t comment on other people’s eating habits? And is that something you are aware of teaching them? Or has it not really come up?Amy So we don’t really have comments at our table about the amounts that other people are eating. But we do have a lot of the “that looks yucky” type of comment. So we do regularly talk about how, you know, everyone gets to decide what they think is delicious. “This tastes really delicious to me.” And my 4-year-old will now use that language of “This tastes...” Usually “this tastes yucky to me,” which, at least she’s owning that as a specific thing. She’s not casting the blame more broadly. Because you want your kids to be able to go to school and not be judging other people’s food. So I think definitely working on that a little bit at the table in your own house when it comes up can be helpful. I mean, we’ve had like, only Christmas meals with extended families. We have not eaten anything with anyone else in a long time.Virginia Period. This is reminding me, I’m trying to teach my kids to say “This is not my favorite,” rather than “I hate it” and putting their heads down and sobbing as sometimes happens. And I realized the other day, my 3-year-old is mishearing me because she sat down and said, “This is my favorite! I’m not eating it.” And it’s about my pasta sauce. So it really hurts. Because my sauce is amazing. But yeah, “This is my favorite! I’m not eating it today.”Amy I do often have to remind the kids that not every meal will be their favorite and that it is okay for sometimes it to be mommy’s favorite, or other people’s favorite. And that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with the meal or that it’s bad, but we can eat the fruit on the side or whatever. Virginia Yes. There will always be something you can eat, but it might not be your favorite tonight. Yeah, I’ve recently announced that Tuesday is the night when I cook whatever I want because I felt like, we were getting into a slippery slope of all the meals being just their favorites. Which — you should serve your children’s favorite foods. That’s not a bad thing. But you know, Monday night is pesto pasta, that’s their absolute favorite. And Mondays are tiring, and I don’t want any fights at dinner on Mondays. And Wednesdays is taco night, which is their other favorite. And so I was like, you know what, Tuesdays are going to be whatever I pick. And it’s going to change week to week and they don’t love it. But they’re coping.Amy If I’m making one of my favorites, I almost always serve flat bread on the side. Because then I know that they have nothing to complain about because they like bread. Yeah, and usually the things that I want to make myself have Indian sauces or things, and so a flatbread kind of makes sense. Virginia I keep a lot of packages of dinner rolls in the freezer for this purpose. Other than occasionally, they get sick of the favorite. That really screws you. But anyway, that’s a whole other thing. My kids are quick to fall out of love with their favorites and have new favorites. It’s hard to keep up. Okay, the last question is: How do I do Division Of Responsibility when my child has food allergies? This question has come in a bunch of different ways. I’m not going to read them all, because they’re all very specific. But I think what people are generally struggling with is, you’ve got this one big, scary food your kid can’t have. And somehow that feels like it’s blurring the lines of this responsibility question.Amy I mean, I guess there could be an issue, if like your kid was allergic to dairy, but you still kept dairy in the house? How do you not make them feel excluded? Is that the question?Virginia I don’t exactly know what the intent of it is. But I think it’s probably something like that, like, “Can we serve ice cream, with dinner or whatever, if one kid can’t eat it?”Amy I mean, I think you need to have a replacement for it, you need to somehow make the playing field fair. So you need to lean on other types of things that the kid can eat, like, make a list of all the delicious things that that everybody in the family can eat, put it on the fridge, where you can look at it. And then maybe like, when your kid is at school or at daycare, that’s when you can eat some of the other foods that they can’t eat. But I think make them feel like they are part of the family. And they’re a part of your food experience as much as possible, rather than making it their issue. And I think a lot of families are really good at this. I mean, there are so many products now that make this so much easier than even just a few years ago. So I think you just do Division Of Responsibility in the same way. But you have to just rethink what the foods are a little bit. Virginia That makes sense. Often the tone coming across in these emails, and certainly this is something I remember dealing with when my older daughter had more medical food issues, is: Often there’s a lot of anxiety about growth with a kid who’s got a lot of allergies and whether they’re eating enough, And so maybe this is also about, “Can I trust their fullness?” And I feel like, for the most part, the answer is absolutely yes. You can still trust your child to know their hunger and fullness even if they can’t eat certain foods. Right?Amy Yes. If there is a medically indicated reason that the kid can’t feel their hunger or their appetite levels are skewed because of medication or some other issue, you want to talk to your doctor and find a feeding therapist who is trained in those specific things. Because navigating that alone is going to be incredibly challenging. But otherwise, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to trust your child with whatever the food is, whether or not it has nuts or doesn’t have nuts. And you know, I think on the growth issue, this is a whole other topic. But if your child is growing, even if it’s not like leaps and bounds, if they are growing, if they’re meeting their milestones, if they seem happy, if they seem like themselves, you probably should just leave them alone. If they’re dropping off of their growth curve, and your doctor is really concerned, that’s a different issue. But just because you’re at the lower end of the growth scale, or the higher end, doesn’t mean that there’s a problem.Virginia Yes, absolutely. And I’ll put some links to folks that Amy and I both really trust if anyone is looking for feeding therapy help along those lines. [Check out: Helping Your Child With Extreme Picky Eating, Thrive By Spectrum Pediatrics, and Responsive Feeding Therapy.]But yeah, I think the fundamental message of even if this is a kid who’s got certain foods they can’t eat, and maybe that means you’re worried about their overall nutritional makeup (because you’re having to skip out on certain food groups) — still, working on how to trust their hunger and fullness cues is going to be super, super important. You know, maybe even more important for a kid who’s got to navigate food in a slightly more fraught way. Amy Yes. And if anyone’s looking for like specific substitutions that you can’t find it just email me and I’ll poll my Instagram community because someone recommended a dairy-free parmesan today that I didn’t know about. Virginia That’s awesome. And check out Amy’s website, because all her recipes always have notes about substitutions you can make if you need to take out a common food allergen. She’s amazing at figuring this out.Amy Well not 100%. But I try! Virginia Well, okay, you aren’t 100% amazing. Maybe not 100% of the recipes have this, but I have noticed this as a recurring theme. Amy, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. Again, I’ll put links in the transcript to YummyToddlerFood, and to our old podcast archives for anyone who wants to go down that rabbit hole with us. Amy Thanks for having me!You’re reading Burnt Toast, a newsletter by Virginia Sole-Smith. Virginia is a feminist writer, and author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. Comments? Questions? Email Virginia. If a friend forwarded this to you and you want to subscribe, sign up here: This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

christmas halloween technology harvard indian iowa trusting grandma des moines xyz comfort food little kids before covid burnt toast virginia sole smith amy you amy palanjian yummy toddler food amy well amy so eating instinct virginia it

Killing the Angel in the House, by Virginia Woolf

The Passionistas Project Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 13, 2021 88:38

Amy: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy! I'm Amy McPhie Allebest. Today's text is called Killing the Angel in the House, and it's a collection of lectures and essays written by Virgina Woolf between 1905 and 1941. That phrase, Killing the Angel in the House, and what it represents, has been really, really important in my life so I can't wait to share it and discuss it with my reading partner today, Rachelle Burnside. Hi, Rachelle! Rachelle: Hi, Amy! Amy: Rachelle Burnside is a friend of mine from the Stanford Master's of Liberal Arts program. We have been dear friends all the way through our program, as we not only did our foundations courses together, but then we also kept choosing the same electives! We studied William Blake, Dante and the Sacred Feminine, and very memorably, Rachelle and I had some life-altering (for me) conversations during our class on International Womens' Health and Human Rights. Rachelle is incredibly well-read and well-spoken, and I've learned so much from you through the years, Rachelle, I'm thrilled that you're here with us today! Rachelle: Thank you, Amy. I'm excited to be here to talk about these issues. I love what you're doing with this podcast. Amy: So can I have you start by introducing yourself? Tell us a little about you, where you're from. Rachelle: So, I was born and raised in California, and I've spent my entire life here, with the exception of a year-long teacher exchange where I taught religion, philosophy, and ethics at a Catholic school in London. That was an interesting experience, on many levels, not the least of which because, like you, I was raised in a Mormon family, although I left the church when I was 18. I came from this really niche Protestant background and a culture where we don't teach religion in public school and then suddenly found myself teaching not just Catholic theology, but religious practice for Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Sikhism, etc., because that's part of the required curriculum in England. I found it refreshing, actually, because people were much less dogmatic and were able to have really nuanced, thoughtful conversations around faith and theology in ways that we are unable to have in the U.S. My mother is adopted, and her adopted parents both have ancestors that were part of the original group of settlers that migrated to Utah with Brigham Young. Her birth mother, who was also Mormon, has family roots in Georgia and Virginia from the original Scotch-Irish settlers. We don't know anything about my mom's birth father except that according to her 23andMe results he must have had English, French or German, and Scandinavian ancestry. My father is from Battle Creek, Michigan. His maternal grandfather came from Glasgow, Scotland to Canada an indentured servant after he was orphaned at 14. His maternal great-grandmother was from Baden-Wertemberg, Germany. The rest of the family is all English, Irish, and Welsh, with the exception of my dad's father, who we found out through DNA testing was actually illegitimate and biracial, which no one in the family knew-- even my grandfather. So I have tiny 5% of my DNA from West Africa, specifically Nigeria, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast. Through genealogical research and DNA, we've been able to figure out who my grandfather's paternal family was, and my 2x great grandfather was a man named Franklin Johnson, born in 1850 into slavery in what is now West Virginia, and died in 1945 in Michigan. My father converted to Mormonism when he was in his teens, and my parents met when he was on his mission. I grew up in Sacramento, in an all-white community until I was 13. I then moved to East San Jose when my mom remarried. My step-father was Chinese-American, and my middle school was a majority-minority school. It was a great education in learning that not everyone has the same life experiences as you do. I attended Santa Clara University where I graduated with BAs in English and History....

Amy Honey Teaches Personal Growth Through Sales

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 17, 2021 29:46

Amy Honey is a pull, no punches, powerhouse, speaker and trainer in the areas of customer engagement, body language, behavior modification, sales and habit transformation. She has extensive background in high ticket sales and is known by her peers as a powerful closer, Amy is also passionate about helping girls and women find their courage just as she had to do starting at the age of 16, when she found herself alone and independent through her own resourcefulness, she still managed to graduate from high school. Her passion for personal growth, travel and transforming lives has taken Amy all over the world, helping people transform their lives through behavior, observation and habit change. Learn more about Amy. Learn more about The Passionistas Project. Full Transcript: Passionistas: Hi, and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast, where we talk with women who are following their passions to inspire you to do the same. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. And today we're talking with Amy Honey, a pull, no punches, powerhouse, speaker and trainer in the areas of customer engagement, body language, behavior modification, sales, and habit transformation. She has extensive background in high ticket sales and is known by her peers. As a powerful closer, Amy is also passionate about helping girls and women find their courage just as she had to do starting at the age of 16, when she found herself alone and independent through her own resourcefulness, she still managed to graduate from high school. At age 20. She became a single mom and chose to put her family's welfare first while overcoming numerous obstacles in an unreceptive marketplace. It was during these life challenges and her entrepreneurial journey that she crossed paths with personal development and discovered her love for speaking and training her passion for personal growth travel and transforming lives has taken Amy all over the world, helping people transform their lives through behavior, observation, and habit change. So please welcome to the show Amy Honey. Amy: I'm so happy to be here. Passionistas: Oh, we're so happy to have you. What are you most passionate about? Amy: Personal growth. My path through that is sales. Do you ever watch any of chef Ramsey, Gordon Ramsey stuff? He does this show called Kitchen Nightmares and he goes in and what that shows really about is about personal growth, but his, his avenues through cooking, you know, so that's his version of it. So I think everybody has their version of personal growth. Passionistas: Talk about your journey through life, where you started out your experiences, that we talked about a bit in the intro at the age of 16, becoming independent, and why personal growth has become such an important concept to you through your journey? Amy: I probably started in sales at two years old. I was just like, I was just in, I was just, I loved the idea of being able to create something and then, and then make money for my time or my creation. And so even as a little kid, I made like pet rocks and sold them to my family, or like we would travel through Germany were my dad was a military. So we traveled and I was, I was adopted. So it's my, I'm a single, an only child. Oh, come into play later. So we were traveling through Germany and we had this like VW bus and it had this rack in between. So my parents was very difficult for my parents to get to the back of the, of the VW bus, you know, camper and the frigerators right there. So they would ask me for food and I would just charge them. So it was like, it'd be like a nickel, like, okay. Yeah. And I would like walk up with my little, you know, you know, I'm like eight years old and I'd walk up with my little paper and say, you know, okay, I'll take your order, you know? Okay. That'll be five cents, you know, whatever, but they paid it because they didn't want to get it into the back of the bus. Little did I realize supply and demand, but I learned it very early on, I guess. And and so then from there, uh, later on, I actually started out. So, so it was a dance instructor. So I'm really into dance. I'm really into moving energy. So I became a dance instructor at age 13. So very young, my dad, since the time I was three taught jazz, tap, ballet, gymnastics. I taught everything. I started assistant teaching at 13. And then by the age of 16, I was teaching my own classes. And then at the same time I was working two jobs, so, and going to high school. So I was working on the phones for Kirby vacuum cleaner. So I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners on the phone from the age of 14. And then at the age of 16, I was allowed to go door to door. So I wasn't allowed to do door to door sales until I turned 16. So this is back in the eighties, dating myself here. So at that point, I just was good at talking to people because for me, it was about connecting. And then at age 16, I'm out on my own. And I moved out on my mom and dad's house. I just they're great people. We just had large differences in opinions. It's very interesting DNA to me is very interesting because my parents are really good people, but I got the opportunity to meet my birth family about five years ago. And now I'm really, really close with my brothers. I've got four brothers that never knew I existed. And so what I found so interesting is that I'm so much like them in the way that I think about the world and my sense of humor and all that stuff it's naturally in your DNA. Right. And so there was just a difference of opinion. And so when I moved out at 16, I always felt like it, like I did something wrong. This is my fault. I'm a bad kid. I'm horrible person. But in the meantime, I am putting myself through high school. Like I still worked. I still graduated high school on time. So, you know, it was, I was just had a really, I always had a really strong work ethic anyway, but I also had an ethic of like, okay, I just, whatever it takes to get it done, like whatever it takes to get it done at the same time, I started really seeking at that point. Because I really thought something was wrong with me. Like I was, something was wrong with me. So I started seeking and I sought out counseling and I sought out, you know, which was also kind of like wrong. Like if you went to counseling, like by my parents' standard, you know, you were wrong or you needed to be fixed or something goes wrong with you. But I don't think that we put enough emphasis on the importance of mental health. So I just started seeking and I, I started finding books and I remember one of the very first books I read way back, when is a book called peeling, the sweet onion. And it was always all about the layers of who we are and how we're going to forget it kind of over and over and over again, and how to really become more of, of the center of who we are, like getting the layers of the, kind of the crap off, you know? And so that was one of the very first and it's, it's an old book and it's not really popular these days, but it's still super relevant, like really super relevant. So, and then I just, you know, went on to Tony Robbins and you know, all of these other people. And then I started working in the seminar industry, doing sales, like doing sales, but doing coaching because for me, sales is not just like getting the number, like it's funny. Cause like I get on, like I talk to my family all the time. I was just talking to them last night and you know, all sale. I had a good day or I had a bad day, you know? Uh, and, and my daughter was asking me, well, what, what makes it good is like, if you just get a sale and I said, no, no, it's the conversation. If I can get on the phone and help somebody and have a great conversation and they don't buy anything from me, I had a great day because I impacted somebody's life in a way. So to me, sales is about service and connecting the right people with the right products and figuring out the right flow of energy with the sale. So maybe that right flow of energy might be a no, but when you come to the highest point of service with that person, and you're not just looking at them as a transaction or a number, when they are ready, they will come back to you and maybe they never will be ready and that's okay too. But if you push them into a sale, you're going to it's, it's just, it's horrible, bad karma on you. I think bad energy on you. You're, that's where you're going to get higher cancellations. You're going to get people complaining about your company. You're going to get all these things, right. So to me, it's just not worth it to push a person into a sale. Passionistas: And then when did you start public speaking? Amy: I've been a teacher since a young age. So I was in front of groups of people with no problem and teaching dance. And I teach zoom by owned. I owned a gym. So, you know, just I've always been in front of people, not a problem. I was also a stuntwoman. And so I'm don't have any problems being in front of cameras. That's my husband and I are both stunned, Exxon actors. So I just never had a problem being in front of people. But when I started working in the seminar industry, I was forced to get in, you know, we would have to intro the speaker. So it was like all of a sudden I had to introduce a Les Brown or somebody and I'm just, Whoa. Okay. Okay. So it was just kind of run into it. And then I just started speaking. And for me, I just think when you can speak to a group of people, it's a lot easier than trying to one-on-one because there's always things like a, every single, every single business. I believe that we have to educate our clients because an educated client is a good client and when they understand it and they're educated enough. And so I feel that there's things that every single business repeats over and over and over again. So if we can take those things that we repeat over and over again, and I end make a video or, or get them as together as a group and say it, you're not exhausting yourself saying it over and over and over again to each client. Passionistas: Tell us a little bit about being a stunt woman. What attracted you to that world? Amy: I was always into fitness. I wanted to do martial arts from non-time. I was a real little kid, but I was, I had to do, you know, I had to dance. So dancing was the thing or piano, piano, piano for a while. It was not ladylike to do martial arts. So it wasn't allowed to do martial arts. So as soon as I turned eight, well, as soon as I turned 16, I moved out. But by the time I was 18, I had my feet underneath me and I'd graduated high school and stuff. And so at that point I was like, Oh, I can take martial arts. No, one's stopping me. I can pierce anything. I want, I can get tattoos. So yeah. So I did, I went and started taking martial arts. And at that same time I was body doubling as an actress. So I was living in Oregon at the time and I was on this movie set and I met a stunt coordinator on the movie set, Steve, his name was Steve, really super nice guy. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. And so I was, I was an extra on the set. So as I was body doubling and I met this I met the stunt coordinator and he said to me, and I started just digging and asking questions. And he said, look, if you're really interested, why don't you fly out to LA and meet with our stunt guys and see what you think? And I said, Oh, okay. And so I booked a flight to LA and it was so funny. Cause I'm like, I'm 51 years old. Now I think I was 22 or 23. At that time I weigh a lot more now than I did then. So I was probably like 105 pounds, like soaking wet, five foot tall, I'm little. And so I get on this plane, I get on the plane. This is 1994. It's like, get on the plane and no one's on the plane. And I'm like, this is really bizarre. Right? Well, come to find out, that was the 1994 earthquake in Northridge that had just happened that morning. So everybody canceled their flight, right? So like I'm on the flight by myself and I'm heading to LA and they've got this guy, his name was big. Wayne picking me up at the airport. This is a guy I've never met before. Right now, big Wayne is like a massive dude. He kind of looks like the rock and is probably about as big. And I walk up and he's holding the sign and I'm like, this is how every horror movie war starts like, Oh my God, what? I'm like, I'm just like, I'm walking into this thing. I don't know this guy. I'm getting in the car with a stranger. I'm in a strange town. I was just like, what was I thinking? Like I'm freaking out at this point, like inside my heart is like, but I'm like, no, no, I trust my gut. I trust my gut. So he took me out to eat with a couple of the other stunt actors. And it was very interesting because they wanted to know my philosophy on life. Like they wanted to know if I believed in fate, they wanted to know if I believed in circumstance. They wanted to know if I believed if I created my own reality at that point, like I was really young, but they wanted to know these things because they weren't going to trust me with teaching me some of these things. If I didn't believe that things happen for a reason that you're in the right place at the right time that you trust yourself. Because it's very important when you're doing choreography with another stunt actor, you have to trust that when they're supposed to Zig, they're going to Zig. And when they're supposed to zag, they're going to zag. Otherwise you're going to collide and people get hurt. So that's how I learned. And so the kinds of stunts that I do were our high falls and lighting myself on fire and fight scenes. Passionistas: What projects did you do? Amy: Oh gosh. Like I did a lot of a lot of TV and I did quite a few like Showtime, HBO movies. And I couldn't even tell you some of the titles because they have what's called a working title. And then, and then, and then it goes to print crime strike was one of them like any like cops reenactments. I played in a battered woman a lot because I get beat up really well. So I can really, I can really sell, I can really sell a punch. There's a really cool chase credit card commercial. And it's actually a friend of mine. Her name is Melissa Barker and she's gets hit by a car and she comes off and she's like, yeah, you know, like you can't, I can't predict everything what's going on, but I can predict what's in my wallet kind of thing. And um, so she's actually a really big stunt woman. And she, she was one of the girls I trained with early on and with her and her husband, Eric, Betsy's another big stunt guy. So yeah, she's still going strong. I'm 51. I don't bounce. Like I used to. And um, and I got out at a point when, you know, I realized that most stunt people have broken their back at some point. So I was like, yeah, I think I'm going to cash it in quit while you're ahead. Passionistas: Your husband was also a stunt person. Did you meet him in that industry? Amy: The funny thing is we did not. We actually met, do you know who, uh, Joey Dispenza, Dr. Joe Dispenza. He's written a book called breaking the habit of being yourself. He's a, he's a speaker. And again, it's personal growth. So we met doing personal growth. That was really funny. Cause we were at this thing where he was talking and I think we were like the youngest people in the crowd. So like, we were both like 36 at the time. And so we were like the youngest people there and everybody else was like, well, over 60. And so we were just like, Hi, a young person. And so, and it was like, he was like, Oh yeah, I'm a star. I'm like, Oh my God, I'm gonna stop a woman. So that was interesting. But he did, he is from Australia and he did stunts for a live action shows. He did some movies, but he mostly did live action. So he did, he was a Warner brothers movie world. He opened up the universal Japan. He went to Indonesia. So he was a stent, a livestock action performer for years where he did shows daily after it, that you eventually opened your first business together. Passionistas: So what was the first business you started together? Amy: It was the gym that we started together before that we were kind of doing our own things, but then I'm an entrepreneur and a big risk taker. And it's funny, he's a stunt man, but he's not risky. So I'm more of a rule breaker and a risk taker. And he's more by the book by the rules. So jumping off a building is not risky to him. As much as like purchasing a brand new business is scary, scary to him. So, uh, so he always worked for the people kind of thing, but now he's learned to be an entrepreneur. So the gym was the first business that we opened together. Passionistas: Tell us about running your own gym, what was that like? Did you like doing that? Amy: Oh, I'm so glad we're not doing that. I loved helping the people. It was great, but God, it w like what a babysitting project that was because our gym was a little different. We were like our more high-end studio. So you didn't just come to the gym and work out when you wanted everything was classes. So I taught Zumba, I taught spin. I taught, I created my own classes like riding row, which was like a, like a spin and row class combined. And then I had employees and stuff, but Oh man, what a headache? What a headache and a brick and mortar. And I'm so happy that we do not have that during, like when the pandemic started, all I kept saying was like, I'm so glad we don't have the gym. I'm so glad we don't have the gym. We never would have survived it. Passionistas: Now while you had the gym, you developed the Five Elements of Health. So tell us about that and why each one is important? Amy: What Jamie says is you've got five elements of health, exercise, sleep, hydration, nutrition, and emotional environment. And when you get all five, you've got a grip on your health. That's what he says. You got a grip on it. Um, so they're all important, but the most Important one of course is emotional, uh, environment. And what emotional environment contains is the energy around you. Emotion, emotion is energy in motion, and it's the people around you. And it's your, it's your health space. And it's your, it's everything that has to do with your mindset. And the emotional environment is the most important one because you, it's almost like if you think of a triangle and you think of like, the emotional body is like at the top of the triangle and the physical bodies at the bottom. If you change the physical body, but you don't change the mind up here, you're just going to come back to that physical body that you were at before. So you could lose all the way you could do it. This is why people lose weight. And then they come right back to here. This is why people win the lottery and then spend all the money and don't have the money because they got the physical level, but they didn't do the mind level up here. So what I realized in that is that the mindset was the most important piece. So, so for me to really help people would be to focus on the mindset. So that's what we kind of shifted to, is focusing on the mindset. I worked with people that needed to lose hundreds of pounds. That is, it can be a slow moving boat. You got to kind of give them a wide berth and let them be able to, you know, come around to this new lifestyle. And it takes patience and it takes, but it's really takes shifting that mindset. And so this has changed. Nothing's going to change in the body and if it does change, it's just going to go right back to where it was at. If the mindset doesn't get changed along with it. And so, Passionistas: So is that what inspired you to create Improv for Impact? Amy: Improv for impact is more my husband's business, but it's a tool that I use in sales, Tai Chi. So improper impact. He's, he's always done improv, but when people think of improv, they think of comedy or they think of like, whose line it in any way, or they think of like comedians. Oh, that's funny. What I realized when I was recognizing it and watching what he was doing was I was like, Oh my gosh, what a brilliant way to, and a fun way to figure out what people's habits are that are holding them back from success. Because as he's playing the games, I'm watching the patterns. And what happens is when you play a game, there's always rules on the game, right? So anytime you add rules, it adds stress. But even though it's fun, stress, anytime we're in a moment of stress, like it, like if you think of like, like fun games where you're like, ah, and you're like, you're like kind of get a little stress. We always revert back to our habit in times of stress. So then I could identify, I easily identify what the habits were. So there's certain games where we can watch it or say, Oh, that's interesting that person doesn't like to take responsibility for things, or, Oh, that's interesting. This person always wants to push their idea, but they're not willing to listen to other's ideas or, Oh, that's interesting. This person always says no before they hear it out because in their head and this is, this really can help teams. It can help innovation with business. Because what we see, a lot of people do is like, say I'm an employee. And I come to the boss with an idea and the boss goes, well, we can't, no, that's not. We can't do that because in the boss's head, he's thinking, what's going to cost this. It's going to cost this. What are we going to do? Right. But if the boss had just said, yes, okay, well, let's figure out how that can happen. Maybe another idea is going to come out that maybe it's not that idea, but if he was open to it, instead of just immediately blocking that idea, he would be able to innovate and be able to come up with something completely new. I love Apple. What Apple did. Steve jobs came back. When he came back after he had been gone from his company for a while, they spent, I think, a few days on this. And they said, well, what business are we in? And they said, well, we're in the computer business. And he said, no, no, no, no. What business are we really in? We're what are we really in? What are we really doing here? And they took days to figure this out. And they spent time just minds, you know, brainstorming what they ended up coming up with was no, we connect people to their passions. And that's how they came up with the iPod. That was when they first came up with the iPod because, Oh, well, their passions are what their passions are, music, their passions or photos, their passions, or family emails, their passions are, you know, these kinds of things. So that's was, became their motto. And it was like, it was a different, innovative way of thinking about things. So if we can stop blocking that, then we can, then we can, then we can identify who in the companies doing these things. Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. And you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Amy Honey. To learn more about Amy, visit her website amyjohoney.com. Now more of her interview with Amy. How can people transform their habits to, to connect better with their clients and communicate their values better? Amy: We teach about the energy of sales. So we teach about looking at the energy and then we also teach really active listening, truly active listening to somebody, and we teach them how to stop blocking them. So for instance, if I come to you and I say, Hey, Nancy, I got this great health product. Are you open to taking a look at it? And you're just like, no, I'm like, Oh, okay, cool. What, what interests you the most? Right. So like trying to connect on a different level, right? When somebody tells you no or blocks it, you have to accept it. So what I see a lot of salespeople do is they keep pushing. Yeah. But this is really good for you, but this is really… no, Nancy, this could really benefit you. Like really? You need to look at this, right? No, she already said no. Right, stop it. And just stop. Like sometimes it's better just not to sell. Passionistas: You really are passionate about helping girls and women find their courage. So how do you do that? Amy: And especially single moms because I was a single mom. So especially single moms. I met my husband when my daughter was 18. So how do I do that? How do I help women? I, I think that women are really powerful in who they are. And I love, I specifically love helping women and teaching women how to sell because we are, we are nurturers. We are naturally a nurture and we naturally create through pleasure. So men push, push, push hard, hard, hard, buy, buy, buy women don't function that way. So I like to teach women sales by just using their own nature of who they are. You know, don't try to be me. Don't try to be the other best salesperson in the world. You've got to be you to do it. And you are valid and you are valuable in who you are. And so that, so I, I, I, I, especially just, I mean, I work with companies and corporations, but I really am super passionate. Like when I see a woman, especially a single mom, I'm kind of like hone in on her. And I'm just like inner ear, like really amazing. You can do it. Passionistas: What's the philosophy of Sales Tai Chi. How does it work? Amy: So Sales Tai Chi right now, the main thing that we're training teams to do, we're training them how to recreate their live events to online, because it's just necessary right now. So how do you recreate that live event experience and do it online? Sales Tai Chi is all about the energy of the sale and the flow of energy and how to take whatever comes at you and move it into the energy that you want it to be moved into. So rather than blocking the energy of a no accepting the energy, turning the energy into what you want. And when, when you do get to know what I train our teams to do is to accept that no, you know, when you get objections, that's different than a no. When you get objections, you want to turn that objection and vet and validate their objection. Because if somebody says to you, Oh, I just, I just don't have the time right now. Well, that's just, that's an ex an objection in reality. It's an excuse because they just told me they really wanted this, but now they're telling you they don't have time. Right. So you never want to say, Oh, but you've got plenty of time. Or you got, because you're just invalidating their excuse and their excuse in their own head is really valid. So it's more about asking questions, you know? So when they, when they say, Oh, I don't have time. Oh, I know. Yeah. Time can be. That can be tough. Do you want more time? You know what I mean? So it's like, it's like accepting, accepting it. And if it's a no, except the no sales is like kissing, the other person has to be leaning in, or you can't kiss them. Passionistas: You talk about how I shouldn't try and sell the way you try and sell. So how does somebody tap into their, their personal strengths to figure out what their best approaches? Amy: So I would just ask you, like, when you're like, do you, do you sell anything right now? Passionistas: We sell a subscription box. Amy: Okay. Oh, cool. What's in it? Passionistas: It's all products from women owned businesses and female artists. Amy: I love that. That's great. Okay. So what is your favorite thing about the products? Like what are you most excited about that excites you about that product? Passionistas: To me, the most exciting thing about the subscription box is that we're supporting other women. Like it's just, you know, we, we beyond selling the products, we, uh, interview every woman in the box and we share their stories so that people are, aren't just buying the product. They're supporting the woman behind the product. And to me, that's what I love about doing the subscriber. Amy: What do you absolutely hate about selling? Passionistas: Asking people for money. Amy: Okay. Yeah. So then what I would do with you is I would shift your mindset around about that because are these products gonna serve that person? Passionistas: Yes. Amy: So if you're not selling, you're not serving. So I would just help you shift that mindset around asking people for money because it is value. It is valuable, right? Passionistas: Oh, yeah. Amy: And then how do you sell as yourself is you just find the things that you like. So if you really love connecting with women, then just connect with them. You don't have to sell them anything. Right. Just connect with them. If that's your favorite part about it, and you hate asking money, but you love connecting, then just connect and then it's, it doesn't even feel like you're asking for my needs similar to like, you know, would you tell your best friend about a great movie that you just watched? Passionistas: Sure. Amy: So why wouldn't you tell them about the subscription box? So you're going to just tell your friends as if you were telling them about a great movie. I'll leave you with a little story. This was a kind of a big lesson for me. So when I did own the gym, I had a, I would help people lose hundreds of pounds. And I had a program that was $5,000. I'd be with you for a year. I guaranteed at least a hundred pounds of weight loss. So during that, I thought, you know what? I want to really help everybody. I really just want to help everybody and not everybody can afford me. So maybe I should just run like a free, almost weight Watchers type of a class on the weekends. So on Saturday I did an, a full hour. I had about 18 as a smaller town side, about 18 people that came during that entire year that I did that. I was there every week. Not one person lost one pound. And the worst part about it was there was a guy and he passed away at age 36, at 450 pounds. I feel like if I had sold him that package, that he would probably be here today because when people put, put money in the game, they're invested, they're, they're gonna do it. They're gonna, you know, and, and just think about the women that do buy your box and that why, like how excited are they when they get this box? I mean, who doesn't love to get a box of stuff where you're just like, I don't know what's coming and I can't wait. It's like opening. Right? Like, so tap into that excitement that the women feel that buy your box. And then that makes it a little bit easier to ask for the money because you know, they're going to be excited to get it. Passionistas: What advice would you give to a young woman that wants to be an entrepreneur? Amy: Go for it. Jump in with both feet. Don't hesitate. It's like stunts. Once you go to jump off that building, if you stop yourself in the middle of it, you're going to get hurt. Once you commit, commit and do it, don't hesitate that hesitation. That's like, there's, there is a lot of dead squirrels on the road to indecision, right? So don't hesitate when we hesitate. That's when we know, are we going to make the right decisions all the time? Probably not. That's okay. Stop beating yourself up about it. Take a little risk. It's okay. Get out there and do it. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Amy Honey. To learn more about Amy, visit her website, amyjohoney.com. Please visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and subscription box filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans — to inspire you to follow your passions. Sign up for our mailing list, to get 10% off your first purchase. And be sure to subscribe The Passionistas Project Podcast, so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests. Until next time stay well and stay passionate.

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Ep 11: Student Voices from the UK (Univeristy of Greenwhich)

The Inside-Out Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 22, 2020 46:22

This episode of the Inside-Out Podcast features Dr. Gulia Zampini and Dr. Camille Stengel, who both teach at the School of Law and Criminology at the University of Greenwich in the United Kingdom. They both completed the Inside-Out Instructor Training Institute in 2017. Inside-Out courses have been held in the UK since 2014. For the past few years, they have been co-teaching Inside-Out courses at a women's prison called HMP Downview. The Inside-Out podcast is hosted by Dave Krueger from The Inside-Out Center, the international headquarters of The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program at Temple University's College of Liberal Arts. To learn more about our Inside-Out Instructor Training Institutes, click HERE. To support the expansion of Inside-Out activities around the world, please make your contribution HERE. Episode Transcription David Krueger: This episode of The Inside-Out Podcast features two university lecturers and three of their Inside-Out students from the United Kingdom. Dr. Gulia Zampini and Dr. Camille Stengel both teach at the School of Law and Criminology at the University of Greenwich in the United Kingdom, just outside of London. For the past few years, they have been co-teaching Inside-Out courses at a women's prison called HMP Downview. Dr. Zampini and Dr. Stengel speaks with three of their outside students Maddy, Becca, and Amy. You'll hear their voices after this word of introduction about Inside-Out from Tyrone Werts. Tyrone Werts: The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program facilitates dialogue and education across social barriers. Inside-Out courses bring campus-based college students and incarcerated students together in jails and prisons for semester-long learning. These courses ignite enthusiasm for learning, help students find their voice, and challenge students to consider what good citizenship requires. Since Temple University professor Lori Pompa taught the first class in 1997, Inside-Out has grown into an international network of more than 1,000 trained instructors from across the US and several countries. Prisons and universities have partnered to create opportunities for more than 40,000 inside and outside students to move beyond the walls that separate them. We are more than a program...we are changing the world. Camille S: Hi, I'm Camille. I'm one of the facilitators with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program at the University of Greenwich in London, England. And I've been working on Inside-Out in partnerships with a prison called HMP Downview for the past three years, and I've been working on it with my colleague, Guilia, who's also here. Giulia Z: Hi everyone. I'm Giulia. I'm Senior Lecturer in criminology at the University of Greenwich, and I work alongside Camille on Inside-Out. We've had our partnership for three years and it's been an amazing and inspiring journey and today we have with us three of our students who have taken Inside-Out and they're outside students and they're joining us today just to talk about their experience with Inside Out. So we're really excited. Do you guys want to introduce yourselves? Becca: I'm Becca. I'm a second year criminology student at University of Greenwich. Amy: I'm Amy. I'm also a second year student at Greenwich. Maddy: I'm Maddy and I'm also a second year criminology student at Greenwich. Giulia Z: I think you can say third year now. Becca: Yeah, my third year. Giulia Z: Excellent. Okay. So our first question is really about your involvement in Inside-Out and whether this involvement—this participation—has changed your future plans? Has it impacted your future plans in any way? Becca: Should I go first? Maddy: Yeah. Becca: For me it's made me want to stay within the criminal justice system and, and that, that's kind of, I mean, it's been a big influence for me. I think, I think as well that obviously it's proved to me how prisons really are. And I was really quite scared to go into work in prisons, because I was really quite scared that they were going to be a terrible place. And really, they're not, and I think that's one of the main reasons as to why it's influenced me to stay kind of within that region, the criminal justice system. Amy: I think for me it has not necessarily impacted in terms of career because there's small aspects in the criminal justice system that I wouldn't mind going into. This is just one of them. It's certainly shaped my life in general, it's made me become more open minded about situations and the privilege that I have as a person not being incarcerated. Like, a very humbling experience it's been. Maddy: Yeah, I mean, for me, I would definitely say it has impacted my future plans. I mean like Becca, I would say that I was always quite scared to work in a prison. I thought like you never know what could happen. I really didn't know what a prison even looks like before Inside Out. And I would definitely say it has changed my plans because before starting uni and even before starting Inside Out, I never wanted to work in a prison, it wasn't an interest of mine. I didn't particularly feel that there was a lot of important work going on there. But having done Inside Out. I would say that was a very naive perspective. Like there's definitely a lot that you could do and a lot that the prison system could benefit from from working in there. So I would definitely say that it has changed my future plans and the career I'd like to go into. So, yeah. Camille S: Great, thanks. That's so interesting to hear about, it's yeah, it made you change how you think about your future career plans, but also Amy's point about how it's shaped how she thinks about her life in general. I was wondering if we could go down that direction a bit more and either Amy or Becca or Maddy, if you resonated with what Amy said about Inside Out helping her become more open minded and think about specifically that privilege of not being incarcerated. I wonder if maybe Amy, you could start and elaborate on what you mean by that, and Maddie and Becca, if that resonates with you, you could add to it. Amy: So, In terms of privilege, I'm referring to the fact that I'm not stuck inside the prison 24/7. I am able to go to university and I'm able to study and learn about the justice system and how it can be fundamentally flawed and people don't necessarily think of prison education as something very important. I think there's this mindset that ignorance is bliss and they sort of throw away the key once they're locked up and we just shun them leaving be. Becca: Yeah, so I'm just going with Amy's point and I think before I started studying criminology, I had the kind of perspective that if you're in a jail or if you're in prison then you've done something to get there and Inside-Out completely changed my perspective. Completely because you go into the prison and actually they're not horrible people. They're not these horrible scary people that the media and other people make out criminals to be and although they may have committed a crime, it doesn't make them horrible people. So I think that it has made me understand my privilege in a way that I can get up and go to the shop if I want to. I think we've all kind of been in a position. Wrong place, wrong time where we could have ended up in prison. And so not always people in there as well are completely guilty. So, you know, I think that it's kind of made me realize the flaws of the criminal justice system and how in my career, I can help put those wrongs right and as Amy said, I believe that prison education is absolutely incredible. And I feel like we need to get rid of that as young criminologists and criminologists together really and get rid of that stigma of ‘Criminals are horrible people' and you know once someone enters the prison system society does just wash their hands with them. And I think it's, it's awful. So in my career, it's made me want to, as an individual, change people's perspectives or change the general public's perspective. And that's why I'm so grateful for this program. For me that perspective, and to understand my privilege in society. Maddy: I mean, yeah, I would definitely agree with what you both said, I think one of the biggest things that all of us learn and like I think Inside Out brought out in it also is privilege. I think now I wouldn't use the term ‘lucky'. I think we all say, ‘Oh, I'm lucky for that', ‘I'm lucky for this', but I would definitely say it's because we're privileged now. I mean, obviously, like you said, we're privileged because we're not in prison. And I think many people would say, ‘Oh, I didn't commit crimes. Why would I be in prison?' But I think it's more than that, like the prison system is flawed, the criminal justice system is flawed and I think we don't think about the people that are in there that shouldn't be because they'd have a lack of privilege. We don't think about the people that probably have committed crimes that are not in prison because of their privilege and like us, like Becca said, some of us could have been in compromising positions that could have got us in different situations and because of our privilege that hasn't happened for us. And I think to understand that and acknowledge it is the first step of helping because I think now that we know that from Inside Out that's brought that out in us, I think we can now move forward in our careers and use that to then help others. Giulia Z: Yeah, that's sad. That's a very, very strong sense that I get from all of you that you've really grasped the kind of fundamental principle of what Inside Out is about and that's really, it's a powerful thing to hear because you are young people and of course you are students of criminology, but I'm kind of curious about what maybe the differences between like what you learned in the books and what you learned in connection with other people in dialogue with other people in the inside out classroom compared to a traditional classroom, a lecture room, or you know, even connecting and talking to your peers or also University. Anyone want to go first? Becca: Can I go? Maddy: Yeah, go, go. Becca: Yes. So I think for me, and it's, it's all well and good learning from a book. I mean you do learn a lot of the legal side obviously through books. You can't really learn that by entering a prison as such. But you see the practices and how the criminal justice system actually plays out for people and how most of the people, most of the inside students that after a while, you get to speak to and you get to know. They sometimes, if obviously they want to, they don't have to, but one of the inside students told me about her story and I'm obviously not going to say what the story was but her journey. For example, I mean, she was a black individual and she only had one black juror and the black juror was the only one that found her not guilty. And for me, like just hearing that and kind of sitting there and listening to—obviously there's a bigger story but hearing what she had to say—it really pulled on my heartstrings, and you would never learn that from a book. You can never learn that from, although our lectures are amazing. They have a lot of stories to tell you. It's different when you sit there and you hear that firsthand and you see the heartbreak and you see what these individuals, these people have been through, because I think that sometimes it's easy to forget that although, obviously not, not for us because we've experienced it, but for the media they're just a number. It's ‘Oh, this person's committed a crime'. They're this, that they're nasty people, but they're really not. And I think that is the most amazing thing that anyone could ask for, I think, especially with what we study, and actually going face to face with these criminals. You know, I mean, they're not horrible people and it hurts me that they're portrayed in that way. And, and I think It's incredible that we've had the opportunity to go in and actually sit there and learn for ourselves, instead of in books. So yeah, that was kind of my experience with it. Amy: Yeah, I get what you're saying. Becca, it's, it's one thing to learn the academics, the research into the topics that we've covered, such as drugs, sex work. It's another thing to listen to somebody's perspective, who's gone through the system and experienced how flawed it sometimes can be. And what you said earlier— everyone makes mistakes in life. And it could just be one mistake that lands you in prison, and then you have to deal with the stigma for the rest of your life. And I'm so grateful that I've had the experience on Inside-Out, talked to the inside students, because it's really changed my perspective on a lot of topics and that's just something you can't get from sitting in a lecture for like an hour, or reading academic research. Maddy: Yeah, I mean I would completely agree with that. I think it's such a unique experience. I think that's one of the things that a lot of us, why we wanted to do it was because there's nothing like it. There's no opportunity like it for university students and I just think everyone should just go for it because it was just so eye opening and insightful. I mean, learning from books is great. Obviously, all of us go to university, we expect that we expect to be sitting at lectures and seminars and learning things and a lot of it is facts and figures and I think having that life experience is so important. Obviously, we will never fully understand what it's like to be in prison, we'll never fully understand what the criminal justice system is like because we haven't had that first hand experience but sitting there and hearing what everyone else has to say, how the inside students feel, what their day to day life is like, has been really helpful. And I think it has benefited us all to know that because we can use that in our degrees, we can use that in later life and I think that is just a unique experience that we won't get again as university students and I think having that is actually probably sometimes more beneficial than learning from a textbook, because it is you've seen it firsthand. You know it's true. You know, you've sort of done the research because you're there, like, you know, what's happening and I think as well in, in the world, they don't tell you all the bad things, necessarily. And in books, they might not state what's going on and hearing the inside students' own experiences was really interesting because I can't say that I knew things that they'd said, and obviously when we had discussions we had their opinions and some were different, some were the same but they were sort of more informed because they've been through it. So I thought that was really interesting. And that was really beneficial as well. Camille S: Great. These are all quite fascinating points in the threads between them in terms of getting that firsthand experience that you don't get in books. I'd like to challenge you on that though, because in a way it's almost like y'all came into the prison with like nothing to offer, that you were just empty vessels there to listen, listen to the inside students and gain their knowledge. How did it, how did it help you grow as, as criminologists who you know, at the time you came into Inside Out you had a year and a half, maybe two and a half years if you're an extended student of learning under your, under your belt. So well, we've looked at the differences between Inside Out and maybe more traditional academic learning with books. I wonder if there were any synergies. So if you saw anything you could connect the dots, for example with, you know, the classes you've done so far and Inside Out. Maddy: I mean, for me personally. So one of the modules I did other than Inside-Out this year was ‘Inequality of Justice' and I think that links so closely to the Inside-Out program because obviously a lot of the Inside students were black. And they also, we had a minority ethnic from Outside as well. And I think that was important because hearing their stories and hearing what happened to them. And obviously we're going with ‘That's truth'. Their experience to us is the truth and we're hearing these stories and I'm thinking the whole time like ‘That's interesting' because I've learned that from the inequalities modules and I'm hearing things and that is sort of putting it in place and showing that that does happen and you hear the statistics of how often things like this happen and how often BAME backgrounds are imprisoned. It's unfair, and I think that was really shown in Inside Out and I think that sort of taught me like this is serious. This is a big issue, like and we need to move forward and change this in any way we can. And I think that made it more for me, doing Inside Out like, ‘Okay, right. This is like we need to do something like in the future. I want to be in a career where I can like change this', because we are all the unit university students that are going to be the next generation of people that hopefully can change this. And I think all our other modules lead up to it up to this, like, not just Inside Out , not just the inequalities modules, but everything we've learned is sort of put into place for now on. Yeah. Camille S: Maddy, can you just explain what BAME means because that's a UK term. Maddy: Yes. Oh, sorry, sorry Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic so Becca: I think as well. Adding on from Maddy's point, it's made me realize my, my voice. I think before I entered criminology, in my own journey, I found it really hard to express myself in a certain way. And when I found criminology, it was amazing. But I speak about criminology, a lot. And when I entered the Inside Out module and I was in a big group of people, it allowed me to sit and listen to other people and acknowledge it and appreciate it and then respond and challenge myself and challenge my peers. And then I was then able to put that into practice in my own life in my own personal life, as well as my professional, my professional life. And I'd like to think that it's got me to where I am today. And so for me, I think, yeah, I don't really know. What was I gonna say, where was I going with that? Again as Maddy said, I studied the ‘Inequalities of Justice' course and I also studied criminology so I had a lot of previous education on prisons and kind of the inequalities of the justice system and, and I did understand kind of what was going on. But I think when you sit down in a prison. And you know, I think we all at times, got a bit frustrated, especially with the alarms going off for the movement not being at a certain time, so their lives are never structured. And that, for me, was one big thing about entering the prison. I love structure in my life, and, and for me, having-, thinking about having that privilege taken away from me is, is daunting. So there's things like that, that you can't learn about from books. You can't learn about how much right and how many of their rights are taken away and you know their normal day to day lives that they would have, I mean at Downview prison they eat, sleep and go to the toilet in the same place, and they're there at the moment 23 hours a day, and there's not an hour that goes past I don't think about those girls or anyone in incarceration at the moment and it's-, it's painful when you, you can't learn about those things unless you firsthand experienced it. And I think it's something that almost everyone should experience because it has completely changed my life and my career and my everyday life choices. Amy: For me, I'm very similar. Before coming to university, I'm gonna hold my hands up here. I was very naive about those who are sent to prison, about prisons in general and I never thought that those who are incarcerated could be victims and it wasn't until I started learning in our criminology courses and then learning through Inside Out that those incarcerated are victims as well, just not necessarily in the same way that they can be victims, may have committed a crime because they they're poor and they can't afford food, so they may have stolen that foods, that doesn't make them any less of a victim. It's just, it's different. It really, really opened my eyes and made me reflect on how naive I was before this. Giulia Z: So you're identifying a lot of thorny, thorny issues there. You, you're talking about your naivety and the fact that you, you know, I'm just trying to kind of summarize it and put it all together here. Your naivety but also your lack of experience, your lack of experiential knowledge about things that you come from. You're all white girls, you come from, you know your background, you know, maybe you have a varied class background, but you're all, probably don't have this that you know you can never experience the world as a black person. And you would never, you can never experience the world in the sense, in, in the terms of institutional racism, because you're not subjected to that. And then you can read the word institutional racism in a book, but it's not going to have the same meaning as when you encounter it in a person who is in front of you or a human being who has experienced deprivation because of their skin color, right. So I think it's pretty powerful. That kind of Move from, you know, from a position of naivety to a position of knowledge, which can, which can then empower you to do something about it. Right? And, Yeah, so maybe let's, let's try this if you could put your finger on one thing that you would do differently or think about differently or, you know, just react to differently or act upon differently, what would that be one thing for each of you? Sorry, I put you on the spot. Amy: So for me Maddy: Just a slight doubt. Is this Inside-Out, or is this life? Giulia Z: I think, I think life. But, you know, obviously, it could be something that isn't spot like that. Inside Out has inspired, maybe not directly, but you know we had conversations before where we talked about, you know, ‘What are you doing right now? How are you reacting to the current things, like state of affairs? Is there something that you feel you're doing differently because you've gained this sensitivity to injustice?' Yeah. Amy: I have always been quite reserved. I've never really spoken out. I've never really enjoyed talking in front of people. I've always found it really nerve racking and so I just wouldn't say anything. And I started feeling like that in Inside Out. I didn't contribute in a group, in a huge group discussion as much because I'm a very nervous person .I don't necessarily want to say. I sometimes struggle articulating how I feel. And I don't want it to necessarily be taken the wrong way when I just struggle. But now that I've finished Inside Out,I am a lot more vocal and I am able to talk about issues more. I mean, if you'd asked me to do this podcast a year ago I would have said no, I would have been so nervous to do it. But now I am more confident and I can do that. Becca: I think for me it has quite literally been the opposite from what Amy said. I'm very, very outspoken, very outspoken and, and before the course, completely hands up, admittedly, everyone that knows me will say, I'm always the person to stand up and fight for what's right. I always have my heart on my sleeve and I, my heart is always in the best place, but I will always stand up and say ‘You're wrong' or ‘This is how I feel'. And with Inside Out you cannot do that because there is no right and there is no wrong. It is just people's experiences within the criminal justice system and outside of the criminal justice system, not what we learned from books. So for me it was the whole concept of sitting there, keeping my mouth shut, and listening to people, and and that is one thing that's completely changed my life. Like even if I listen to the TV, speaking over it, and ‘Oh my god what is he saying?' or ‘What, what's going on, so confused. Why is he saying this? Why is he saying that?' or ‘That's wrong, because I know this fact, I know that fact' whereas I started to sit, sit back and listen to what people have to say. And then argue my point in, in a different way, without making someone feel like they're wrong. And so for me, that, that's, what, what I'd say it's made me more. I don't want to say more reserved because it's not changed the way that I feel the way that I think it's just changed the way that I communicate with people in an educational matter in, in a respectful way within my career. And I think that's one thing that I really struggled with before. And because I was very, I don't want to say confrontation in an argumentative way, but I did very much say ‘I think you're wrong' without allowing the person to kind of finish or say what they want to say. So for me, it's been incredible. It's been an incredible experience. So, definitely, yes. Maddy: I mean, I think for me, one big thing is judging people. I mean, I wouldn't say that I was particularly judgmental before Inside Out. I wouldn't say that I'd look at someone on the street and be like ‘Ugh' and judge them. But I think after being in Inside Out and things, I think a lot of people have this perception of people that are incarcerated and people that were in prison and then have come out of prison. I think people do judge them. And I think that's knowing now, the people I've met are people just like us, that we're all human, we've all had different backgrounds, we all have different life experiences. And I think you can never judge someone until you know the circumstances. And I think after hearing, I mean, however many Inside students there were. I can't even remember now, probably about eight or nine but hearing each of them and background and the ones that shared with us and trusted us with this information. I feel like, how can you then, we'll pass on one and then pass an opinion when you don't even know what they've been through in their life. And I think that goes for everyone. Not even just people in prison. And I would definitely put that down to Inside Out making me like that because I just think, obviously you can never judge a book by it's cover and things, but particularly just like if you had someone out there, an ex-offender then people are like ‘Oh, I wouldn't employ them'. But then why like, they're just like the rest of us. And I think now, say I was an employee or a CEO of a company or whatever, pitting big ideas out there, but I just would never be like because of that you couldn't be working for me or you can be in a company or I would, I would work for someone who was an ex-offender. It wouldn't bother me in the slightest. And I would definitely put that down to being in Inside-Out Camille S: That's great. There is a lot here about listening and empathy, and, and I think listening like, as well Amy, what you were saying, you'd be more confident and being able to share your opinion is also the confidence that people will listen to what you have to say and, and, you know, Becca with you saying you've taken a step back that's, I think the beauty of the balance of Inside-Out is it is about active listening. It is about sharing space and letting that space happen both in terms of whose turn it is to share their story and whose turn is to listen and that dance between it and through that, I think through that listening is where empathy develops. So it's some, it's quite special to hear that these are, these are some of the main things you've taken away. And obviously, Julie and I both taught all of you in your first year as well. So it's nice to think back to how you were in your first year and see how you've developed as students, you know, in terms of these different aspects you've developed on. So, we've asked about yourself, kind of key points that you've, you know, reflected on. Based on your experience with Inside-Out. What would you like to see change in the criminal justice system? Amy: I'd like to see a much bigger focus on education in prisons and I want that to be reflected in the wider society. I've come across a lot of people in my life who still have the mentality of ‘Lock them up, throw away the key, forget about them. They've obviously done something wrong, that's why they're in prison'. But that, that's just very flippant and very ignorant because like Maddie said you don't know a person's circumstances. You don't know, you don't know them and how can you expect people to just change their, their behavior and criminality, if you don't educate and allow for a second chance to happen is cause without that second chance then those incarcerated can't prove that it was a mistake or that they've changed as a person. Becca: I would probably say authority, for me. I had an encounter with a guard at Downview and that, I wouldn't say it frightened me but it kind of made me feel like I was in the position of one of the Inside students and obviously in the UK, everybody wears clothes and we entered wearing our normal clothes and the inside students also wear whatever they want to which obviously they... Camille S: No one is wearing a uniform right? Becca: No. Yes. No one wears a uniform. And so obviously during toilet breaks, we would obviously use the staff toilet and, and one of the guards questioned me and I felt really intimidated, I felt very little, and I also felt judged. And for me that was a moment that, that, that day, the rest of that class and on my way home—I had about two and a half hour journey home—so I had long time to think about it, and I listened to music and I sat and I thought ‘Wow, this, this, this man has really taken advantage of his authority in, in his position. He's abused his power in my eyes and to try to', I didn't know the word, I don't know what he was trying to do but I haven't felt that little in, in my life and and I mean that and for me that was a very pivotal point and I went home and I did my research about guards and how guards treat incarcerated people. Normally, not all guards and that some guards treat some of the Inside students and people that are incarcerated over the whole world and, and it was a big complex for me in my head because I thought ‘Ah, we watch all the TV programs and all the guards, they get along like best friends with, with the people that are, that are inside and when, when he realized that I was an outside student, he was so apologetic towards me and he was rubbing my shoulder, ‘I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't realize that you wasn't a resident here' and and for me it was shocking. So I'd really like, and in my career to advocate for people who are inside prisons and to help them have voices, because I think sometimes they're not heard. And I think that they should, they should be heard. And I think experiencing that as if I was an Inside student was horrible. It was more than horrible so yeah. Maddy: I think leading on from what Becca said what the thing that I would change, like the top thing, would be similar in them being heard, because the Inside students would talk to us about the harms they face and I think that was one of the biggest, biggest learning experiences for us that because they would tell us about how the food would make them sick, how they'd get secondary highs from the spice that other inmates were smoking, and I just thought all you hear is the harm they've caused to the families if they've committed a crime and etc. but you don't really hear about the harm that's caused to them and I just think that's such a big thing because you could have done what I'd call a minor crime or a major crime, you could be in any position in the criminal justice system. You might be innocent, you might not be, but I think you should not be harmed when you are meant to be there, and people in authority—that Becca said—should be looking out for you. And I think that was really interesting to hear and quite scary because they're literally being sick daily from food they've got to eat or they'll go hungry. And I just think that just needs to change. That's awful and to hear that and I sit and leave and it's just like we're going home to eat what we've got and they're sitting there like just being victims of harm within the criminal justice and I just think that needs to change. Giulia Z: Just for context, ‘spice' is essentially what in England, we refer to as spike. We talk about spice when we talk about synthetic cannabinoids, so synthetic versions of cannabis essentially that are really rife at the moment in the prison system. And so that's the most popular drug that's being consumed currently in prisons in the UK. And so, yeah, just for a bit of context. And yeah, so it's it's really resonating with me that you are all thinking about how injustice plays out in the relationship, you know within within, within the prison and also in the relationship between incarcerated people and correctional officers and like all of a sudden I had this like thought in my mind, I'm like, ‘Oh, wouldn't it be amazing if correctional officers were Inside Out students, you know, as sort of outside students. Wouldn't it be amazing if jurors, and- and- and judges were Outside students and, you know, how can we bring these you know groups, you know, the people in to, you know, to really have the experience that you had to see things differently. So yeah, thanks for sharing that. That was, that was really inspiring. And, and just, this is a little curiosity of mine. What was your favorite activity? What was your favorite learning activity? You know, a lot of students are like ‘Oh Alligator River.' You know, maybe something else. But I'm just curious to hear what your, you know, your favorite kind of learning points or activity discussion was. Camille S: Can I just jump in and say it doesn't have to be a learning activity. It could also be a warm up because we also did some amazing warm ups. Giulia Z: Oh yeah, yeah sure Maddy: Oh, I have one. Definitely when we all got stickers, of which drug and we all had to guess and it was quite interesting because I think quite a lot of the Inside students didn't know what some of them were and we were talking and I was trying to explain it to them and I was like ‘Oh, should I know what this is?' like and it was just really interesting because we were all trying to detail it and it was funny. I think we all just laughed, and that was one of the first lessons, right? I think we all sort of grew, sort of as a class and I thought it was just, it was definitely, it was so funny. I would definitely do that again. But it was, it was a great activity. Camille S: Maddy. Can you explain what the activity was because not all Inside Out classes do the same thing. So can you explain what happened and why it was so funny? Maddy: So each of us got a sticker on our back with a different drug. So I think I was LSD, someone was heroin, and different, just all the drugs, magic mushrooms and whatever and we all had to walk around and give each other clues and guess what our drug was. And so there's like 25 of us are walking around like chatting about drugs and like, trying to explain it, and like, then we were all like ‘Oh, how'd you know that?' and it was just so funny, that, and it was all of us were sort of and just making jokes about it, was just, it was just, it's more of a ‘be there' moment. But it was good. Amy: Yeah I'll definitely say that's, that's one of my highlight moments as well Maddie, cause some of them are very difficult to guess so Maddy: Yeah. Amy: One of the inside students that I was talking to, she had morphine on the back, which I thought of, you know, it is a very ‘in the middle' like it's illegal for you to have but it's legal in a medical, like hospital field and then you have ones that you wouldn't necessarily think of drugs, like the one I had was alcohol. And it really makes you think about drugs, in general, and it was, it was actually very funny. And I really enjoyed the other activity we did in that lesson where half of us were given a drug to legalize, so I was in that group and we had to, we had spice and we had to come up with how he would legalize it and money, would it be in a shop like, all that stuff and everyone else had something they would make illegal, which I think was alcohol, I believe. And, and that I really enjoyed because it was very challenging, particularly if you were given the one about spice. It's just very difficult because we had just read about spice and, what's the word, and the homes, it can cause, we'd just spoken to the Inside students. So we'd just spoken about basically getting secondary highs in the toilet off of it. So there, that was certainly very challenging but I'm glad it was challenging. Becca: For me it has to be the introduction. That day was life changing for me. I was so nervous to even enter, I'd never entered a prison before and we got in and I was like ‘This is a classroom, this is crazy' and, and then everyone came in and I kind of looked at a couple of the Outside students, but it's crazy, because I was expecting criminals to look like criminals and the Inside students look like me, if not better. And it was an unbelievable experience. When we sat down, and we got to know each other and we sat in chairs opposite each other and everyone got to move around and asK a series of questions. And one of the Inside students said to me that, that she likes to see her children and to that I replied ‘And how often do you see your children?' and she said, ‘I don't know whether, you know, but in the UK, obviously we don't have a lot of female prisons.' And I said, ‘Yeah. And I'm aware.' And I didn't really think about it in this way and there's a lot of limitations in, in research in this aspect. And I said, ‘Oh, like so, how often do you get to see your children?', and she said ‘Once a month, if I'm lucky' she said, ‘because the visitation days that I get are on weekdays and I can't see my family during the week because they live so far away.' And for me, again, that was another moment that took me back. And I was like, she gets to see her children once a month if she's lucky. And so for me, that was, that was a big, big thing for me. Um, so, yeah. Camille S: Thanks. Those are all great moments. We're coming to the end of the podcast here. So I think if Giulia and I can indulge, I'd like to share our favorite moments as well. So all the ones you mentioned, I thought were brilliant. The wagon wheel at the beginning, It feels like magic for Giulia and I because we've been preparing for months for this and to see, y'all, you know, the nerves to gel. It's great. But for me, this year, my favorite class was right before lockdown happened actually because, as you know, we missed our last two group workshop classes and our, our closing ceremony, because of the pandemic, so we were able to do all our substantive sessions and the one that stood out for me was when we had a debate about sex work versus prostitution. And why I liked that so much was because every week Inside Outside students work together, you know, on different activities, talk about different things, but for the sex work versus prostitution debate y'all were put into a side that we've said, ‘You're either for or against whether you actually believe it or not', and you had to make a convincing argument that then you did in a debate style competition. And I think if someone walked into the room, at that point you would just see a bunch of learners, you, there's no way you would be able to distinguish who was Inside and who was Out in such a collaborative cooperative way and I really, I really like that class because I felt it was such a nice coming together of collaboration amongst students. Giulia, what was your favorite moment? Giulia Z: Yeah. I agree with that because, that you could see that all of you are coming into your own, that you had grown in confidence but also that you had grown as a group, as a collaborative group working together and being able to like, you know, help each other out and feed off each other, you know, suggesting answers to the person who was like in the front speaking, it was just great to see. It was really great to see. I think my favorite moment, I mean, there's loads of moments, it's very difficult, but I think I always I always liked it, and I always liked the Alligator River story. And the reason for that is that, you know, I think it really brings out differences that exist between people's kind of moral judgment, as well as some of the similarities in fact, because obviously even though some, some of the characters were judged differently by the different groups, some of the characters were judged the same or quite similarly by all groups. But what I like this year compared to years past, is that I think it was Maddy, it was you suggesting that, you know, actually, we need to look at this from a structural perspective and we need to look at gender and we need to look at sexism. And this was the first time that this came from a student, rather than me, because I'm usually the one who goes ‘Okay, but what about, let's move away from the individuals perspective and think about social structures.' And this time, you know, this year it was you. And, and I love that. Because I, you know I felt like, you know, for me, the best, the best bits about Inside Out is when facilitators can disappear. When you know, when the teacher is in the classroom, the presence of the teacher is no longer important and it's all about students leading and teaching each other and inspiring each other to kind of dialogue and go forward. So, so, so, that to me is a, is a sign of success that you know as a facilitator and so yeah that was great, really great. Yeah. Camille S: Great, so I think on that point about, you know, moving beyond individual thinking about structural issues. I think that's where we should probably wrap it up. So thank you Amy, thank you, Becca, thank you. Maddie. And thank you, Giulia and thank you to the Inside Out center for recording this podcast for us. It's been a lot of fun. Dave K: If you would like to enroll in one of our Inside-Out Instructor Training Institutes or make a contribution to the program, please visit our website at insideoutcenter.org.

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第983期:The Stubborn Recovery

英语每日一听 | 每天少于5分钟

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2020 3:33

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Amy: How about you? Have you ever been in an accident?Paul: Not a car accident. I was in a bicycle accident.Amy: Yeah?Paul: I laugh now but at the time, it was pretty bad.Amy: What happened?Paul: It was dark and it was Christmas day. And I was on my bicycle going down a quite steep slope and my telephone rang. And I looked at my mobile phone and I took it out of my pocket whilst riding my bike. And looked at it and noticed it was my dad and he was ringing to wish me a happy Christmas.So I felt sort of compelled to answer the phone. So answering the phone, still going down the hill, probably gathering speed. It's dark and I'm trying to get my dad off the phone as soon as I can. And before I knew it, I drove straight into the back of a parked black car.Amy: Oh no.Paul: I saw it at the very last minute. So I hit the back of it and my body slammed into the ground, and I broke a few bones, yeah. Yeah.Amy: Oh no.Paul: Yeah, yeah. It was a pretty miserable Christmas to be honest with you.Amy: I'd say it's terrible. That's the worst.Paul: Yeah.Amy: Did the owner of the car see what happened? Did you damage the car?Paul: I didn't stay long enough. I got out of there pretty quickly.Amy: And went to the hospital.Paul: No, I was a bit stubborn. I don't know why. I was the worst night sleep I've ever had but yeah, I didn't go to the hospital until the next day.Amy: What bones did you break?Paul: I broke my collarbone, the clavicle.Amy: Oh, a nightmare.Paul: And I broke a few ribs.Amy: Oh no, ribs. That's the worst because they can't do anything for it. They just send you on your way and you just have to cough in pain.Paul: Hmm.Amy: Oh no.Paul: Yeah. But it could have been a lot worse, you know.Amy: Hmm, that's true.Paul: Yeah. I could have broken my neck.Amy: So how long did it take you to recover?Paul: It took me about probably six weeks, I suppose.Amy: Hmm.Paul: Yeah, because then—actually, in the following —it happened on Christmas day, so three months later in the March, I was lucky enough to win a place in the Tokyo marathon. And I really wanted to do it because it's quite difficult to get. It's like a lottery now. There's so many people who apply to get a position.So I wasn't going to let this accident stop me from running the Tokyo marathon. So I was trying to rush it, really and I shouldn't have. But I did. I've run there.Amy: Did you?Paul: Yeah.Amy: Oh, my goodness.Paul: Yeah, I finished it but—Amy: Congratulations. But how were you? That must have really hindered your recovery.Paul: It hindered my training period for the marathon, yeah, so.Amy: But you finished it though.Paul: I finished it, yeah.Amy: Well done.Paul: I wouldn't do it again. Marathons are miserable things to be. Really. Why put yourselves through that pain? I still like running so maybe in the future, I'd do a half marathon or something, yeah. But a full marathon—my marathon days are over, I think. Yeah.

christmas recovery tokyo stubborn marathons paul no paul it paul yeah amy well amy so amy oh paul not

On the fourteenth entry of our See It to Be It podcast series, Amy C. Waninger speaks with Vonda Page, an organizational change leader at PayPal, about her entrance into the tech space and her experience being the only in many job settings, and Vonda talks to the fact that even individuals without a STEM background have spaces for them in technology. Check the links in the show notes to connect with her!Connect with Vonda on LinkedIn.Donate to the Justice for Breonna Taylor GoFundMe by clicking here.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Check out our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate. Now, look, for those of y'all who are new here, the purpose of Living Corporate is to create a space that affirms black and brown experiences in the workplace, right? There are certain things that only we can really understand, and when I say we I mean the collective non-white professional [laughs] in corporate America. And when we look around--if you, like, Google being black and brown in corporate America, you may see, like, a post in Huffington Post or something that kind of communicates from a position of lack, but I don't know if we necessarily see a lot of content that empowers and affirms our identity and our experience, and that's really the whole purpose of Living Corporate. It's with that that I'm really excited to talk to y'all about the See It to Be It series. Amy C. Waninger, who has been a guest on the show, who's a writer for Living Corporate, and who's also the author of Network Beyond Bias, she's actually partnered with Living Corporate to actually have an interviewing series where she actually sits down with black and brown professionals so that we can learn about what they actually do and see ourselves in these roles, right? So it's a variety of industries that she's--she's talking to a lot of different types of folks. You're gonna be able to see what they do, and at the same time you're gonna hopefully be able to envision yourself in that role, hence the title See It to Be It, okay? So check this out. The next thing you're gonna hear is this interview with Amy C. Waninger. Y'all hang tight. Catch y'all next time. Peace.Amy: Vonda, welcome to the show. I'm so glad to have you. How are you?Vonda: I'm great, Amy. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.Amy: This is exciting for me, 'cause you and I have had so many conversations on these topics alraedy, and every time I talk to someone and we get going and we're on a roll I'm like, "Oh, I wish that I had recorded this for the show," so now we get to, which is exciting to me.Vonda: That's great. I'm happy about it. Thank you so much.Amy: Good. So Vonda, how long have you been working in the tech space?Vonda: It's so funny. You know, I was thinking about it, and I've really been in the tech space for about 24 years, and the last 20 exclusively, and it's interesting because I really got into tech organically because I never was necessarily oriented towards math, towards science or, you know, digital technology, and the way that I got into the tech field was I originally started working in the restaurant business, right, in bars and restaurants, some chain places, some local places, and as different restaurants were getting online with different computer systems, they would need a person that could teach everybody how to use it. And I was always a really good trainer. My background is communications, always really good at, you know, processes and helping people learn how things work, and so they'd say, "Okay. Well, you know, we're getting a computer system, and we need you to train people." And I'm like, "What?" So they give me the big fat book, the big fat manual, you know, the operating procedures, and I have to review that, and it would be interesting because after looking at "Okay, this is how the technology works," I had to compare how are we currently working and what is different, right? So in a restaurant back in the old pen and paper days, right, before iPads and all that fancy stuff, people would come to the table with a paper and a pencil and they would write it down. So when we started to adopt computers and different types of technology, I had to look at "What's the delta between how we're operating in a non-technical way," right, without technology, and then when we move to using technology, what's that difference? So the way I got started was really helping people move from, you know, the paper and pencil onto using different computer systems.Amy: I think that's fascinating. I have a story that I would love to share with you if you don't mind. I went to one of the--you know the really cheap hair-cutting places? I took my kids there one day, and their computer system was down and they didn't know what to do. They were frozen. And I looked at the woman--and I was an analyst at the time, you know, kind of like what you're describing--and they're like, "Well, we can't cut hair because our computers are down," and I said, "Why do you need a computer to cut my kid's hair? Can't you just use scissors?" And they kind of laughed and she's like, "Um, yeah, okay," and so she got out a piece of paper and the first thing she said was, "What's your phone number?" Well, that's the identifier they used in their system to look up what haircut he'd had the last time. I said, "You don't need his phone number. You need a #2 guard. Cut his hair." But they were just so lost 'cause they had been training on how to use the system, not how to do the job, right? And so what you're talking about is the reverse of that, where people come in not already indoctrinated to the technology and now they have to learn to do their job with it.Vonda: Exactly, and then there's that balance of using the technology with the actual process. So the process of cutting hair in your example is perfect, right? You use scissors or you use clippers or you use a combination. You use a comb. Maybe you have a spray bottle with some water. You need that whether you have a computer or not, right? If you're in a restaurant, you need pans and pots and food, right? And you need that, right, whether you have a computer or not. So, you know, it's a very similar thing, and it's so interesting, but that's really kind of how I got started, and for me, I grew up with computers, right? I learned as the technology advanced, and later on in my career I worked exclusively in tech. So now for the last--yeah, since 2000 I've been exclusively in tech, and a lot of what I do is really helping companies when they decide to change a technology, whether that's through an upgrade, whether we are retiring something to bring in something new or just adding new features, I help the company or the team determine "What is the strategy we need to implement that technology change so that we don't have an adverse impact on the business, on the employees or on whomever that change is gonna impact?"Amy: One of the things I think is so interesting about that, Vonda, is that you didn't come in from a technology standpoint--and I think I've had some other folks on the show that have worked in technology, that are pure technologists, but I think it's important for people to understand you don't have to be a technologist to work in technology, and in fact, the tech sector needs people people, right? If you say, "Oh, I'm a people person," my goodness, does somebody in tech need you. Vonda: Absolutely. And it's so funny because, you know, even now every now and then somebody will ask me some kind of technical question. Like, a friend of mine yesterday was asking something and I said, "Listen, I really have no idea." Like, "I've heard of this thing you're asking me about, but I'm not--" And she was like, "Well, you've been in tech for, like, ever," and I said, "I've been in tech, but I'm not a techie." And so what's interesting in the tech field, and what I do is I work with a lot of engineers, a lot of extremely technical people, a lot of architects, and while their expertise is really based in the system and how things are built and how things are connected and put together, they need support from the standpoint of somebody who can take all of that, what they're talking about, and help the business as well as, you know, the community that's gonna be using that technology understand what is it, how does it help or impact me, and why do I want to use it, right, and what is the benefit of it, and sometimes a technologist will say, "Well, it's great. It has all these great features. It does this," and they'll say, "It does," right? So they'll say, "The tech does this," and my question to them is, "Okay, so how does that affect, you know, Suzy? How does that affect Rohit? How does that affect Carmela?" So you're making changes to technology. You're putting enhancements in. You're building things on top of apps or creating features, but what is the people side of that? So one of the gaps that I have seen over my career in the technology field is that people sometimes leave out that we are creating technology for people. The technology is to be used by people. So you have to think--okay, if we take the example of earphones, right, or listening devices, right, and you think about "People need to use this for what? To either block out sound, to focus sound, you know?" What is it that people need it for, and then how do we build it or talk about it so that it matches what that need is? And that really requires, you know, the ability to ask a lot of questions and to be--like, I take a lot of notes. I pull in different people that have different areas of expertise for a particular technology. So sometimes in a phone call or in a conversation there will be an engineer and an architect and a product manager and a project manager that's somebody that's kind of herding the cats and all of that, and then you have other subject matter expertise that may be connected to that particular application, right, or that particular business process. So it's really important to have the soft skill of communication, that you can pull in those different perspectives, you can ask those different questions, you can get, you know, people talking, because a lot of times, technologists, they kind of work inside their own head, right? And so helping them come outside of their head with certain questions, especially open-ended--you know, how will this help John get his work done? How will this make it easier for the customer to execute a transaction? And really helping to articulate that for the technologist so that the business can say, "Oh, we know why you're making this change, and we're gonna make sure that we support it."Amy: Absolutely, and I've spent so much time in those roles. I'm just nodding along like, "Yes, we need a translator between the two worlds," becase they do speak different languages often. So I want to switch gears just a little bit, Vonda, and I want to ask you, especially 24 years ago when you started working in tech and, you know, sort of had a toe in the water but still way too much tday, I would imagine that you are not swimming in a sea of other black women at work.Vonda: No. It's so funny. So I just moved to a different team, and I was the only, only black woman. And I'm in a new team that has more women, but still the only black woman, and what I have found is that throughout my career I'm usually the only black woman--and every now and then there may be a support staff person, like a project coordinator or an administrative professional, but not usually. And so, you know, I've learned to be comfortable in that role, right, and to just really not let it hamper how I'm gonna perform. I don't shy back if I have a question. I ask it. If I'm running the meeting I'm running the meeting, you know? If I am trying to accomplish specific outcomes for a project or a meeting, I state what they are, I let them know "These are the critical success factors for getting it done," and, you know, no matter what I kind of keep on fighting, right? But it is very difficult, because what happens--and I'm sure, you know, in your work and in this inclusion space have had conversations with other black women who, you know, you get into this space where you know what some of the obstacles and challenges are going to be, but what you have to do is just drive ahead, right, and as you experience more and more circumstances, right, whether it's in meetings or whether it's in presentations or whether it's in, you know, any kind of group effort where you have to do things, you have to kind of go into it knowing that you might not get the support or the cooperation. Amy: So where do you get the reserves of energy that it must take to walk in every day knowing that--and forgive me for saying this. I mean, I'm gonna just kind of lay this out, right? Knowing no matter how good you are, no matter how great a job you do that day, no matter how great a job you've done for 20 years, there are probably no people who look like you above you in the food chain at your company, and your shot at getting there is pretty low.Vonda: Yeah, and it's interesting, 'cause--so I do two things. So one thing I do--and it's funny. So one thing that I do to mentally prepare myself is when I know I'm gonna have a challenging day, especially a day that I'm gonna be expending a whole lot of energy, I really make sure that I kind of have a ritual that I do, right, and part of it is the way I take care of myself, right? So I do a lot of physical exercise, 'cause I feel like when my body is strong, that helps me be mentally strong and emotionally prepared. That's one thing. I try to also listen to motivational music. So, like, I listen to a lot of hardcore--not hardcore, but, like, inspirational rap music, right, and I call it my mental warmup. So I have a playlist of, like, Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar and Drake and, you know, Jill Scott and different people, but I have music that kind of talks about, "Hey, things are hard, right, but you can do it," and so I use music and my physicality to help with that, but the other thing I do, Amy, is I have friends, right, and colleagues and associates that I'm close to that I know I can call to vent, right, and I can say, you know, "So here's what's happening. Am I looking at this, you know, in a way that doesn't seem right?" So that really helps. And I also go to therapy. I love therapy. I am a big advocate for people trying to take charge of their own mental health and mental well-being. And I talk to my therapist, right, and my therapist is a white guy in his 40s, and, you know, I look at it as--and we have a great relationship, right, and I look at it as--you know, and I think he does too, as he's my sort of--like, sort of... I don't want to call it a check, but my support from the standpoint that I can describe a situation or what it is, and he'll say, "Wow, that is really terrible. That must be really hard for you. How do you feel about that?" Amy: So I'm really glad that you brought up therapy, because I know, you know, among--particularly among my black friends there's a lot of stigma around seeking therapy because it's viewed as weakness or a lack of faith, and so I want to thank you for sharing that. That's very vulnerable. And, you know, I think it helps people when other folks come forward about those kinds of things, right? About prioritizing mental health, and particularly in a community that has cause for, you know--I mean, you're in a lot of collective stress, especially right now. I do think it's so important. Where do you go at work to find community when there are so few people who look like you in this place?Vonda: Yeah. So I'm funny like that, Amy. I seek out the black people. Like, I literally look for the black people. So I look for any face that I see that is of any shade, and I say, "Hey," and I walk up to people--you know, pre-COVID, right, I would walk up to somebody, a stranger, you know, and be like, "Hey, I'm Vonda. Who are you? What team do you work in?" Sometimes I just get on LinkedIn and I look for people that work for my company, and then I reach out to them on LinkedIn and I'm like, "Hey, we work at the same company. Here's my User ID. Why don't you Slack me when you get to the office?" Or something like that. So I make a purposeful attempt to reach out to people, and then I just kind of build it up from there. So I'm--and I don't know where I learned this. You know, I guess--my under-grad degree is in communications, my graduate degree is in communications. I've always been a very communicative person, you know, and so I will just reach out to somebody and say, "Hi, I'm Vonda. We haven't met. Can I put 20 minutes on your calendar just for, like, a 1-on-1 intro chat?" I've never been told, "No, you can't put 20 minutes on my calendar," I've always been told "Absolutely," and then I just kick it off like that. "Hey, I'm new here," or, you know, "I saw you on campus," or "Hey, I stalked you on LinkedIn, and I just wanted to say hi and find out what you do. Are there any other black people in your department? What's your experience like? If you ever need to talk, let's talk." And fortunately, you know, a lot of companies nowadays have ERGs or employee resource groups. Some companies call them affinity groups. That's a really good way to meet the only, because in a large company, you know, especially in tech and in high tech, they're probably the only in their team or the only in their department. So, you know, everybody is sort of craving that sense of "Oh, there's somebody that gets me. Oh, there's somebody that looks like me." So I bet you they're experiencing some of it, right? So when you're looking at gender the experience is a little different, right, for black men versus black women, because the way we're perceived, you know, in society is a little different, but we still are, I find, in tech usually the only. I would say, other than my colleagues who work more in the non-technical spaces, right, my colleagues who work more in, like, customer operations type of roles, you'll find more black women, right, in those roles, right? So it'll be more in those teams, but in the highly technical ones, everybody is usually the only, and when you are the only, you know, as you said, you do feel like "How am I gonna get to that next level? Because there is no one that looks like me," right? And if there was, you know, a black woman that might have had, you know, a high-up job, maybe she only stayed at the company for a couple of years or maybe she moved on--and it is difficult, but there's a part of me that feels like even if I can't make a significant enough change to maybe see it, I'm at least helping the next generation. So for me--and I guess it's part of the mom in me, right, is I want to help the next generation so that when they get to high tech in the corporate world they're not the only, but if they are, they know "Okay, here's how you need to navigate," right? You have to walk in realizing that the same perceptions that people have out of the corporate space, like, those are the same perceptions that get carried into the corporate space. And really, as you said, there's no amount of excellence and tenacity and accomplishment that will, you know, change that for people, but what you can do is change for yourself, you know, how you approach it, and if you have the information, right, to be able to say, "Okay, I am prepared that my ideas might not get traction. Okay, so then how do I start to build a coalition of advocates, right, and other, like, friendlies to help build that up? I know that if I'm presenting I might get interrupted, so what do I need to do about that?" So I have lines already memorized and prepared in my mind, right? So if I'm speaking and someone interrupts me, I say "Hey, can you hold your thought, John? Because I wasn't done," and then I finish, right? And I serve as an advocate to everyone. It doesn't matter male or female, black or white, Hispanic, Indian, it doesn't matter, and those things I think make a difference.Amy: Absolutely. So just in closing, what advice do you have for people who are maybe wanting to break into tech who maybe are not technologists but certainly, you know, have questions about how to get started. Where would you send them to kind of start this journey?Vonda: Yeah. I've thought about that a lot, because tech is here, and it is going to continue to grow and move into a bunch of different spaces. One of the really growing areas in tech right now is really around data science and data analytics, and I would encourage people to do at every stage of their career, right, whether they're in college right now, just finishing up high school, early career, mid-career, is really just start looking at some of those trends, right? So for example, you could just do a quick Google search on technology trends, and you'll see AI, you know, automation, artificial intelligence, and data science. Those things will pop right up, and the recommendation is really know a little bit about a lot, right? But just enough. You don't need to know, you know, all the deep down nitty-gritty details of what everything means, but if you have some familiarity, you know, "What's the conversation around automation these days," right? What's the conversation around Cloud? What's the conversation around data science? Have familiarity with the conversation around that. LinkedIn is a really great resource to go in in the search, and you can either type in, you know, the title "jobs" and type in, you know, a couple of titles, right? You can type in "data scientist," you can type in "automation," and then you can start to see, "Okay, these are some of the fields, and these are the criteria." But I would tell people even if you don't have a STEM, you know, type of background, science, technology, engineering and math, even if you don't have a STEM background, there's a space for you in technology, because we have to balance out the technologists, right? We have to balance that, and you really need strong communication skills, strong engagement skills, the ability to think not all the time at the detailed minute level, but to be able to look at things from a macro level, from a 30,000, 50,000-foot level. Be able to think about strategy. So if somebody asked me to do X, why did they ask me to do that? What other goals does it match up to? What's the bigger picture? And if you can understand the bigger picture, then that is a leg up, because in my experience folks that have a very specialized area of expertise and they only--let's say they know 90% about that and they know very little about other things, those are the people who really struggle. So you want to be--you know, not a jack of all trades because you can't, but you want to know a little bit about the big things, right, and then when you need to deep dive into them you do more. So, you know, I was on a call yesterday about some cryptography stuff, right? I haven't worked on cryptography--which they say crypto--since last year. So I had to go back and kind of read some of my notes and refamiliarize myself. "Okay, so for crypto here's what we're looking at, right? We're talking about how things are transmitted and are we making sure that the protocols are secure." So it's just a matter of knowing a little bit, and sometimes I'll be in a conversation and I'll say, you know, "I'm the least technical person here," and they're always like, "No, you seem like you understand it." Well, I understand it enough, right, to be able to articulate it, but if you ask me to, you know, write the scripts for it or--no, I'm not doing that. So I think it's really a few things, really understanding them, and just using your communication skills and your personality. And don't feel like, you know, because you're not an expert in something that that doesn't mean you're not valuable, because really most of those people aren't experts, right? And so I guess that's kind of where the impostor syndrome piece can come in for people. You're not an impostor, right? You know what you know, and there's enough resources out now that you can do research, right, to get the amount of knowledge that you need necessary to do it and do well.Amy: Vonda, thank you so much for sharing your experience and your wisdom with our audience. I really appreciate you.Vonda: Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure, and I look forward to talking with you soon.

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229 See It to Be It : Insurance Program Management (w/ Traci Adedeji)

Play Episode Listen Later May 23, 2020 32:21

On the thirteenth installment of our See It to Be It podcast series, Amy C. Waninger speaks with Traci Adedeji, the AIO program lead at AIPSO and president elect of the Rhode Island Chapter of the CPCU Society, in a wide-ranging interview about her unique role, her unconventional journey into the insurance industry, and so much more. Traci espouses the importance of establishing mentoring relationships at work and shares some advice on how to foster a very strong professional network on LinkedIn. Check the links in the show notes to connect with her and find out more about the CPCU Society!Connect with Traci on LinkedIn.http://bit.ly/2T9giYRFind out more about the CPCU Society on their website. They're also on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Links in order, beginning with their website:https://bit.ly/3cWpbh7https://bit.ly/3giUQeGhttps://bit.ly/2WUwfFuhttps://bit.ly/3e6nON4Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here or below.https://bit.ly/2Ug4l5KHelp food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org:https://bit.ly/2WD73UkCheck out our website.https://bit.ly/living-corporateTRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach Nunn. Now, listen here. Y'all know what we're trying to do. We're trying to build, inspire, encourage, empower, all on a platform that affirms black and brown experiences in corporate America. And it's interesting because as I came up just kind of coming into myself as a professional, I didn't see a lot of people that looked like me in consulting. I didn't see a lot of people that looked like me in human resources either. But when I would come across someone who looked like me doing something I wanted to do, it gave me encouragement. It gave me a stronger sense of hope that I could do it too, and so it's with that that we're really excited to talk to y'all about and bring you another entry, actually, into our See It to Be It series. So the next thing you're gonna hear is an interview between Amy C. Waninger, a guest on the show, a member of the team, and the author of Network Beyond Bias, and a leader who just happens to be an ethnic minority. In fact, yo, Sound Man, give me some air horns right HERE for my leaders. [he complies] Yo, and give me some more air horns right HERE [he complies again] for the See It to Be It series. So catch y'all next time. I know you're gonna enjoy this. Peace.Amy: Hi, Traci. Thank you so much for joining me today.Traci: Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm honored that you asked me to join you.Amy: Well, I am excited, because you and I have worked together before on committees and projects, but never in the same company, although we are at least in part in the same industry, in the insurance industry. And so I was wondering if you could tell me just a little bit--because your job title is program manager, but a lot of people who are not in a project management space or in a corporate space with a lot of projects may not understand what a program manager does, so can we just start there with kind of what is that job?Traci: Okay. So technically it's "program lead." I work for AIPSO, which is not an insurance company, but we provide services to the insurance industry. So the easiest example that I can offer for what we do would be let's say that in the state of Rhode Island, most--every state actually has a mechanism to handle what's called residual market business for automobile insurance, because in just about every state you have to have automobile insurance to be able to drive. So what happens is that, you know, if Allstate writes 40% of all of the standard automobile business in a state, the state will say, "Well, you also have to write 40% of the residual market business in that state," and--Amy: And the residual market is typically, like, really high-risk drivers that couldn't get insurance other ways, right?Traci: Essentially--exactly, people who are unable to get insurance through the standard market for a variety of reasons. So what Allstate might say is, "We know we have to write this business, but we really don't want to program our systems to handle this business. We don't want to hire people to handle this business that's underwritten and processed a little bit differently than our standard business, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna hire AIPSO or a company like AIPSO to handle it on our behalf." So that's probably the cleanest example I can give of what we do. There's some variations on the ways those different mechanisms work, but that's probably the clearest example. As the program lead, my responsibility is a little bit of underwriting, a little bit of program or project work. If we have to implement changes in the system, I'd be involved in the business requirements and working with the technical folks to make sure that our systems can accomodate what it is that we need to do from an underwriting and processing perspective.Amy: Thank you for that. I appreciate that. So how did you get involved in the insurance industry? Because I'm guessing, based on all of the people I've talked to in the insurance industry, that when you were 5 years old and, you know, you went to a family event and Grandma said, "And Traci, what do you want to be when you grow up?" You probably didn't say, "I want to be an insurance program lead." [both laugh]Traci: You are absolutely correct, although I do love insurance so much that I think we have to get to a point where, especially little brown boys and girls say, "We want to work in insurance." I was--I'm 54 years old. I'll be 55 in April. And when I was 16 years old, I was a teen mom, and when I was 17 years old I had another baby. So here I am, two children, college dropout, and my parents said, "You gotta get a job. You gotta do something to take care of your babies." So I got a job working at an insurance agency as a file clerk, and one day everybody was busy, the phone rang, I answered the phone, and it was a very simple call that I was able to answer because I had been listening to the people who were customer service representatives, so I just handled the call. I got promoted to customer service [?], and this was in 1984, and just worked my way up. I went from working on the agency side of the business to the company side of the business, as an assistant underwriter to an underwriter to an underwriting manager in different companies around the New York City area. In 2007, I thought I was in love, [laughs] and actually left the industry and moved from the New York City area to Rochester, New York. That relationship and the business that we were trying to build together in a different industry didn't work out, and I had to get a job, and insurance was all I knew at that point, 'cause at that point I had worked in the industry for over 20 years. So I came to Amica in Rochester, moved to Rhode Island, and, you know, Amica is an amazing place to work. I was very happy working there, but I got a call one day from a recruiter--that's what happens when, you know, people have your information out there when you're networking, and the gentleman said, "I've got this position I'm trying to fill. Do you know anyone who would be interested?" And when I looked at it, it looked like it was the perfect storm of everything that I'd learned to do in all of the different positions that I'd had in insurance. So I went on to interview and I said to myself, "Okay, I really don't want to leave Amica [?], but, you know, this is a really cool opportunity." So I had a number in my mind. I said, "Okay, if they come back at that number, that's gonna be the universe telling me that this job is for me." I interviewed on a Wednesday, and on Friday I got an offer at the exact number that I had in my mind.Amy: That's amazing. So I always tell people, "When a recruiter calls, answer, because you never know what's waiting on the other side of the phone for you," and if not for you, then someone that you know, right? You may think, "Oh, I have no interest in that whatsoever, but I know someone," and if you can connect those two people, you've just created something amazing for someone else.Traci: Exactly, which was also the relationship with that recruiter, because if you then get to the point where you legitimately are looking for a position, they're gonna remember how you helped them out when they were trying to place folks and they're gonna do their best for you.Amy: Absolutely. And sometimes you even get a little referral bonus out of it if you--[both laugh] if you, you know, send them to somebody that they can place. So I've had that work out for me too. I was never expecting it, but when it happened it was always nice. So you've already told me about the different types of positions that you've held in the industry, but, you know, you came into this industry kind of by chance, right? You just happened to get a job at an agency. What has been the biggest surprise to you about working in insurance that you didn't realize as someone from outside?Traci: This is something that I've known for a while, but I think the thing that solidfied my interest in insurance and was my "a-ha" moment was when I started studying insurance, when I started studying--I actually started studying for my CPCU, which is, as you know, a professional designation in the industry. I started studying for my designation in 1992, and in studying insurance I came to have an appreciation for first of all how important insurance is, but also how diverse the industry is. Pretty much any discipline that you would be interested in studying, there is a job for you in the insurance industry, and that is I think the coolest thing about insurance.Amy: Yeah, I had a similar experience. So I came into the insurance industry as an IT professional. That was my background. No insurance background whatsoever, but I just happened to be a consultant that got placed at an insurance company, and when I then later got hired by the insurance company, somebody told me about the CPCU designation, which--it stands for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter. It's a professional designation that requires 8 courses to complete. You have to pass some tests, which thank goodness they're multiple choice now. They used to be blue book.Traci: [laughs] Yeah, I remember the books.Amy: No, thank you. I wouldn't have done it. I would've been too scared. But anyway, I started studying because, you know, I wanted to prove myself in this industry, and I wanted to frankly get the bonus that came with getting the designation that my employer offered at that time, and I was amazed by the scope of the insurance industry and the mission of the insurance industry, and when people ask me "Why do you love insurance?" And, you know, my focus of my company is not insurance-specific, although maybe it will be someday, but I think insurance is so fascinating because it does two things. It makes all economic investment possible. There's no part of the economy that insurance is not affected by or that it affects, right? I mean, every single transaction that happens is backed somewhere by an insurer. And the other thing we do in the insurance industry is we're there when people need us most. I mean, on somebody's worst day, we're there to help in, you know, ways that we can to make them whole and get them back on their feet, and I can't even imagine a more meaningful industry than that. So if somebody who has maybe never considered the insurance industry before and wants to learn more about the kinds of jobs available and how to get in--you know, how to kind of break into this industry, where would you recommend that they go?Traci: I would recommend that they get in touch with the local chapter of CPCU. I would also recommend that they get in touch with professional insurance agents and brokers, because they have professional organizations. Depending on where they are in their career, I would, you know, for example, if they're a high school or college student who's interested in the industry, I would look at internships with companies, with insurance companies. So those would be my suggestions. I do also know that through professional organizations, those of us who are invested enough in the industry and in our careers to be a part of these organizations have a tendency to be pretty generous people, so it would be pretty easy to even get a one-on-one informal, or even formal, mentoring relationship with someone who is in the industry that could offer some guidance.Amy: That's a great idea, and I know that there are a number of formal programs, but like you said, LinkedIn is a great way to just connect with someone if you have a target company in mind and you want to learn more about it. Most people are open to a phone call or at least exchanging emails and, you know, seeing what they can do to help. That is true. So, you know, the insurance industry has a reputation--and I won't say whether I feel that this is deserved or not, and you know exactly where I'm going--but the insurance industry has this reputation for being stale, pale, and male, and it's all a bunch of old white men, and that's it, right? And I know a lot of different industries suffer from this stigma, but for people who are maybe not older or white or men, what resources have you found that can help them kind of find their place in the industry, feel connected to others, feel a sense of community so that we can retain that talent in this industry and not lose it to somebody else?Traci: For me, I think back to a company that I worked for in 1990, and that was where I really got my start as an insurance professional and learned the most about the industry, but it's also where I recognized that at that particular company, in 1990, the early '90s, if I wasn't a white man with a degree from the right school, there was a very distinct feeling on how far I was going to progress in my career, and that was why I ended up leaving the company. I think that we--you know, it's great to join organizations, but I'm a grassroots kind of chick. I think that it is important to give back to each other, whether it's women, whether it's people of color. It's, like, whatever commonality you have with someone, if you see someone that's struggling or you see someone who's where you were previously in your career, you have a responsibility to reach out to that person and to offer them guidance if they're receptive to it. I'm the type of person that I have no qualms about reaching out to other women, to women of color, to just form those informal mentoring relationships, even if it's just "Let's have lunch once a month." There's people I don't even work with anymore. It just might be, like, an email or a LinkedIn message every now and then. So I think there's great value in forming those types of relationships. Yes, it's professional, but I think that if it's sort of a little more casual where you bond with that person and feel comfortable speaking with them, they're gonna be able to really guide you in a meaningful way.Amy: So that leads me right into my next question, which is I've noticed about you that you have a very strong professional network. I mean, you know everybody it seems like. [both laugh] And not all the same kind of people. Like, you really know people up and down the hierarchy. You know people across the industry, and when we were together at a conference last year I was just so impressed by the span of the network that you have, and so I was wondering what's your approach or what are your tips to networking and how do you stay connected with so many people with such limited time?Traci: LinkedIn makes it easy, because I can be on my computer at, I don't know, 2:00 in the morning when I wake up and can't sleep, and I can pop in and see what people have posted. I don't even have to tell you I absolutely adore your content, and every single thing you post I read and I share, you know, because I just find a lot of value in what you post, and I do the same for other people who are a part of my network. As far as I guess connecting with people, my advice would be ask. It's simply to ask. There's a woman who worked at a previous company, and she was pretty high up, you know, in the food chain if you will, and we didn't really--I mean, we had casually and in passing at work spoke, but it's not like we had a relationship. She ended up leaving the company, and I had no qualms about sending her a connection request on LinkedIn. I said, "Well, the worst that could happen is that she won't accept it, and if she says no I'm no worse off than I was before." I think that everyone has something to offer, regardless of their discipline, regardless of their position or title. I think that a lot of times we don't make those connections because we pre-judge and make assumptions. So I think that you just ask. Amy: That's good advice: So I have a friend in the speaking industry who says, "Every time you ask you risk getting a yes," and I really like that, and so I tried to kind of shore up my nerve to ask more, because I would not mind risking getting a yes.Traci: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I tell people this. I am by nature a pretty shy and reserved person. I grew up as the kid who got teased a lot in school and, you know, that whole thing, so not a lot of self-confidence in my younger years, but when you get to a point where you've got kids to feed and you recognize that the higher you achieve in your career the more money you're gonna make, you kind of put that to the side, you put your game face on, and you make what magic happen you need to make happen, and what happens is that as you practice that, even if you say to yourself "I'm gonna try to connect with one new person this week at work," "I'm gonna try to make a connection with one person who I've not had a connection with previously." The more you do it the more comfortable it becomes and the more confident you are in doing it.Amy: That is absolutely true, and I think a lot of people see networking as something very fake and forced and inauthentic, and they don't feel good about it, right? It kind of leaves, like, an icky, like, feeling about it, and when you approach it from, you know, almost gamifying it--I've done that in the past, right? "I'm gonna meet three people today. I'm gonna help three people with something," whether it's, you know, I'm gonna carry somebody's bag or I'm gonna hold open a door and say hello. Like, something, and so I think sometimes just kind of reframing how we think about networking can make a huge difference in our behaviors and our attitudes and ultimately in our results.Traci: Right. You actually said something that I think is very important, that networking and connecting with people if you treat it as "What can you do for that person?" versus "What can I get from that person?" Because people know when you're being fake. People know when you, you know, just have your hand out or you're looking for something, but we need to first of all not undervalue ourselves and recognize that we each bring something unique, but there's only one me. Nobody else brings exactly what I bring in this combination, and we have to recognize that that has value and that other people will see that value, and if we focus on "What can we offer others, even if it's a small kindness?" You know, those things, the universe will bring those things back to you.Amy: Absolutely. So I know that in addition to your day job you also volunteer with the CPCU Society's diversity and inclusion committee, and I know what a time commitment that is because I'm on the committee as well, but can you tell me how and why you got involved?Traci: I got involved because I was asked. [?]. I was new to Rhode Island, and I actually got--I'm on the board of the local chapter [?], and I was moving to Rhode Island. I said, "I don't know anyone. I want to, you know, meet folks, so joining this organization would be a great way to make friends and immerse myself even more deeply in my industry." So my request to volunteer resulted in me being asked to be on the board, and my relationship with David resulted in him asking if I was interested in being on the diversity committee. And it's a lot of work, but I think that it is important. I think the idea of diversity and inclusion has evolved so much over the years. When a lot of people hear diversity, you know, they think racial diversity, they think gender diversity, but there are so many other types of diversity, and it really I think is about making sure that there are opportunities for everyone, but I think it's also toward being a catalyst for the mindset that needs to happen so that opportunities are there for everyone automatically. We don't have to say, you know, "Oh, we have to go out and make sure that we have a person of color," there's a person of color because we just organically created a culture and a society with people of color in our community, so of course they're gonna have a role in our company, in our organization.Amy: Absolutely. And I tell people, "If you look around and you don't see someone's group represented, it's because you've got work to do to make people feel welcome and make people feel comfortable there." The responsibility is not on others to seek you out, right? And so, you know, I'm thrilled to be a part of the diversity and inclusion committee because I see that what's coming for us in terms of our talent, right, we have so many people on the verge of retirement in the insurance industry, and we just don't have the groundswell of interest among people, you know, that we need to replace all of that knowledge and all of that talent, and so I think, you know, we're gonna have to get beyond the "certain people from certain schools" and, you know, really reach out broadly and show people what we've got and why we're such a good place to have a career.Traci: Right. I think it's about building the excitement about the industry. You know, insurance isn't sexy to most people, and I think that, you know, the work that we do, particularly with the CPCU Society and the diversity and inclusion committee, is to educate the public about the excitement. Like, it's kind of our job to get them excited about insurance and to show them what next level opportunities there are. It's not just sitting behind a desk in a blue suit and white shirt and red tie. [both laugh]Amy: Absolutely true. So I wanted to ask you too about role models. Do you have any professional role models, and if so, what about them inspires you? Traci: So there's a woman--the woman that I mentioned that used to work with me, and I consider her a role model. So a few things about her that resonated with me... first of all, she's very tall like I am. [laughs] And that's something that it took a lot of years for me to overcome, because there's a tendency when you're quite tall to not want to intimidate people, so you tend to kind of--you slump a little, you try to make yourself small. So it takes a courage to just be, to stand up and just be who you are and recognize that you're putting that in your mind about, you know, your stature intimidates people, but she had such a grace about her and just a way of connecting with people. I don't know. She just had influence. She had such presence and influence, and that is something that I admire greatly and something that I work toward emulating.Amy: That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. So I hear men a lot of times will talk about "tall privilege," right? So if you're a tall man, and the statistics bear this out, tall men make more money than short men. They get promoted to higher positions. Like, we revere tall men in our society. Tall women have a different set of characteristics ascribed to them, and I am--I am not blessed with height. I'm only 5'3", but I can--you know, I can imagine how that might play out and how that might affect the way you show up. And, you know, if you're trying to make yourself smaller physically, you're probably also trying to minimize your presence in a room and minimize your contribution and not call attention to yourself and not let the best of you thrive in an environment. Traci: Actually it's interesting, 'cause I had a conversation with someone probably about six weeks ago about the idea that as a very tall not petite woman of color, if I am annoyed at work or if I feel very passionately about something, I feel that I don't have the luxury of being as vocal as someone who is not of my stature and my pigmentation, because it's perceived differently. Amy: If you're vocal about a frustration, I would imagine that the word that comes back to you is "angry" or "aggressive." If I get upset about something, if I'm frustrated and I express my frustration, I'm [BLEEP], right? I'm not angry 'cause I'm white and I'm not aggressive 'cause I'm short, but I'm [BLEEP] or I'm overreacting or I'm sensitive, right? And so I think that we all kind of operate in these constraints of words that are going to be used to describe us to kind of keep us in check, 'cause I don't like it when people say that I'm being sensitive. It's like, "No, I'm not being sensitive. You're being a jerk." But--[both laugh] that's not on me. So I can understand how that would be a struggle. So what advice do you have for young people of color in navigating those kinds of interactions? Because you want people to be, I'm guessing--I mean, we want people to show up authentically, right, but we don't want to lay a trap for people who the moment they speak up and advocate for themselves they get labeled in a way that's damaging to their careers.Traci: I can tell you what's worked for me. I think--to your point, it is important that you be who you are. So I'm 5'10". I'm gonna wear my four-inch heels because that's what I want to wear. If I think that something is not right, I am going to speak up about it. What I try to do is--and I'm just gonna say it, because I don't want to suggest that anyone be manipulative, but in a business setting, okay, what I do is I say to myself, "What is it that I want to get out of this exchange?" And, you know, know who my audience is and know what I need to say and how I need to say it to get what I need out of this interaction. You know, and I'm not talking about things where, like, I don't know, I'm being discriminated against or harassed or something like that, 'cause that's a whole different--and that's, thank God, never happened to me to my knowledge, but that's a whole other kind of conversation, but just an every day--you know, your boss has said something that you didn't like, or you've been assigned something that you don't think you should have to do or something to that affect. I think that it's important to always conduct yourself professionally. I think it's also important to separate your feelings from what the situation is, because just like the other person has their biases and this whole set of ideas and backgrounds that's influencing their behavior, so do we, and we have to recognize, like, the things that we're sensitive about. We have to recognize how we might have contributed to that situation, and we need to present our case in a constructive way. And it's interesting, because I have a 25-year-old daughter who's going through this at work right now, and what I've encouraged her to do is, you know, write down what you want to say. Ask your boss for a meeting, and even if you need to have that piece of paper in front of you, make your point. You know, if you feel a certain way, rather than saying, "You, you, you, you, you make me feel, you did, you, you, you," I would turn that around and say, "When you say or do, I perceive it as," because what you're then doing is you're taking ownership of your feelings and you're very clearly drawing that path from "This is what happened, this is how I felt, and this is how I responded to it. What are we gonna do now to fix it?"Amy: Mm-hmm. And so really what you're describing is emotional intelligence, and, you know, in my experience I've found that I am the most emotionally intelligent when I am the least represented in the room, and I am probably the least emotionally intelligent when I am most represented in the room, and so I try--once I recognized that about myself, I try very hard to think about the dynamics of a meeting or the dynamics of a conversation and "Do I need to kind of practice some of those skills because I'm dominating and maybe running over someone who doesn't feel safe to speak up with me?" Right? And so I think that if we can all do our part, right, to recognize when maybe we've got a little bit more influence or a little bit more social power and kind of back off a little bit and make some space.Traci: Yeah, and there's actually power in being able to do that I think, right? I think that when your peers see you navigate let's say a contentious situation, you know, if everybody's on 15 on a scale of 1 to 10 and you're on maybe 7 and bring everybody down to where it can be resolved, then people are gonna look at you as a change agent, if you will. So I just think that that's powerful.Amy: Yeah, absolutely. And that's leadership, right? Leadership is getting everybody to a better place together. So no, I think that's great. In the time that we have left, I'd like to ask you to finish my sentence. First is "I feel included when ______."Traci: I feel included when I am able to express myself.Amy: Oh, I like that. And then the second part is "When I feel included, I ______."Traci: When I feel included, I'm able to include others.Amy: I love that. I love having people answer this, because everybody answers differently, and it's always powerful. So Traci feels included when she's allowed to express herself, and when she feels included, she is able to include others, and I don't know that there's anything more powerful than that, to be able to widen that circle and bring others in. So that's fantastic. Traci, thank you so much for your time today.Traci: Oh, it was my pleasure. I appreciate you so much.Amy: Oh, thank you very much.

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How A Group of Martians are Using Omnichannel Experiences and Voice Technology to Impact eCommerce

Up Next In Commerce

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2020 49:32

For those not in the know, The Mars Agency is an independent agency that combines the best of technology with the best human intelligence to provide solutions to businesses throughout the world of retail and eCommerce. And one of the Martians who leads the charge at Mars is Amy Andrews, the SVP Business Development & eCommerce. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Amy walked us through all the trends she’s been seeing in the eCommerce industry, including the changing consumer behavior, the rise of omnichannel experiences, and why companies that can crack the code of using voice plus video technology could see a huge payoff. Key Takeaways: There is an opportunity to merge eCommerce and influencer content in order to make a more relevant and personalized shopping experience The amount of data in the eCommerce world is overwhelming and can lead to losing the humanity of the work, which Mars tries to avoid by having a blend of the best technology and the smartest humanity Voice shopping still hasn’t reached its tipping point, but there is data that shows that voice technology is growing in the world of eCommerce For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible eCommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce, this is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org and your host of this lovely podcast. Today we're joined by Amy Andrews, SEP of business development and eCommerce at the Mars Agency. Amy, how are you? Amy: I'm doing well Stephanie, how are you doing? Stephanie: Doing great, yeah as great as can be. So, when I heard of the Mars Agency, I saw that you called your, was it your customers or your employees Martians? Amy: We call our employees Martians, very lovingly. Stephanie: Oh man, I love that. I was trying to think of a name I wanted to give our employees, but nothing comes close to that. Tell me a little bit about the Mars Agency and how all that came about. Amy: Sure. So the Mars Agency has been around for over 45 years, started by an amazing woman, Marilyn Barnett, and really our focus has been on marketing to shoppers over that last, almost half a century. And Marilyn was really a pioneer in this space, she used to be when she started kind of the grocery model who would hold the box of laundry detergent as people walked by. And really just, yeah, and talk about women in business. She was just such an interesting leader and saw that as a marketing opportunity for brands at retail, and started the Mars Agency. And we have a long history in shopper marketing, and shopper marketing is really just marketing to shoppers so, as that has evolved and how people shop has evolved, we followed them and led them to all those different places. Stephanie: Got it. So are you working with large brands to kind of teach them the trends in the industry and how to market to, like you said, the shoppers, is that how to think about the Mars Agency? Amy: Yep. We work with a lot of large consumer package good clients so, like Campbell Soup, Nestle Waters, several others across top retailers. So Walmart, Target, and for me in the eCommerce space, Amazon is definitely a huge player. Stephanie: Okay, cool. And what is your day to day look like there, what is your role look like? Amy: So I lead our eCommerce team, which I mentioned some of the retailers but we really work across all eCommerce retailers and digital platforms. If you think about things that some of you probably use more recently than others like Instacart and other delivery services. We help brands market to their shoppers in those spaces, and really anywhere that you can buy a product online. Which used to be physical stores would convert it online, or your kind of Amazon, Pure Play retailers, and now as I'm sure you've experienced definitely, there's a lot of different options to buy online as you're scrolling through. Instagram you can shop now and kind of always be almost we're moving towards one click away from a purchase in any environment so, that's really what my team focuses on, for our clients, how do we help them market and ultimately sell more online? Stephanie: Got it. Has everything with COVID-19 kind of adjusted your strategy of what you're advising your clients to do? Or what kind of shifts have you made when it comes to that advisory role? Amy: Yeah that's a great question. I think we have seen a lot of data as this, sadly continues for us. But it has definitely had a huge impact on the eCommerce space, particularly for grocery, since a lot of our clients are the CPG packaged clients. We've seen online grocery projections in the last couple of weeks reach what we thought they would be in 2025. So there's been, yeah huge growth in this space, and a lot of new users to this space so, we know that's out of necessity, but again as this kind of continues, we think that a lot of these people, like 60% of people tried a delivery service for the first time in the last six weeks. That's a ton of new people who are buying new groceries online and, yeah there's been a lot of experience as I'm sure you've heard with, not being able to find what you want, or having slow delivery time- Stephanie: Yeah. Being out of stock of my favorite matcha tea, very disappointing. Amy: Out of stock, yes. Which is a little bit easier to deal with than toilet paper but- Stephanie: Yeah, I guess. Amy: I guess it depends on where you are on both with your supply but, no we've had ... Yeah, a lot of people are having to make different choices and having to try things but as this continues, I think people are forming new habits, and even new preferences, so it's definitely influencing how we're advising our clients and where they should invest. I think what's also interesting is because of a lot of those issues, a lot of our clients and a lot of retailers have just put their marketing on pause, to make sure that they can get things in stock, and for retailers to make sure that they're not price scourging or kind of promoting things in the wrong way that would send the wrong message. Amy: So I think what will be interesting long term is, some retailers and brands kind of catch that, and once they have products in stock, once, even Amazon this week has fixed some of their Amazon Fresh delivery issues. As those things start getting worked out, I think they'll be a lot more interesting marketing opportunities, especially as you think about all those new users, either to a retailer or to a brand. I don't know if you bought a different tea brand when you couldn't find yours. Stephanie: I did, I did. Amy: Yeah, a lot of people are having that experience right, so then it's like how does that new brand try and keep you and then how does your old brand try and get you back? So we're definitely working with our clients on all those types of questions. Stephanie: Got it. Do you think clients should be turning off their marketing budgets? As you mentioned, a lot of them are doing that right now, do you think that's a good strategy, or should they till be maybe thinking of ways to experiment because this is a whole new world, it might be actually a good opportunity to kind of experiment a bit without offending people if possible? Amy: Yeah, no, I think ... Yeah, I think it is a bit of both. I think initially, not just marketing but a lot of businesses and industries, just kind of paused to figure out and make sense of what was going on and determine what they should do next. And I think that was, probably a smart move at the time, just to not make any rash decisions. But we're definitely partnering with our clients now on, what is the right way to market. I think one of the trends that we'll see is probably a lot more regional and geographic differences. Like we in the Bay Area are still sheltering in place for another month. So, online shopping here will be very different than other states that are opening up. Amy: And, marketing to those people might be very appropriate now, and I would definitely recommend testing and trying things in that space. Stephanie: Got it. Amy: So I think it's going to have to be a combination. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. Do you see the companies you work with coming to you with similar struggles? Like other themes that you're hearing and any advice around some of those struggles that they're experiencing? Amy: Yeah. I think a lot of the marketing struggles, or just some of the struggles on a more macro level of just the unknown, especially in terms of timing and how long it will continue. And then we kind of have some of the same issues in terms of data, you know there's so much out there, like when you turn on the news, you see so many different stories and different points, sometimes it's kind of hard to determine what are the right guidelines, or what's the right data that you should follow. So, we're really treating this as an ongoing conversation with our clients. And it does differ by geography, it does differ by category or industry. So, I think taking a really custom approach and being able to adapt now, and have a strategy where you're also able to easily adapt moving forward, is going to be really important. Amy: We typically do annual planning with our brands, and we've already been talking, you know we're already in the stages of re-planning but, I think re-planning will be something we do all year now, I don't think it's kind of the pre COVID plan and the post COVID plan, I think it's going to be continuing to adapt. And the brands and retailers that are able to evolve in that way are probably going to be the most successful. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. It seems like a good time to kind of pivot in certain areas, cut projects that aren't, maybe as necessary, and thinking in a completely new light based on everything that's happening. What kind of things do you see being cut or changes be made in these re-planning sessions at these companies? Amy: I mean, the big question now, which the Mars Agency is tackling with our clients is, what might come back in-store and what might not, in terms of marketing and planning around that? There's the kind of legal or even not legal, but kind of the official guidelines or restrictions side of things, in terms of how people shop and how many people can enter the store at what time. But then I think there's also a very real consumer behavior piece of it. So, one thing that has happened in stores and that a lot of our brands being food brands, we've done is, things around sampling and trying new products. And whether that's a cooked piece of food outside of a wrapper, or a sealed up new product, I think in both of those cases, I don't know if for myself, and if I think about other shoppers, I don't know how eager we're going to be to take either one of those samples now. Amy: So, we're trying to rethink things like that that have been really traditional vehicles to encourage trial, how do we think about that in a new way? Either if that's a re-plan in terms of, what do we do with those dollars and invest them in something else? Or what I think is maybe more creative and exciting is, how do we think about sampling in a new way? Or how do we think about demos in a new way? And that's where we really see the in-store and the eComm world kind of colliding, and really creating some of these omnichannel is the word that we use a lot. Stephanie: Yeah. Amy: Omnichannel experiences, so that we're moving towards that anyway, and I think COVID has been an interesting tipping point to, as you said, kind of pivot and think about these things, and push ourselves to think about them even more differently now, to deliver the best shopper experience. Stephanie: Yeah, it seems like it could be with everything bad that happened, maybe a good forcing function to kind of push some brands into the eCommerce world who maybe weren't fully utilizing it before, or not at all. Do you see them being able to adapt to some of these changes that you're recommending them or being able to shift something that they've always been focused on selling in-store, always focused on someone having that in-person experience, like you said, whether it's a sample, a demo, have you seen them be able to pivot on to eCommerce, or being open to that, or even having the technology to do it? Amy: Yeah. I mean I'm pretty optimistic, so I think yes, I think all brands can do this and adapt and pivot and do so relatively easily. I think that was a big question before all of this, and the crisis was just how quickly should each, brand based on their category, be moving into this space? And a lot of brands were over-invested in eCommerce because they felt that that was going to be the future so they're a bit of a step ahead. And that doesn't mean that other brands can't catch up but, I think COVID has just been a kind of internal tipping point for a lot of organizations to think about how they're treating eCommerce and maybe prioritizing it a little bit differently. Amy: So, yeah for brands or companies who weren't thinking about it before, I would definitely say, now's the time. And, because the whole industry and the whole world is really shaken up, it's a great time to think about how you're treating eCommerce differently, and then within the eCommerce space, what we can be doing differently there as well. Stephanie: Got it. Is there anyone that you ever looked to in the industry, where you maybe point your clients in that direction of being like, hey, here's an industry leader when it comes to the checkout experience, or the shopping experience, or the unboxing, or anything like that? Anyone that you guys kind of look to as like a leader in the space? Amy: Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are a lot of examples of brands or retailers doing, I would say pieces of the puzzle really well. The one that comes to mind for me as someone who is creating a really holistic, best in class experience, is actually a retailer. I think IKEA does a phenomenal job in this space, in terms of just digital experiences. They have different digital technologies, and apps and platforms, and AI, and all of that, that is really just helping recreate the experience of going to an enormous, huge physical retail destination, I mean, I can't think of a more traditional shopping experience than kind of browsing through those huge displays in IKEA. Stephanie: So many levels, at least here in Palo Alto. Amy: Yes, definitely. I think of like a huge retail footprint that they've had to translate into a digital experience. There's one now where instead of IKEA saying, what's the best .com site or digital catalog? They are thinking what's the best shopping experience? And now you can as a shopper, walk through an IKEA store, through virtual reality, and pick different products, and then also using AI to see them in your own bedroom. So I think they've just done a great- Stephanie: Oh wow, that's awesome. Amy: ... Job. Yeah, I think I've just done a great job of thinking about it a little bit differently, and kind of doing it in a fun way that that's the biggest piece for myself as a shopper as well, that's sometimes missing from the online shopping experience. It's so convenient, and there are so many wonderful, wonderful benefits that come along with that. But you do lose kind of the fun of shopping, and browsing around, and I think IKEA has done a nice job of bringing some of that physical experience in a fun, very branded IKEA way, to their shoppers digitally. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. I think sometimes people forget that it's not just shopping and trying to buy the thing, but really, like when I go to IKEA, it's my day. It's a whole experience, I'm ready, I'm prepared, I've had my snack, and I'm ready to go through every single setup area to like look at their bedroom, and see how they set it up, and look at this living room setup and incorporating VR into that shows that they know exactly why their customers, at least customers like me come there, is to be able to experience it like I'm actually there. So yeah, that's great. Are you advising other companies to kind of, not only think that way but maybe moving into technologies like that, that they weren't utilizing before? Whether it's VR, or AR, or any of that kind of stuff? Amy: Yes. And I would say just even more broadly, we're advising our clients, and working with a lot of our clients right now on, how do we create the best digital content that's going to be relevant for an eCommerce shopping experience? So, yes that could be an amazing VR IKEA type experience, or that could be a six-second video on a product page, that tells you exactly what you need to know about the benefits of this new water that you're drinking. So I think it's about, what's right for those different brands and, then having that content strategy that then dictates what technology you might need to use to deliver it. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah, I definitely see that shift of a lot of companies, brands, turning into kind of their own media companies when it comes to producing their content, and focusing heavier on that, and not just on a paid strategy where maybe that's been, how it's been for a couple of years. Amy: Yeah, I think I've also seen brands, hopefully, using technology to deliver experience instead of just kind of using or testing, technology for technology's sake, or to have something new. So, it used to be QR codes, and then maybe some AR that just, is just kind of there for the fun, cool factor, that's interesting. In some cases, it's kind of fun, but I think if you're just doing it for the tech's sake, and it doesn't deliver a consumer, or a shopper benefit, it's really a fad and kind of dies quickly. So, we're always trying to think about, what's the need first, and then what can we use to deliver against that? Stephanie: Yeah, it's good to flip that mindset when it comes to that, because yeah I can think of, especially QR code, that's a good example. I've seen random places it's on there, like a cereal box or something that delivers no value, and I don't actually want to even see what's behind that QR code, it seems like it was just placed there because everyone was doing it. So- Amy: Right someone told that- Stephanie: ... You definitely- Amy: ... Told that marketer, "You need a QR code." And they checked that box. Stephanie: They did it. Amy: Yeah. Stephanie: Have you, when it comes to content, I know a lot of brands right now like you said, are focused on that and trying to make sure they get, of course, new customers in that vertical, and also make sure they put out great content. Have you seen any best practices with their clients around like you said, short product videos seem to really increase conversions where you know, like something on YouTube, if you've never been on YouTube maybe isn't the best way to go? Is there any themes around that? Amy: Yeah. I would say generally we always start with what's going to be the right message for the type of media, or for the type of tactics. So, you mentioned YouTube, that's obviously a very different format than say Pinterest, who's also having quite a moment with everyone at home looking for inspiration and recipes, and all of that. Obviously, that type of content you would develop for that would be very relevant to our brands, but also relevant to that platform and what we know people are looking for there. Yeah, I think we're definitely moving towards kind of more bite-size, or smaller content formats, in general. So definitely short format, we always give the example of, you don't want to have your 30 second or 67, 60 second, excuse me, TV spot and just use that everywhere, on your eCommerce sites or on your digital media more broadly, we want to be tailoring it for the environment. Amy: I think another thing that we're trying to do a lot more of now, in terms of a trend, is how are we leveraging influencer and user-generated content in a new way? So, if we talk about relevancy, especially in the eComm world where reviews are so important, and the new mom, you might go on and you're testing the reviews of a stroller, or a really important product for your baby more than you trust advice from your own parent, or from your mom peer group even right? So, people play a ton of influence on that, especially in the eComm space. So, thinking about how we merge eCommerce and influencers, has been really interesting and we've been working with our clients on taking influencer content from a particular shopper since we're in that space. Amy: So, how do you leverage Walmart influencer content on walmart.com, and Amazon influencer content on their site? And in doing so, you create an even more relevant experience for the shopper, because not only do they have those product details and reviews, but you've kind of put all that influencer content in one place, so they can have more ideas on how to use your products, or just more relevant images and messages based on people like them. Stephanie: Yeah, that completely makes sense. I wonder if right now, with how the market is, if it'll kind of give the wrong signals to companies. Like maybe, you have all these people at home so, if you see content is very easy to get right now, you have people maybe at home who actually want the longer podcast and the longer clips. Whereas after all this starts to calm down, I wonder if it'll be hard for brands to kind of pivot again, if all that reverses. And, all of a sudden there's not many consumers who want to create content for free anymore, and long reviews and, people want those shorter clips, like you talked about. Do you see any problems coming up by brands acting too quickly right now, to kind of pivot to what the environment is now? To then it reversing maybe again in a month or six months. Amy: Yeah, I think that's a good question, and that's why I think, as I kind of mentioned earlier, we're taking a proactive but kind of cautious approach. So, one thing we did for one of our brands was, we just went out immediately and pulled out content that, I don't want to say offensive, because that's almost too strong of a word, but pulled out content that wasn't culturally sensitive. For example, a group of people in a home that was more than 10 people. Stephanie: Got it. Amy: We went in and took all of that content down, you know, just to make sure we were being sensitive, and we were also being relevant. Even if someone wasn't particularly upset about it, and maybe they had no thought on it, but we want to make sure we're giving them the most relevant message of how our brand can be used in their lives. So I think that it is going to be an evolution, it's going to be really interesting to see kind of what behaviors stick. I think bread makers was one of the top terms searched on Amazon, the last several weeks. So, I wonder if we're going to get burnt out on making bread anytime soon. Stephanie: That does sound delightful but I'm like, yeah, I don't know how long that trend will last because, my mother-in-law makes bread, and man is it a process. Amy: Well, maybe she needs a bread maker. Stephanie: I know, she does. Amy: But yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how much of those are kind of the COVID trends that then people get sick of it, or people want to, I'm not sure, maybe people will want to race back to the stores like you said, it'll be maybe really exciting when an IKEA opens, and you can go back in, and browse around and get your meatballs and all that. And I'm thinking people are going to do that in a different way. And I think that we're going to have to continue to evolve. So, that's what I mentioned about the kind of planning, I think annual planning is dead. I think we're going to be planning over and over again, if that's monthly if we can get kind of more on a routine, or maybe that's just continuous as things change, and as the news changes. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree. So, the Mars Agency has been around for almost 50 years I think, how does the company and the Martians of the company, recognize trends and then act on it quick enough to help your clients? Amy: Yeah, I think, I honestly think that's why we have been able to be around so long. In the marketing and advertising world, we're one of the few independents who's left, we're still family-run, the company is now run by Marilyn's son and Ken Barnett. And I think that having that independence, and having really just a lot of still that entrepreneurial spirit, has allowed us to really adapt as the industry has adapted and, in most cases kind of stay one step ahead. We talk a lot about our Martians, as you said, and really think that there's a balance between, our people and our technology. So, over the years we've, of course, as most industries have invested more in technology and data, and all of that, we've also really balanced that with our Martians and having, what we say is the latest technology and the smartest humanity. Amy: I think some companies, especially in the eCommerce space, because there's so much data there, and so many different tech platforms, I think if you go too far in that direction, well one, there can just be kind of data overload, and you're not able to find the insights and all the data. But two, I think you just lose a lot of that humanity, and kind of that person who we like to be who's saying, "Well, why is that the case? And, what does that data point mean?" And kind of taking it that step deeper, so that we can really understand what the human behavior is because I think that's where you have the best marketing ideas that really resonate with people, instead of just kind of trying to attack a data point. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. Are there certain metrics or data points that you've seen many brands use that you're like, you guys are all using this, but it actually doesn't really tell you much. Instead, maybe you should look at this instead. Amy: Well, because we're focused on shopper marketing and conversion, I mean, our ultimate data point is always sales. So we're always looking at, how many products were we able to sell as a result. Along with that though, you obviously want to understand what other impact you might have had on engagement. Or, in some cases, there are other circumstances that are affecting sales that are out of our control. We, of course, want to measure all the other media metrics as well. I think to answer your question on, are there certain metrics that brands are looking at that they shouldn't? I don't know if I would say you shouldn't look at this, but I think a lot of brands are placing a disproportionate kind of weight in the eCommerce based on their ROAS or their return on ad spend. Amy: And there's just some interesting ... There are some ways that you can get a very high ROAS, and that a lot of media companies or retailers will say, you had a very high ROAS and it's typically because you are reaching people who would have purchased anyway. So I think that's one where, it does beg the question of sometimes having a person or maybe a smarter data set that's kind of suggesting, why is that the case? And digging a little bit deeper to understand the why behind that metric. Stephanie: Yeah, that seems like an easy way for someone to be like, hey, look how great those ads doing when you're like, all those people were already previous customers so. Amy: Right if you're ... Yes, if you're targeting past purchasers, you can typically get a pretty high ROAS so. Stephanie: Yeah, that's pretty funny. Are there any new emerging technologies that you're advising marketers to look at or other like eCommerce platforms that you're telling people to check out? Amy: I don't know if I would say this is an emerging technology, but just in light of all of the changes around COVID, I would say looking more at new delivery platforms or channels. And this is something that, we're just having early conversations with our clients on now. But, there are a lot of what used to be in the world of retail, relatively niche players You see a lot of those platforms having really explosive growth now, kind of during this COVID period. So it'll be interesting to see how that behavior might change over time. Amy: I think we're also seeing some really interesting partnerships, so you can have your 7-Eleven order delivered by DoorDash. Or you can make a reservation to shop at a local store on OpenTable. Again, those aren't new technologies, but I think it's kind of new platforms and new channels that will be really interesting to test and learn as we go, as you're suggesting, and then also as things, hopefully at some point, kind of start to normalize. Stephanie: Yeah, cool. And then how do you think about, I saw on your website that you were talking about getting the most out of voice technology and how to conquer Amazon? Do you think, I know voice technology, it feels like it's been trying to ... It's been like that up and up for a while and no one's really cracked it. Even when I was at Google, it still felt like they couldn't crack it. How do you think about incorporating that into what your clients are doing? And same with Amazon as well? Amy: Yeah, that's a great question and you nailed it. I think it has been growing, we have on my eCommerce team, a dedicated voice specialist has a background in user experience. And, similarly, I think we've had tons of great conversations around voice, we've seen tons of great data in terms of how it's growing, but I don't think we've reached the tipping point yet of voice shopping. I think it's still, some of the data and it'll be interesting again, to see kind of how this being at home more might change that. But, there are definitely different behaviors that have grown with voice more than shopping has. We're still actively pursuing and exploring that with our clients. Mars is the preferred Alexa developer, we also work with Google Voice as you mentioned. Amy: But I think it just comes back to, really the foundation of what we do which is, how can we create better shopper experiences, and voice definitely has the technology to do that. I think it's just about the adoption, especially in the shopping space. So to date, we've worked with our clients on, creating skills that can be useful to shoppers based on their different categories. But I think it'll be interesting to maybe see how COVID changes the voice space as well. Stephanie: Yeah, I could see that becoming useful, especially as the catalogs get bigger of what the brands are putting on their eCommerce sites. It'll be easier if you're able just to tell the website like, I want to find this, instead of having to go through the whole catalog and try and find exactly what you want, and it probably growing by 50% from the time you were there maybe two months ago if they can crack, getting the voice technology to actually work and be seamless, and not an extra step. Amy: Yeah. And then I think another thing that'll be interesting now is just, I even have to remind myself as we're talking because typically we think voice and we think, speaking into the speaker, but with the combination of voice and video. Plus people being at home and maybe wanting more, we know there's been a huge surge in recipe searches for example. I think having the voice plus visual is a different way that brands should be thinking about voice now, and something that we're working with some of our clients on. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. And what about the conquering Amazon piece? I'm only thinking about how that maybe has shifted a lot, especially lately because of everything Amazon is doing of like, only surfacing maybe essential things, and changing shipping times, and maybe kind of burying certain retailers if they didn't view them as essential. I could see a lot of people kind of getting scared about relying on Amazon as their platform to sell from, and maybe moving away from that and trying to build their own eCommerce store on their own, and just do their own thing. Do you see that kind of happening? Or what are your thoughts around Amazon? Amy: Yeah I mean, Amazon could probably be a whole nother topic or hour. Stephanie: A whole podcast one. Amy: Exactly, I'm sure there are millions. But, I think in terms of, we've been really digging into what has this last six or so weeks meant? And where have we seen new growth? Walmart.com in March was the number one downloaded app in the grocery space and surpassed Amazon for the first time. So, it's interesting to kind of see all these stats and you think, oh, maybe Amazon isn't as important. Amazon just still dominates the eCommerce space. Which is why you mentioned, we have it on our website. I would say even as of two months ago, people were using Amazon and eComm interchangeably, almost. Amy: So, it's great and it's exciting to see that, and as we have always advised our clients, we should think about this holistically across this space and across all different retailer dot-coms and delivery platforms like your eCommerce strategy should be comprehensive. But I don't see Amazon ever not being a component of that, at least not in the near future. There are a lot of issues now from a user experience, from a shopping experience, also as you mentioned with brands and maybe being deprioritized for essentials or not being able to market in the way that they have been able to before. But it still really is the lion's share, it's still seeing the most growth during this time period. Amy: So it's not, I don't think it's a place that brands can afford not to be, with the exception of maybe a couple of the really big ones. But I think the idea of trying to tackle eCommerce without Amazon, or without having a strategy around Amazon, and there's by the way, a bunch of different ways that you can do that, it definitely doesn't have to be every brand's number one eCommerce retailer. But I think it probably has to be part of the strategy, just because of the number of shoppers that are using that as their primary eCommerce destination. Stephanie: Yeah, agree. So earlier we were talking about brands creating content, how do you think about the intersection, or what do you advise your clients when it comes to the intersection of content management system, their commerce platform, and their CRM? How do you see that working in their space are any best practices around that or advice? Amy: Yeah, I think, I mean one is to be thinking about the total experiences we've been talking about, and making sure that, no matter what agencies or, in our case, we're oftentimes working with a lot of other agencies either at different parts of the funnel or that the brand is working with for different pieces of their advertising. A lot of our clients are large enough that they're hiring multiple agencies. So I think it's, having IT as planning processes that are very integrated, and making sure you're connecting all the different partners so that you can leverage all of the different content and all of the different wonderful assets. Amy: In terms of, what should the content strategy be, I think it comes back to, what's going to be best and what's going to be needed and relevant for the shopper in that environment. So, we're really working with our brands in the eCommerce space on, how are you creating eComm content that typically doesn't always exist in other brand channels? So, how are you creating content for your product pages with information that people need to know when they're at that point of buying you versus buying a competitor. If you don't have that right content, let's create it, we help our clients map that out on what's needed in terms of assets, and videos, and enhanced content, and all of that. Amy: And then really track that over time to make sure that we're constantly optimizing it. We have a new technology, an eShelf maximizer tool that uses data to look across different websites, and identify across thousands of skews for a lot of our brands, what product pages might have some issues or some areas of opportunity, and then we can fix those right away. And with the retailer's constantly changing their algorithms and limitations, and all of that. This is kind of a huge pain point for our brands so, even though we'll optimize content as brands change their packaging, or new products launch, there's kind of continual issues and continued opportunities to optimize. So we're using technology to make sure that we can stay ahead of that and be really proactive for our brands. Stephanie: Got it. Do you see them being able to kind of manage that in a way that stays organized? Because, I kind of view a lot of brands having their content management as one silo, and their CRMs another one, and their commerce platforms another one, it doesn't seem like they've been able to integrate like, well, here's how our content is affecting our customers and actual conversions. Do you see that kind of shifting now? Or are a lot of your brands already ahead and they're already kind of all intertwined, and they got it? Amy: Oh, I wish that was the case. No, I think, I mean, I think we have silos within the Mars Agency, I think most companies have silos, I think most of our clients would say that they have silos within their companies as well. Unfortunately, I think that is a reality so I don't want to gloss over that picture too much. I think it's about, how do you look for ways to work and collaborate across those silos, for more of a common goal? So, I think eComm has been a silo for a lot of brands today. We've kind of siloed it off and said, let's deal with that separately because we don't quite know what to do with it, or maybe it's still a little bit too new for our brand or company. Amy: And this is really a moment when I think we can be integrating it in, we certainly have done that at Mars. Our team is now integrated with our customer development team. So when we're working on a Walmart plan, it's not the Walmart in-store plan and the walmart.com plan, we're all one team. So I think hopefully, that would be an outcome of this time period is kind of breaking down some of the eCommerce silos. But I think as you pointed out, there's definitely still an opportunity for, I would say most brands, to kind of better connect. I think content and eComm are coming together much more naturally. I think CRM is still a piece that we could, as an industry, probably better connect to some of the other pieces. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree. Have you seen, like what do you think the first step is to that digital transformation? Or have you seen a company really do it well? Is it like start from scratch, throw everything away and start over? Or, how have you seen that work? Amy: I think that actually, most companies have kind of, that we've worked with, have kind of taken eComm out and brought it back in, or taking the digital team out and brought it back in. And I think that's actually an okay approach in terms of, especially where you are with your company's growth in this space, some kind of half joking that eComm has been a silo. But, in a way that's been necessary for some companies because, as eCommerce has grown, it typically starts off as an add on within a current team, and then as it grows, it kind of gets its own silo, or its own little team on the side, and then as they get big enough, they come back into the integrated team, typically the marketing team, or in some cases, the sales team. Amy: And I think that that makes sense because, as the space grows for different clients, it needs different resources. I think a lot of companies are going to be fast tracking that now, so they might skip that step of having the separate eCommerce team and just automatically integrate it. I don't think that's a bad thing, I think that could be beneficial to, instead of kind of separating it or starting from scratch, just integrating in from the team from the beginning. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. That sounds like good advice. So, do you see any disruptions coming to eCommerce? Like one thing I've been paying close attention to, or reading up a bit is about these pop up retail stores. And I think maybe that could be a trend that a lot of retail stores are closing down right now, and people might be scared to actually set up locations for 10 year leases, after all this dies down. So I'm wondering how maybe that could influence the future of retail and eCommerce. Do you see any disruptions like that that is on the horizon that you guys are looking into when it comes to eCommerce? Amy: Yeah. I mean I think there's going to continue to be a lot of disruptions, and probably a fast tracking of what would have happened anyway. So, some, as we've seen in the last several years, some really established big box retailers have closed down, or shut several of their locations, because that huge size of space didn't make sense anymore, and to your point that frees up space for other types of retailer formats. I think coming out of this that, one of the disruptions will be, what we go to a physical store for, versus what we continue to buy online. So I think there's going to be a lot of differences in those categories, and even in in subcategories within that. I think what's going to be interesting about the physical stores is just, how do we deliver an experience in those stores that is worth kind of leaving your house for? Amy: And I think some of the best retailers, and some of the best brands have been talking about that for years, right? How do we create a physical experience of our brand? If you think of like the flagship stores, that's meant to be bringing the brand to life and delivering on that experience, and then you think of retailers who have been improving their in store experience, to get people to browse other categories, or browse other sections. I think a lot of that was a trend that will now really be pushed and challenged, and fast tracked as we rethink about what that physical space means to a shopper. So, pop ups, as you mentioned, were great because they were delivering a different experience and that was a reason to go, see something new, or maybe see something that you could only buy there. Amy: I think exclusives will probably continue and be played around with in a new way in terms of what's exclusive online versus in store. But I think it's a little early to tell what disruptions are going to continue, and how people are going to use those physical spaces. I mentioned it earlier, but I could also see there being a big difference in geographies. The coasts have always been a little different anyway, but I could see the the retail experience on the coasts being a little bit slower to change at first, and then probably having more disruptions in the end. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. I can see also when they start streamlining the return process, I've already started see that at least with Amazon, where it's like, you don't even have to bring a box now or anything, just bring the good back there. Once that starts feeling easier, it seems like a lot of things could shift because, to me that's been the biggest hang up of ordering things online and, not knowing how to really return it, and not knowing if I'm going to feel like doing it, and keeping the box, and printing out the label and all that stuff. It seems like that could be a big shift too, and it's kind of already been forced that way over the past couple months. Amy: Yeah, no, that's a great example of now people are having to get creative in how they do things, both retailers and shoppers. And also, just as you try things and get used to it, you might realize that the return process wasn't as bad as you thought. Or the delivery window that your groceries came was actually more convenient than what you'd wanted before. So, I think some of those habits are going to change, which is always interesting to see, because now we're still in kind of the survey phase of, what do you predict that you're going to do? Or will you use this service again? And it's always interesting of course, to see what people say versus what they actually do. Stephanie: Yeah. Amy: And I think just over time as we all keep doing this, we could say, we hate it and it's a pain. But some of that we're going to be adopting those new habits that will stick with us in the longer term. Stephanie: Yeah that'll be really interesting to see what actually comes from that. So before we move into our lightning round, is there any other thoughts you have for eCommerce leaders or trends or anything else you want to highlight? Amy: No, I think you've covered it. I mean, I think this is just such an interesting time for the eCommerce space that, if you talk to someone else next week, they might say something different, and that's what's kind of exciting about it is watching how quickly it's changing, and just really being able to adapt quickly to stay relevant. Stephanie: Yeah, that's why this podcast is so fun. All right. So the lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where you answer each question in a minute or less. So you have a minute, you don't have to rush too much, but it's kind of whatever comes top of mind. Sound good? Amy: Great. Stephanie: All right, I'll start with the easier ones first, and then move to the harder one towards the end. What's Up next on your Netflix queue? Amy: Oh, this is the lightning round. Let's see. Stephanie: When your eight month old and three year old aren't hanging on you. Amy: Exactly. I have to move into my adult entertainment mode which also doesn't sound like the right phrase to use, so that shows that I've been watching a lot of cartoons lately. Stephanie: No more Daniel Tiger for you. Amy: I know I'm just glad that I can get off Disney Plus and over to Netflix. We are big fans of Nailed It, and with the at home baking, I know I'm a season behind on nailed it, so I need to get caught up on that. Stephanie: Cool. What's up next in your travel destinations after the pandemic is over? Amy: Oh, we were supposed to go to Vienna for my husband's 40th, so hopefully we can get that back on the agenda. But, next week I'm going to be driving from the Bay Area to Aspen to see my new niece so- Stephanie: Oh fun. Amy: It will be a road trip. Stephanie: Sounds awesome. What is the best shopping experience that comes to mind that you've had lately? Other than being in a store? Amy: Yes, I have not been in a store lately, nor had a good experience in a store lately. Well, just this week was the first time that I could get an Amazon Fresh order, and I am a pretty heavy user. So they had a lot of issues, so I was really excited this morning at 7:00 AM when my Amazon Fresh order arrived. Stephanie: Yeah, that's game changing. I love seeing them come up and deliver it. I'm like, this is nice. Not having to do it. Amy: Yes. Stephanie: What was the last thing you bought from an ad? If you remember? Amy: The last thing I bought from an ad. That wasn't one of my clients products? Stephanie: Yes, yep, that wasn't one of your clients [inaudible 00:51:31]. Amy: Yes, that I was actually buying as a consumer, let's see. I bought some Hannah Andersen Star Wars pajamas recently for my three year old. They're very cute and available now and actually they did arrive quite quickly so. Stephanie: Awesome- Amy: I'd recommend that for the- Stephanie: ... For PJ's. Amy: Yes for the toddler PJ's, they are great. Stephanie: Yep, I know all about that. All right, and the hard one, what's up next for eCommerce pros? Amy: Oh, that's a big switch from PJ. Stephanie: I know, that's why I saved it for last. Amy: Yeah, I think eCommerce pros are going to be ... Have much higher regard in their own industries, and have a lot more influence. So, hopefully what's next for them is being able to kind of take a greater role in that brand and marketing experience across retailers. I know we've talked a lot about Amazon, but I think it's, how do we integrate eCommerce and into everything that we're doing, and that should be really exciting for the eComm pros. Stephanie: Cool. Love it. All right thanks so much for coming on the show Amy, this has been fun. Amy: Thank you so much. Appreciate you having me.

covid-19 tv love amazon netflix google ai marketing voice mission sound influencers mars experiences target walmart vr commerce shopping pinterest respond ecommerce bay area deliver eleven ikea crm women in business quotes disney plus qr doordash pj palo alto cpg instacart personalization up next omnichannel martians crms ugc opentable roas nailed it google voice ecomm key takeaways there amazon fresh daniel tiger campbell soup voice technology amy andrews amy it salesforce commerce cloud nestle waters stephanie yeah amy thank amy well amy so amy oh stephanie no stephanie oh stephanie they

223 See It to Be It : Real Estate Industry (w/ OJ Gordon)

Play Episode Listen Later May 9, 2020 34:21

On the twelfth entry of our See It to Be It podcast series, Amy C. Waninger speaks with OJ Gordon about his entering the real estate industry from the insurance industry and the unique role he's taking on in doing so. OJ also suggests that people interested in getting started or learning more about the industry look into getting involved with the local chapter of their National Real Estate Investors Association (REIA). Check out the show notes to find out more!Click here to find your local National REIA chapter.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate. Now, look, every now and then we try to mix it up for y'all. So look, dependency and consistency is really important, but even within those lanes of consistency, you gotta have a little bit of variety, you know what I mean? You don't come home and just eat the same thing every day, or even if you do--you know, you got a meal prep thing--maybe sometimes you put a little red sauce. Maybe sometimes you put a little green sauce. You know, you gotta just, you know, mix it up from time to time. Maybe sometimes you grill it. Maybe sometimes you saute. Maybe sometimes you rotisserie. You gotta just--am I hungry? Yes, I'm hungry, y'all. My bad. Listen, check it out. We have another entry for y'all from our See It to Be It series. Amy C. Waninger, CEO of Lead at Any Level as well as the author of Network Beyond Bias, she's actually been a member of the team for a while now, so shout-out to you, Amy. Yes, thank you very much for all of your work here. And part of her work has been in driving this series called See It to Be It, and the purpose of the series is to actually highlight black and brown professionals in these prestigious roles, like, within industries that maybe we--and when I say we I mean black and brown folks, I see y'all--may not even know exist or envision ourselves in, hence the name of the series, right? So check this out. We're gonna go ahead and transition from here. The next thing you're gonna hear is an interview with Amy C. Waninger and a super dope professional. I know y'all are gonna love it. Catch y'all next time. Peace.Amy: Hi, OJ. Thank you so much for joining me today.OJ: Hey, thank you for having me. Glad to be here.Amy: Oh, it's great talking to you again. So you're one of my Network Beyond Bias success stories because you and I met at my very first ever industry conference when we were both in Hawaii for the CPCU conference, and you were part of my "I'm gonna talk to three people today if it kills me" program, and we were both sitting front and center at a big session, and I think I turned to you and said, "Hi, you're sitting front and center too. We should probably talk," or something really dorky like that, and then we became friends from that. So you were one of the people that I kind of collected at that conference just because I forced myself to talk, and I'm so glad I did.OJ: And I'm glad you did as well, absolutely.Amy: Well, thank you. So we're gonna talk today about your entering the real estate industry--and the role that you're taking on is a little unique from what most people think of in terms of real estate, so can you tell me first what it is that you do, who you help and how you help them?OJ: Sure, absolutely. So my primary focus is helping people who have real estate problems. So folks who have repairs that they can't make at their home. They have code liens, tax liens, debt that they can't pay off, or for whatever reason they need to get out of the home that they're in and they don't have a solution that traditional real estate can help [?]. So for whatever reason they can't put this house up on the market. They can't make a profit selling that house on the market. Planning unique solutions to help them get to where they want to be.Amy: And so this is--like I said, it's kind of a special situation that you're creating, a special opportunity that you're creating for yourself. Can you tell me how you got involved in this and sort of what about it appealed to you?OJ: Yeah, absolutely. So as you know I work in insurance, and there are many times where you run into a situation where there's something not covered by a policy, and that could be a $10,000, $15,000, $100,000 problem, and when someone has an issue like that and they're not able to get financing or fix the problem, you know, it becomes a safety issue where they're living in a home that's potentially unsafe, they're living in a situation where, you know, no one should be living, and I got into insurance because I wanted to help people, and for the most part we can. There are tons of things that are covered, but in those situations where something isn't covered and, you know, there are people who feel helpless, they don't know what to do, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to [?]. So I started looking into different solutions, and I actually met a couple real estate investors who were like, "What? That's exactly what we're looking for." I was like, "Why would you want this house that has, you know, $30,000 worth of damage? There's a mortgage on it. There's all these issues," and they were like, "This is exactly the situation that we're looking for. We want to help people who are in these situations, because we want to get them living somewhere safe, and we want to take that home and put in a position where someone can live in it again." So it just really appealed to me. You get the opportunity to help people. You kind of get to be thrifty and take something that was broken and fix it, and just, for those reasons, this industry really appeals to me.Amy: That's fantastic. So I recently moved into a new home about three years ago, and it had a lot of problems that we weren't anticipating. You know, we knew it would need a new roof for example. We didn't know that within the first year of ownership we were gonna lose our water heater, our HVAC system, our sump pump, you know, and have problems with some other things, and so I can see how very easily, even without, like, a traditional insurable loss--like, you know, there was no fire, there was no flood, right, it was just wear and tear on a house that had not been maintained for 20 years--and, you know, it was expensive, and we were already sort of maxed out on the mortgage, and so, you know, we had to kind of take out a second mortgage. It's really embarrassing to say, but we had to take out a second mortgage to pay for, you know, several thousands of dollars worth of repairs to a house so we could live in it, 'cause you can't live in a house in Indiana without heat, right? You can't live in a house in Indiana, you know, that's leaking carbon dioxide into your house. So, like, we had real problems, and people don't have a lot of reserves. A lot of people are living paycheck to paycheck. I know that's been my situation for most of my life. You know, it's really easy to get upside down really fast, not just in your mortgage but in your monthly expenses, and then to have somebody who can come in and say, "Hey, I can help with this." You know, "You're not gonna be homeless. You're not gonna lose money on your house." I can see where that would be a really welcome message for folks who are struggling or who are concerned about those things, because I can see how, you know, just a lot of people are just a few thousand dollars from disaster. I know I've been there many times in my life.OJ: Absolutely.Amy: So it's wonderful what you're doing. So what's something--I know you have already alluded to this a little bit, but what's been the biggest surprise to you about this industry? Something that you weren't expecting when you first got into it?OJ: So actually, the thing that surprised me most was, you know, you hear about real estate investors and you're like, "Oh, they're these slimy people and, you know they're just trying to make a quick buck and, you know, they're gonna offer you way less than what your house is worth," and that's kind of the stigma, and there are a few bad people who do those kinds of things, but for the most part everyone I've come across has really just wanted to help people. You know, whether it was me first getting into the industry and wanting to learn, people were willing to take the time out of their day to explain things to me, to walk me through processes. Their main focus is not how much money I've made, it's how many people did I help, and I think when you can go to bed at night knowing that your main focus is how many people we can help, you can sleep well, and it really kind of changed this thing in my mind. I was thinking, "Oh, man, I'm gonna be one of these slimy real estate investors," and really it's not that. You know, there are many times where a person doesn't need a real estate investor. They just need a real estate agent or, you know, they don't need either one of those things. They need help managing their cash flows, right? They're just spending too much on their discretionary spending, and that's taking away from their needs. And just being able to have those conversations--like, I went and got my real estate license also so that I could help those folks who need, you know, a traditional solution. And, you know, I partnered with some credit repair and some budgeting specialists who can talk to people about money management and focusing on taking care of their needs before going out and, you know, spending on things that they want, and that's really been able to help people, and it's just an amazing feeling knowing, "Hey, you know, I might not have made any money today doing this real estate investing, but I've helped someone, and this thing that I've done is gonna benefit them and it's gonna benefit their kids for years to come."Amy: That is wonderful. And it's always a shame to me when somebody says, "I was surprised by how nice people are," or how much people want to help, because we--I think so many industries have a bad reputation, right, that people are only out for themselves, you know, they're snakes in the grass and they're just waiting to attack, you know, and I have found too, as I've shifted my career a few times now, that there are always people willing to help. If your heart's in the right place--and you do have to be careful about it, right? Because there are some people who are out there looking to take advantage, but I would say probably 99% of the people that I've met at different stages of my career, when I'm ready to take on something new or make a jump or learn about something new, 99% of the people I meet are genuinely helpful, genuinely want to have a positive impact and, you know, show me something that will help me move forward. OJ: Right, and I've been fortunate to come across those people and really--in the real estate industry you kind of hear, you know, it's cutthroat, and I have not encountered that. I'm really--maybe I've been lucky. Maybe this is just the norm. But I've been fortunate to meet people who are genuinely interested in helping me to develop, helping me to learn what I needed to know so that I could help more people.Amy: That's fantastic. So if somebody's not in real estate today and they're interested in getting started or learning more, what resources are available to them or where would you suggest that they start?OJ: Sure. I would suggest find the local chapter of the National REIA. Here in Orlando there's CFRI, Central Florida Real Estate Investors. It's a nonprofit group that focuses on real estate investment education, you know? There's an ethics course that you have to go through, and it's really designed to help real estate investors who are starting off in the business start making the right decisions for the right reasons and to be well-informed, and it's a great way to just network and meet with people who have been in the industry for a very long time, meet people who have just started, and kind of be able to pick their brains and partner with them and figure out how you can come together to find solutions for folks. So definitely get involved with the local chapter of your national REIA.Amy: And REIA is a Real Estate Investors Association? REIA.OJ: Right. Correct.Amy: Okay. And so just to be clear about this, you didn't take--I'm gonna pick on Trump University. You didn't take a Trump University $30,000 real estate course to figure out how to do this, right? You went and talked to people who were really doing this every day who are in it for the right reasons, who are highly ethical and willing to help you without thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in investment. Is that correct?OJ: Absolutely correct, and don't think that you have nothing to offer, right? So my background is in insurance, right? Well, if you're buying homes you need insurance, so knowing about the insurance industry--and, you know, I've been an adjuster and I've been writing estimates, so I have, you know, building [trades?] knowledge, and, you know, bringing whatever you have from whatever it is you do can benefit you, right? Like if you're an accountant, well, you're gonna need to be able to keep track of a lot of moving parts and a lot of numbers, so that's a skill that's needed. You know, if you work with your hands--if you're an electrician or a plumber or a carpenter, these are skills that are needed to get these homes up to code and make them safe for people. So, you know, having that trade knowledge is something that's tremendously beneficial. So this isn't limited to, you know, white collar jobs, blue collar jobs, anyone can do this. Amy: That's excellent, and I love that message, that you bring what you have and you find a way to contribute and people are there to help you and guide you and partner with you along the way.OJ: Absolutely. Amy: And, you know, that builds such a sense of community in an industry, when you know that you can't know everything, right? The accountant is probably not gonna be the plumbing guy also or, you know, vice versa. So I think that's a wonderful message, and I think it's important for people to realize that so many skills are transferable from one industry to another, and it sounds like this is an industry where maybe more than usual skills are transferable in.OJ: Absolutely. Amy: That's wonderful. So what are your thoughts on where this is headed in the future? Is this industry gonna need more people, or do you see this as a short-term set of problems that maybe in five to ten years will sort of take care of itself? Like, what do you see as the talent needs going forward? OJ: So just like the market is cyclical, the real estate investing needs are cyclical, and so this isn't something that's going away. People need to live somewhere. Anyone can come across a real estate problem. Like, when I bought this house, Matthew hit in Florida and destroyed, you know, pretty much everything in my backyard, and I did not realize how expensive fencing could be.Amy: And you're an insurance guy. You should know how expensive fencing can be, OJ. Come on! [laughs]OJ: And so I had a huge lot, right--the house sits on a third of an acre, and most of it is the backyard, so I was actually deployed helping folks who had damages at their home and I find out "Hey, you know, your fence is down," and I have a pool so I can't leave holes in the fence because that is a huge liability issue. So I called around to get some folks to kind of get me an estimate, and the first guy called back and said, "You have 321 linear feet of fence and two gates," and I just knew. I was like, "Oh, man. This is terrible," and, you know, he quoted me a price, and, you know, if it hadn't been a catastrophe, that was not something that I would have been able to do. And so, you know, I know how real these problems are, these things that come up are. And the policy I had didn't have a ton of adjacent structures coverage, and so, you know, the policy was only gonna cover a small portion of it anyway, so I had to pay for that fence out of pocket, and if I had to charge that to a credit card and make those payments, that would have been tough for me. And so I realized just how tough it is when those unexpected events happen, and sometimes your insurance can't help you or, you know, the things that you were counting on just don't work out for whatever reason, and it's, again, just something that isn't going away. This is an industry that will be here. As the market changes the needs change, and so we'll be here finding solutions for folks.Amy: So I want to take a step back for a minute because, you know, insurance--and I've worked in insurance for 10, 12 years now, right, insurance is one of those things that people hate paying for and they hate using it, right? Because if you're using your insurance it means something horrible has happened, and it's something that we think, "Okay, I want my premium as low as possible because the threat of having a claim is a remote possibility that we don't really know how to calculate," right? We don't know how to calculate that risk. What are the odds that I'm going to use this? We're afraid to use it sometimes if it's, you know, a minor thing. Who can people--let's talk about prevention for just a second. Who's the best person for someone to talk to when they purchase a house or even if they're renting about what kind of coverage they need and what they should be paying for coverage? Because that sounds like a first step to preventing getting yourself into this sort of a financial crisis to begin with, right?OJ: Right, and so if you have a financial planner, that's someone who you should talk to. There are agents everywhere. Go talk to an agent. You know, I sold insurance when I first got into insurance, and the way I look at insurance is you pay me your premium and I give you peace of mind, right? So I need to make sure that this policy that you're purchasing is going to give you that peace of mind, and so when you're purchasing insurance you shouldn't start off with how much premium you want to pay. You should start off with "How much coverage do I need to have peace of mind?" Right? So if you have a home that would cost $300,000 to rebuild if there was a total loss, total fire, and you only have $50,000 of insurance, you do not have peace of mind. You are not going to be able to rebuild that home, right? And so you just want to talk to your agent and talk to your financial planner. Understand the costs, you know? You don't have to become a builder, right, but understand the costs associated with rebuilding a home or, you know, if you're getting an auto policy, right, if you cause an accident, right, there are financial implications. You could end up liable for thousands of thousands of dollars of someone's medical bills, lost wages. You could be hurt and not be able to work, right? And so these are situations that your agents and your claims professionals come across every day, and, you know, I've been on the liability side, and I've seen where someone, you know, got hit by an uninsured driver and had $10,000 of uninsured motorist coverage but $50,000 worth of medical bills, and, you know, they were trying to keep their premium low, and you're not doing yourself a justice by saving $20 in premium when that $20 in premium is tens of thousands of dollars of additional coverage, and you don't know when you're gonna have an accident. That's why people call them accidents. You don't know when you're gonna have a fire. You don't know when these unexpected events are gonna come. If you're purchasing a policy, don't do it because a state says you have to do it. Don't do it because, you know, your mortgage company is saying you have to do it. Do it because you understand that this policy is gonna provide peace of mind in a time where you need peace of mind. The stress of going through these things, right, is overwhelming sometimes, right? And just having, you know, a professional on the other end who can say, you know, "Hey, I know what you're going through. These are the things that are gonna happen and, you know, here's how we can help," is tremendously beneficial.Amy: Absolutely. And, you know, higher premiums don't mean better coverage. OJ: Right. Read your policy. [laughs]Amy: Read your policy, but not just that. Shop it around, right? Because I had--so when we moved into our house I went through the insurer that I had on our old house, and I won't name names, but we'll call them Company A, and Company A, my premiums on my new house were about $4,000 a year, and my coverage was I want to say about four... no, it was about $500 worth of coverage on just the house, and about a year later I decided I was gonna shop it just to see because it was coming up for renewal, and I got coverage through Company B, and Company B was $1,300 a year, and they estimated the rebuild cost of my house at over $700,000, and that's what they insured me at. So I was paying a lot more--I was paying three times the amount that I could have been for about half of the coverage with the first company versus the second, and it's all about how much do they know about your area, how much do they know about the kind of house that they're insuring, how much do they know about the risks and the likelihood of risk where you live, and how good is their math, right, when they're running those numbers, and so I think it really pays for people to talk to different companies and find out, because if I thought when I bought myself--I didn't pay $700,000 for my house, but if I had thought when I bought my house I needed $700,000 for the replacement cost coverage, I would not have insured it for $450 or $500,000, right? Because the other thing that happens that people don't know--and I don't want to go off on a big insurance thing, but the other thing that happens that people don't know is if you do have a total loss and you're under-insured, you don't get all the money your insurance company promised you at the beginning.OJ: Right. So there's that [?] percent co-insurance and [?] the cash value. Right.Amy: Right, so if you have a $200,000 house, let's say, and you have $100,000 worth of coverage on it, and you have a total loss, your insurance company will say, "Well, you know what, it's a lot more common to have a $100,000 loss on a $200,000 house than it is to have a $100,000 loss on a $100,000 house," right? "So we're only gonna pay 50% of your policy payout, or 80% of your policy payout, because you weren't insured to the full amount of your home." And so not only are you not getting the full value of your home, you're not even getting the full value of your policy at that point. You really want to make sure you've got full replacement cost on your home.OJ: Right. So, again, start with the amount of coverage that you need and then shop based on the coverage that you need. So compare apples to apples, right? 'Cause one company, like you said, could offer you--like, let's say Company A offered you $400,000 worth of coverage for the same $700,000, right, and then Company B said, "Hey, we'll offer you, you know, $700,000 worth of coverage for $1,000," right, you're getting the same coverage, right, but if Company A was saying, "Hey, $1,300 a year for $700,000 worth of coverage," and Company B said, "$1,000 for $400,000 worth of coverage," you're paying a lower premium, but you're also getting less out of the transaction, definitely. Your starting point should be "How much coverage do I need?" And then shop around, and always say "Hey, these are the limits that I want. This is the coverage that I need. How much are you charging for that amount of coverage?"Amy: Yep. Absolutely. Thank you, OJ, so much. That is so helpful, and I see several spinoff topics on this conversation, because I think it is important, and I think people really don't understand this. Insurance is kind of a black box, right? I pay a premium and then I pray I never use it, and we need to be more educated consumers about that, definitely. So I wanted to ask you a little bit, any other recommendations for our listeners about what they might want to learn about this industry or where they might go, you know? Articles or places that they might just show up and read or listen to learn more.OJ: Sure, sure. So there are tons of podcasts out there about real estate investing. There are seminars that happen throughout the year, but some of those seminars are thousands and thousands of dollars. I wouldn't recommend that you pay thousands and thousands of dollars starting off, especially not knowing if you're gonna dive in full-time, right? You don't want to spend $30,000 on something that might be a hobby, right? But just definitely reach out to folks. So if you get involved in your national REIA there are Facebook groups, and just reach out to folks who are in the industry and talk to them. I mean, the best value that I've gotten is just conversations with folks and learning things that I never would have thought about, right? I remember one conversation I was having with a guy named Bill Cook, who's a really successful real estate investor, and we were talking about mobile homes, and it was like, "Well, why would anyone want to buy a mobile home," right? And he shared with me that during the recession that was the best investment that he could make, because people were calling him and saying, "Hey, I need somewhere to rent, and I can't spend $700 or $800 a month. Do you have anything for $450?" And his phone is just ringing and ringing and ringing, and he had nothing in his inventory that he could rent for $700 or $850 a month, and then he got into investing in mobile homes, and he was able to now provide clean, safe housing for folks who couldn't afford $700 or $800 a month, but they could afford $450, and it was a smaller investment for him, right? Instead of buying a stick-built home you buy a mobile home, right, the costs are way different, and so he could make that work in his business model and help folks out who needed somewhere to live. And so, like, just having those conversations and understanding that, you know, you might have a preconception or you might be thinking of something in a way that is gonna prevent you from helping people, and just really having those conversations and being open-minded.Amy: That's fantastic. I would like to ask you to finish this sentence. "I feel included when ________."OJ: The people around me are laughing.Amy: Well, OJ, I can tell you that I am so happy to have you in my network and count you among my friends. I have so much fun talking to you, and I think the world of you. I think that you are on just this meteoric rise, and I expect great things from you. You're somebody that I want to, from the moment I met you I wanted to invest in you personally, because I wanted to see what you would become and what you would do in the world, and so I want to thank you for letting me be a part of your journey and thank you for joining me today.OJ: And I want to thank you for having me. It has been truly amazing getting to know you and seeing all of the wonderful things that you're doing and all of the value that you're bringing and all of the awareness that you're bringing just on the side. We had a conversation about intersectionality, and there was a talk on intersectionality here in Orlando, and I went, and, you know, I figured "I'm a person of color. I kind of understand other folks," and it was astounding how much I didn't know, right? And so just kind of--that conversation with you kind of inspired me to kind of go and learn about different groups and, you know, I actually had a mentor who identifies as a gay man, and I had no idea, and we were having a conversation surrounding intersectionality, and he confided in me, "Hey, you know, I've been a gay man for my whole life, and I don't share that with people because I've been ostracized." And, you know, here's a guy who's, you know, in his 50s, right, who doesn't feel comfortable being himself or expressing himself. And I had known him for quite a while and didn't know this about him, and it was kind of humbling to have him share that with me and realize that, you know, while I may have had my struggles, there are other people who are experiencing different struggles, and, you know, there are conversations that need to be had so that those people are empowered, right? And it was at that talk about intersectionality that, you know, we kind of talked about identity privilege, and I didn't realize how much identity privilege I experienced, and it was really eye-opening that, you know, here I am as a minority, but I experience identity privilege, and there are things that I need to do to empower those who don't have the same identity privilege that I do, and so I want to thank you for just bringing awareness to me and inspiring me to kind of go out and learn more, because it really is important.Amy: Thank you so much for saying that. I think one of those most powerful things that we can do as people, right, not as managers, not as coworkers, not as in whatever role but just as people, is ask questions and give each other the space to share, because it's in those spaces where we learn and we grow and we really build connection. And, you know, in the talks that I give I always tell people, "Look, if you think no one in your inner circle is LGBTQ, there's a really good chance you're wrong about that. And it's not that they're not there, it's that they're not comfortable talking to you about it." And the same goes for a lot of other identities too, right? You know, I know a lot of white people who will say, "Oh, I'm friends with--you know, I have lots of black friends," which is always a sign that they don't of course, but when you ask, like, "Who?" You know, it's usually somebody at work that they kinda sorta know, and, like, "Have you ever talked to them about their experience being black in the workplace?" "Well, no." I'm like, "Well, you're not a very good friend, are you?" [laughs] Wouldn't you want to know what that experience is like for your friend? So no, thank you so much for opening yourself up to those conversations and for sharing so much of yourself with me. I'm just honored to know you, OJ. I really am.OJ: Thank you. The feeling is very mutual, Amy.

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221 : Taking Time (w/ Arlan Hamilton)

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2020 20:49

Our very own Amy C. Waninger has the honor of chatting with Arlan Hamilton, founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital and author of "It's About Damn Time," which was released TODAY! Arlan went from homeless in three years to running Backstage Capital, a venture capital firm that solely invests in companies founded by women, people of color and LGBTQ entrepreneurs. She graciously shares a bit about why she started her fund and wrote her book, talks about what it is about under-estimated talent that she thinks makes them a great bet in business, and she tells us how she gets herself into the right mindset to walk in and own really intimidating rooms. Check the show notes to find out more about her book!Interested in her new book? Check out ItsAboutDamnTime.com.Connect with Arlan on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can find out more about Backstage Capital on their website. They're also on FB, IG, and Twitter. Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and listen. Really excited to bring the episode that we have for y'all today. For those of y'all who are in the know, when you talk about venture capital, when you talk about inclusion and equity within the venture capital space, you know who Arlan Hamilton is, okay? So I'm not gonna steal any of Amy C. Waninger's thunder, but I just want to do, like, a quick thank you and shout-out to Arlan for being on Living Corporate, and really excited for y'all to check out the episode, because the next thing you hear, they're gonna get right into it, so I just wanted to make sure I gave a little bit of context that you're gonna be listening to Arlan Hamilton and her talking about her latest book as well as her company, Backstage Capital. 'Til next time, y'all. Peace.Amy: Arlan, thank you so much for joining me. How are you today?Arlan: I'm doing pretty good. How about you?Amy: I'm doing well. So we're recording this kind of in the midst of all of this coronavirus craziness, and the episode will be released on your book launch day, on May 5th, and so if you can, just project forward to book launch. How are you feeling?Arlan: Well, I'm probably feeling the same way I'm feeling today, which is just a few days prior, which is incredibly excited and honored that I have the opportunity to even have a book coming out and coming out on a publisher, and it's just been a really great experience so far. I heard so many different stories from different authors of, like, how their experiences have gone in the past, from indie to published, and mine has just been really great.Amy: That is fantastic. And the book is wonderful. I got to read an advance copy as part of your launch team. I enjoyed it so much. And a lot of the questions I normally ask in this series you've covered in your book, and so I want to make sure people go there, but one question I did want to ask you about is what has surprised you the most about the venture capital space? Now that you're on the other side of it.Arlan: I don't know if it surprised me, but it's been kind of reinforced that there's just--money is a tool, you know? There's no one who is more important than the next person. And yes, there are some people who have a little bit more power, a little bit more strategically have placed them in places with more authority, but really there's an equality that I still believe in, and it drives me to do what I do, and it's why I started my fund. It's why I wrote the book "It's About Damn Time," because it felt like--one of the things was it was about damn time everybody realizes that we're all on this spinning rock together and that just because you're a venture capitalist doesn't make you any better than the next person.Amy: Definitely. And you talk about in your book the statistic that's jarring to me, that while white men make up about 30% of the population in the country, they get about 90% of capital investment. And your fund is a step in the direction to kind of undo that math and to make the playing field a little bit more equitable. How is that going? Like, do you feel like you're at the point where it's starting to shift, or do you think that there's opportunity for more people to come in and do what you're doing and build this space a whole lot bigger? Arlan: I think both. I think there has been absolute change in the last five years, four and a half years since I started Backstage Capital. It was a completely different playing field back then, and that was only a few years ago. So I absolutely see change. Obviously it's not fast enough. It's not enough. So there's plenty of room for better change and for more change, and that's where I'm excited about the future and about--one of the things in my book is about empowering other people to understand that they can join, you know? They can still join this technical revolution and all of that, because there's just so much more left to do. There's so many people who are doing it too. I don't want to ever say that it's only me. I mean, there are plenty of people who are black or brown [and?] women, who are investors, who are trying to change those statistics for the better. But yeah, I think if I hadn't seen some change for the better I wouldn't have been able to keep going, and so I've seen it. Most of it has come from individuals taking the reins and saying, "Look, I'm not going to wait for something to come save me. I'm going to put this into my own hands, and I'm going to start a company or continue a company that perhaps is bootstrapped or that has more revenue [and that?] employs people, and I'm not gonna only count on these few select guys who have a bunch of money.Amy: You know, it's interesting because right now--and I know that you just recently interviewed Mark Cuban and he said now's a great time to start a business, 'cause when people panic you double down, and when people are comfortable, that's when you should panic, right? What industries do you see right now in the midst of what we're dealing with with coronavirus, what industries do you see picking up a lot of innovation right now?Arlan: Well, of course the ones that are for the moment, right? So for instance companies that are selling products that are really helpful right now. We have products in our portfolio that when we first signed up them to our accelerator last year people laughed. They said, "Why do you have a toilet paper company in your portfolio? Aren't you a venture capitalist?" But we saw that they were doing things in a more sustainable way. They were saving tons and tons, literally, of trees every year, and they were fun and they had a great marketing strategy, and today they can't keep up with the demand, and they're doing it in a way that's more sustainable, which is really fantastic. So you have companies like that. We have a company in our portfolio also from the accelerator called Tambua Health that allows doctors to test for lung diseases using a smartphone. And of course last year we just thought, "This is really amazing, and we want to see what it can do," and today now it's of course going to be very helpful during the age of coronavirus. So I think, like, you're seeing a lot of health tech companies that are gonna do well if they can revamp. You're seeing companies that are manufacturing other things, that are now saying, "Let me manufacture some PPE," some personal protective gear for health care workers and essential workers, but right now and in the future I think you're gonna see a lot more education companies, things that are content-driven online, and then the infrastructure to make that easier for people to get to and to see it. And of course people are talking about "What's the future of work going to look like?" And I don't know if we know yet. I don't know if the last four weeks or six weeks or three months can tell us what the future of work will look like. What we do know is that it will be different from what we came to be used to in the past.Amy: Yes. I think that we're seeing, you know, right now a lot of accessibility that was built--infrastructure for accessibility that was built for people from the disability community that is benefiting all of us now, and I am hopeful, to your point that the future that we're building is more accessible by design and not by legislation.Arlan: Absolutely, and there are so many people who can take that into their own hands today, and I hope that that happens too, because honestly, we can't wait around for someone to make things right. We have to do things ourselves, and things are better--you know, they say, "Let me just do it myself." You know, "If I want it done right, I'll do it myself." Let's do that. I like that vibe, you know? Let's do it ourselves.Amy: You said in your book several times when you're looking at founders you pattern match for grit. And I wanted to ask you, because, you know, knowing your background, that you started this fund when, you know, you didn't really have a place to live. I mean, you were experiencing homelessness at the time. You know, grit is just all there for you. I mean, you have built something from nothing more times than I could count in the book, and I'm wondering, what is it about under-estimated talent you think that makes them gritty or that makes folks a better bet in business? Arlan: They're a great bet. We're a great bet. I think if you are someone who is underrepresented and underestimated, it doesn't seem weird or out there or strange to you to figure things out, to get yourself out of a bad situation, to get creative when you're facing for instance, like, the rent is due and you're like, "Okay, well, what can I do to make a couple extra hundred dollars that's legal and that is, you know, a little bit--" So can I use this other talent that I have? But in the world of Silicon Valley, if you think about that same story, one of the biggest stories that ever came out of Silicon Valley--and I remember reading about when it when I was homeless and just starting out. I read about Airbnb, and I read about these three guys who had this amazing idea to put a blow-up bed on a floor and charge people for a conference to come in and have bed and breakfast. And on top of that, when they were looking for money and they didn't have it, they created--because they were designers by trade--they created these cereal boxes that looked like Obama and John McCain, and they sold those, and they sold, like, $50,000 worth. And I remember reading that and people were losing their minds over how ingenious it was, how absolutely nothing--they had seen nothing like that, and I thought, "I've done that at least five times in a major way in the last 10 years of my adult life." Like, I've at least done it five times in a major way so I could avoid bankruptcy, avoid being on the street, avoid all these things, and I just think we as women, people of color, LGBTQ, disabled, I think we all have to, on a day-to-day basis, have to figure out a survival mode for ourselves because we are faced with so many things, whether they be big things that are easy to point out or the papercuts that I talk about, which is you get a papercut, you don't go around screaming about it, you know? But it hurts like hell. And it happens to you. It can happen to you and people don't necessarily believe it, but it's happening to you. It's this oppression that's given to us in papercuts, and so I just think because we're already built to figure things out--I mean, it's not like it's a great thing. I'm not happy that we have been so put into these corners where we have to find our way out, but we have. So that manifests itself in some really great ways sometimes. Sometimes it's negative. Sometimes we feel like we have to do things that are not okay, that are not legal, that are not moral, et cetera, et cetera, but more times than that, most of the time, you just see some really highly creative things. You ever met someone who gets in trouble a lot and you just say, "If they could just apply that to this other thing, they would save so much time and heartache, because they would probably be, like, the Hacker of the Year in Silicon Valley." That's how I feel about most people.Amy: Yeah, that's how I tell my kids. I'm like, "Use your powers for good. Stop getting into trouble."Arlan: Yeah, exactly.Amy: So one of the things about grit that you note in your book, you talk about hustle culture and how pervasive it is, and I know you've made some decisions now that--and I don't want to say that you're on the other side because I know there are always more places that you want to go and, you know, you're always wanting to take your work to the next level, but you've gotten to a place where you're not as hungry maybe as you were, you know, early on, and you're taking some time to evaluate your priorities and scale back some of your commitments and really focus on self-care, and I'm wondering, if you were talking to the you of the early days of Backstage Capital--which was only a few years ago--would you have the same advice of "Step back and, you know, let go of some of the hustle," or would you tell 5-Years-Ago-Arlan "No, keep going." You know, you don't--Arlan: Well, let me answer that. I don't know if I can answer that question exactly because I don't look at it that way. I do more today than I've ever done in my life when it comes to work, and that says a lot. What I tried to get across in the book and what I've tried to get across for the past year or so is that I'm not doing less, I'm working smarter. So I absolutely would tell the person five years ago and ten years ago to take better care of myself, for sure, and that's what I'm doing, but when it comes to the stakes, when it comes to the responsibility, the pressure, what's at stake here is the highest it's ever been, so I just don't know if I can answer that question as it was stated because I don't feel like I have kind of pulled back. What I've done is recalibrated and repurposed, and I've said instead of me knowing exactly how much a stack of paper from Office Depot costs us, I am going to spend that extra 7 minutes that I would have taken to learn that to put into a phone call with one of our portfolios. Maybe it's the 20th phone call of the week with a portfolio company, but it's one more that I may be able to make a right introduction or think about stuff. And I spend a lot of time thinking and strategizing. I've been doing that from very early on. I think it's important. I think it's part of our jobs as leaders to take a breath and strategize. So on one hand I absolutely feel like I'm doing the most, especially with even more going on now and a smaller team now, unfortunately, because of the coronavirus, but on the other hand I'm always gonna advocate for taking good care of yourself and looking at it from a bird's eye view and saying "What do I need to be doing, and what am I doing right now? And do they match?" And if they don't match, something's wrong. We have a mantra right now at my fund that I started just a few weeks ago when things got really scary. I said, "If it's stressful, we're doing it wrong," and that--you think about it and that's so simple, but that's helped us, like, make a lot of decisions. "Wait, is this stressful? 'Cause we have enough stress in our lives right now as a world and as a country. Are we gonna add stress that we don't need to?" So it's helped us to say no to certain phone calls and to a lot of responsibilities that we don't need to have on our plate right now.Amy: It probably also helps with how you allocate the work within your team. I think a lot of leaders struggle with that, to realize that just because they find a task odious or draining, there may be somebody on their team that, you know, they live for that kind of work.Arlan: Exactly, yeah, and it's an art, not a science, and it's something that I'm working on still, but I've gotten much better over time at delegating, and I think--you think as a leader you have to figure everything out and you have to be the smartest person, you have to lead your tribe into the fight. Hey, I mean, you're not--Ursula Burns, who used to be the CEO of Xerox, the first black woman to be at a Fortune 500 as a CEO. Worked her way up from secretary, I believe. She told me in a phone call last year when I was really stressed out--she yelled at me. I mean, she was not doing tough love. It was just tough. She said, "If you are the only person that's generating revenue for your whole team, you've effed it up. You are doing it wrong. Figure out a way that everybody pulls their own weight," and "You are doing a bad job." She said that to me. "You're doing a bad job if you're this stressed out. It's not something to be excited about and proud of. You're doing a bad job if you're this stressed out." So that just, like, slapped me around and I was like, "Wow, okay. On it." Amy: Yeah. That had to be hard to hear but very relieving at the same time.Arlan: Both, yeah. I just took it because I love the source, you know? I look at the source when people are giving me advice. If it's somebody who is anonymous online who's cussing me out and saying I'm doing a terrible job, I just don't give it any weight. If it's someone like what I just described to you, I give it some weight and I say, "Okay, let me think about why she said that to me and why she gave me her time to say it."Amy: That's very good advice. One of the points that you make in your book is that we all have the right to be in any room we want to be in, and that's a very difficult thing for some of us to internalize because we've been told our whole lives, you know, "Sit down. Be quiet. Be nice. Don't be pushy. Don't be aggressive." What's something for you that fortifies you before you walk into some of these really intimidating--what would be intimidating for most of us--rooms, right? How do you get yourself into the right mindset to walk in and own that room?Arlan: I do two things. One is I think about the people that, like, being successful in the room would positively affect. I make it more about them than me. Once I do that, that's a really great way to walk into a room. The best way of ever--like, I have learned over almost 40 years--this is it, this is the secret right here... you have to be okay with the outcome that you don't win the negotiation. So if you have something that you're going in for that's really, really something that you want really badly, if you tell yourself--and I do this all the time--if you say to yourself, "Okay, it's okay if I don't get this. It's truly okay. I'll have a backup plan. I'll have some other thing I'll do. It's okay if they say no." You've completely taken control of the situation. So you go in caring. You go in trying, but you also go in where their no doesn't knock you to your knees, and there's something about that in a negotiation where I've been able to talk to millionaires and billionaires and get what I want because what I want because I'm okay with "losing," quote-unquote, the deal. Amy: Fabulous. And if you can do that with the number of zeroes after the deals that you're looking at, the rest of us can probably do it with the number of zeroes in the deals that we're looking at, right? [laughs]Arlan: Yeah, it's powerful. It's very powerful.Amy: It is. Arlan Hamilton, author of "It's About Damn Time" and venture capitalist and just Twitter queen, thank you so much. This interview will just be the highlight of my podcasting career. I have so enjoyed talking to you. Arlan: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. You're very good at it, and I appreciate you, and I hope that your listeners will pick up the hard cover at ItsAboutDamnTime.com. You can pick up the audio, which I read, or the e-book. Whichever, whatever tickles your fancy. It's all there.Amy: Get them all, because you're gonna want that audio-book in the car on the way to the negotiation, and you're gonna want the hard cover by the bed so you can read from it at night and get it into your subconscious before you go to sleep, and you're gonna want it on your Kindle too because that's where you can highlight everything and go find your notes later.Arlan: Well, there you go. You're hired. [laughs]Amy: All right, sounds good. [laughs] Thanks, Arlan, so much, and congratulations on your launch. This is huge.Arlan: Thank you so much. Appreciate you.

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207 See It to Be It : Higher Education Industry (w/ Dr. José I. Rodríguez)

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 4, 2020 44:35

On the tenth entry of our See It to Be It podcast series, Amy C. Waninger chats with Dr. José I. Rodríguez, a professor at California State University, Long Beach, about how he got involved in academia and what about it appealed to him, and he graciously shares the biggest surprise he had arriving into the industry. José also names several programs that are available for persons of color to help them feel supported and connected within the higher education space. Connect with José on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, and check out his website by clicking here.Learn more about the programs José mentioned, BUILD, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, and RISE.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTAmy: Hello, Dr. J. How are you?José: Good, how are you doing?Amy: Doing great. How's the weather in California today?José: Well, today the weather is good. It seems we have weather. [laughs]Amy: Oh. That's unusual for you guys. [laughs]José: Right, right. It is highly unusual, but we're happy. We need the weather.Amy: So I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit--so you work in the education industry. You're a professor at Long Beach State. And I was wondering if you could tell me, how did you get into academia, or higher education, and what about it appealed to you? Did you always want to do this or did you kind of happen into it?José: Right, thank you. That is a great question. I got into it because I--you know, the pretty typical story that you have going to college, you know, your family tells you that that's the thing to do, and--at least in my family--you have to either be a doctor, a lawyer, or some other profession of that ilk, and I thought, "Well, I don't want to be a lawyer. I don't want to be a doctor. I'm gonna be an engineer." I started out as an engineering major, and I just got tired of doing math if I can be perfectly frank. By the time I finished a third semester of calculus I was done. [laughs] Amy: Fair enough.José: Yeah, exactly. You know how that goes. So I took this GE class in communication, and we sat around, and we were studying small group communication, and we would get together in groups and we would discuss topics and we would share ideas and we would have conversations in a college classroom--which I thought was revolutionary, because up until that point I really didn't have experience with communication in the classroom, and I just fell in love with it. I thought, "Wow, this is really cool. I think that this might be my thing," and the next semester I switched my major to communications studies. I started working with one of my favorite professors, who became a mentor, and one thing just led to another. So it wasn't like I had this grand vision of, "Gosh, yes, I've wanted to be a professor since I was 4 years old." That wasn't me. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was quite confusing. And I just stumbled onto what I do. I developed a nice relationship with some colleagues at the university. I got into a good master's program, and then just created a trajectory, really through networking, which I know is dear to your heart, and that networking panned out in some really interesting ways. So it was a lot of networking and things that I really didn't plan a priori but just seemed to work out in the process of doing and connecting with people, and I really loved it, and I still love it, and I think the idea of just connecting with people, connecting with people through conversations, connecting with people through teaching, through doing workshops, retreats, things of that sort, I find that very rewarding, very much, you know, aligned with the things that I value, and I find working with people to be, you know, useful. You see the results of it right away if you impact somebody's life. If somebody is moved by something that you say, you see those results very quickly just by looking into people's eyes. Somebody's getting an idea or somebody's asking a question or somebody's emailing you and saying, "Oh, my gosh, that was great. That was fantastic," and I think I really enjoy that almost-instant feedback in interactions through teaching, through doing workshops and things of that sort.Amy: That's fantastic. So what I heard in that was that you grew up with a value around education--and a lot like I was, right? I went into my college programs not knowing, like, what does that mean, what am I gonna be when I grow up, and sort of through the role of a mentor and sort of happenstance you were able to channel this value of education into something that's giving forward to new students and is true to your values and maybe not so much math. [laughs]José: [laughs] It's true to my values, that's for sure. Yeah, giving forward, you know, connecting with people, making a point or having a conversation with somebody that wasn't there before, right? So you enter into conversation or you enter into dialogue with someone, and in moments that come seemingly from nowhere you develop a line of thought or a line of argument or a conversation that is really meaningful, enriched, and it almost seems like magic is happening, that you're co-creating or co-inventing with someone, and that's really kind of fun and engaging and becoming more and more rare as we lead mediated lives, and I find that really rewarding. Amy: Yeah, I want to come back to that idea of mediated lives in just a moment, but can you tell me first - what's been the biggest surprise to you? So you moved down this path of becoming a professor, and then you got there. So what surprised you now that you're on the other side of that particular journey? What didn't you expect--good or bad--about your industry?José: Yeah, the thing that surprised me the most was the variety of activities that one needs to perform as a college faculty member. so I got into it because I like to teach and I like the interaction with students, I like being in the classroom, I like getting into discussions, I like lecturing, I like having that experience where you share a concept or an idea and it makes sense to somebody. They get it. Their eyes light up, and all of a sudden they are impacted in some positive ways. I really like that, and I thought that that was the majority of the show, but no, that's not the majority. In fact, that's just one third. There's this whole thing about publishing and being on committees and having service obligations, and I found that to be surprising and extremely time-consuming. And not that it's bad. It's just typically not my thing. I think in most areas of academia people have their strengths or their weaknesses or their preferences, and my preference is on the teaching side of things. Service and academic publishing are great and I've done some of that, but that isn't really where my passion lies. So that was a bit surprising at the beginning and at times a bit daunting, just because it's time-consuming. It's a lot of work, especially in publishing and getting your work out there and the process of revision and working with reviewers. All of that can be very time-consuming, and so that's a challenge, yeah.Amy: So I remember being in college, and I can tell you that my favorite professors were the ones that were there because they enjoyed teaching, not the ones that were there because they enjoyed the publishing aspect. They were usually not the best ones in class. I usually learned a little less from them because they tended not to care as much about making connections so much as, you know, they were worried about the publications and that sort of thing. So on behalf of your students I want to thank you for sticking with it and being there for them. I think that's so important.José: Thank you. I hear that. I hear that from students every once in a while, at times. You know, some faculty are very blessed. They won, like, a genetic and I guess personality lottery, right? They're very good at teaching, they're really good at publishing, and they're very good at doing the whole service thing, but I think most people have a strength in a particular area and everything else is okay but isn't as, I guess, you know, dominant in their professional life. So yeah, I think your point is well-taken, and at times it's a struggle for faculty who really are into the whole publishing game to teach as effectively as possible. And don't get me wrong, that's not everyone. I think the vast majority of faculty do a great job, and sometimes people who are very well-published are actually very good teachers because they're kind of on the cutting edge of their field and they are really excited about it and they bring that excitement to the classroom, and that's fantastic. But in my experience, that's fairly rare.Amy: Yeah, absolutely. So if somebody's not in academia now, if that's something they aspire to, maybe they're an undergrad or even a grad student at this point and they're thinking, you know, "Maybe this is for me." Where would they go to learn more?José: One of the places to learn more is through a mentor or a colleague or somebody who's already quote-unquote arrived. If you find a professor, a colleague, who is really a mentor, that's really the best way to find out if the career is for you. Usually when you go to grad school, especially if you're getting a Ph.D, you're gonna have a committee of people that are working with you as you finish your dissertation, and you usually have a faculty mentor or a faculty advisor, and that person typically is the type of person that guides you, that, you know, writes your letters of recommendation, that has you on their research team, and that is the primary way that you get socialized into the process of becoming a professor. Another thing that people tend to do is go to conferences and, you know, networking events where once, twice or three times a year there are national conferences, local conferences, international conferences, where graduate students go and meet people across the nation and really create a growing body of colleagues across the globe or across the United States and find opportunities to work. In fact, most people I believe, still today, get hired that way. You hire people that you know or you hire people that have worked with people that you know. In my experience, that probably happens 60 to 70% of the time. And again, just like in almost any other industry I would assume, networking becomes very critical. It becomes a part of your professional practice, and it's a great way to find out if the profession is right for you.Amy: So you said something interesting, and I know that--I'm betting that you knew I would pick up on this. You said that people typically hire people that they know and networking is important, and since the audience, for at least part of this interview--to use Living Corporate's terminology--black and brown professionals who maybe feel like they're outside of the in group and in academia, right? If we hire who we know, that tends to self-perpetuate the demographics of a department or of a school or of a profession, and so what resources are available to young people of color or to professionals of color in your area that help them maybe navigate those waters in a way that someone like me wouldn't have to do? What advice can you give them to kind of overcome that feeling of otherness?José: The feeling is a challenge, no doubt. No doubt. What's really exciting is that there's more and more programs for persons of colors and individuals from historically marginalized groups, programs like BUILD and the Mellon Mays Research Fellowship. There's another one called RISE, and we have those types of programs on campus--and they're national, they're all over the country, and essentially those are programs designed to help students from minority groups form a relationship with a faculty mentor in a larger community that is designed to help them navigate the murky waters of their professional development. They would start their undergraduate program with BUILD or with Mellon Mays or with the RISE program, let's say, perhaps when they're, like, a sophomore in college, and they would be assigned to a faculty mentor, to a research team. They would participate in conferences and get mentoring advice, and they would get help putting together a statement of purpose, a resume, a [?], and have publications with faculty members or, let's say, conference papers on their own as a part of a research team. All of those things are not only very possible, but I see them happening on campus every day. It's part of--what I do is I train faculty mentors on how to create conversations that are empathic and nurturing and holistic so that people know the kind of language that might be best, the kinds of things to say, how things might be interpreted, and we try to create scenarios where we're asked to engage in everyday conversations in a way that is much more inclusive and less divisive. So that's my best answer. Find one of these programs on your campus and join. Put in your application and take it from there. That's one of the best ways to do it.Amy: Yeah, that's fantastic. Thank you. Sometimes we just don't know what we don't know, and if the target demographic for these organizations, if the target age or, you know, the target year is sophomore year, that's very early for a lot of students even where they want to head or, you know, what they might want to do. I know I was, like, mid-senior year and then all of a sudden panicked because what I thought was gonna do wasn't gonna happen, right? So I think it's great that if we can engage students earlier in these kinds of programs so that they can explore what out there, and specifically what's out there for them in terms of help so that they can overcome some of the affinity bias or some of the self-perpetuaing selection processes that maybe existing faculty have, so thank you for that.José: Oh, you're welcome. That's an excellent question.Amy: So what other recommendations do you have for students, and particularly students of color, who want to explore careers in academia? Are there books? Are there articles? Are there websites? Are there other resources around that they should take a look at?José: Well, there are plenty of resources, and again I would just go back to the resources that are available in some of these programs. Obviously all of these programs, BUILD, the Mellon Mays Fellowship, the RISE program and many others that I don't have off the top of my head, are available obviously online. So if you Google the Mellon Mays Fellowship, if you Google BUILD, you will see a major website or local website for your university or for locations across the country and then be able to, you know, gather the information that you need, not only on the website but find out what campus near you, maybe even your own campus, has that program. I know that the BUILD community goes out to junior colleges and does some pretty heavy recruiting to let students know that these resources are available. So BUILD in particular, I'm familiar with them because I've worked with them for the past couple of years, and I know that a huge part of their initiative is recruiting. So not just waiting for students to come to them, but really allowing students to know that the resources are available by going out into the community.Amy: Excellent, thank you. So you had said before that you have kind of this passion for creating connectedness and that you discovered this passion when you took a general ed class in communications, and so can you tell me more about where that passion comes from or what do you think was awakened in you in that moment?José: Yeah. One of the things that was awakened is just the power of solidarity, the power of coming together through dialogue to find what we have in common as opposed to what we have in difference, and that whole idea, you know, it's kind of a nice idea and it sounds like a really nice phrase, but to have that as an experience is life-changing, where you go "Gosh, here I come into a conversation where I thought there was all these differences or I'm not getting along with people or I'm different or there's something wrong with me," and then I go into a room and I have a conversation with a variety of strangers, and all of a sudden there's this feeling of connectedness, there's this feeling that I belong, there's this feeling that I can contribute, there's this feeling of, you know, kinship, right? Father Greg Boyle, who's out here in California, he runs the #1 gang rehabilitation center in the United States--Amy: Homeboy Enterprises.José: Yeah, there you go. Amy: He is a national treasure. He is a hero.José: He is amazing, yes. Father Boyle. He has this great line where he says, you know, "Imagine the circle of kinship where no one is outside that circle," right? And I love that metaphor, the circle of kinship, and I believe that we do that through many means, but primarily through conversation, through discussion, through the process of sharing messages with each other. I see him do this. You know, he has his daily message of the day and he, you know, films himself having a little talk, and, you know, this impacts people not only in his community but all over the country, and he goes and gives talks, and I can see that a part of their process is really this constant conversation of bringing people in, of making them a part of the community, of using a language, a discourse of unity, of connectedness, of how we come together really as an extended family and then bring people into that family, help them feel included so that we can heal what has been broken through this new experience of solidarity, right? And the power to do that through messages, through language, through metaphor, is I think just such a gift, such a beautiful experience to have with people, and I've discovered that that was, like, a rare thing, you know, that I saw in college back at the time. I'd go, "Wow, to be able to study this process of creating messages and using words to bring people together," the power of story for example, telling compelling stories that people can relate to about our challenges and where we came from and how we are similar through the narratives that we construct about our life history, our different positionality, the different intersections of race, class, nationality, sexual orientation that then help us be relatable, human, understandable, vulnerable, right? Those things I think get navigated primarily through the exchange of messages, through the exchange of linguistic, you know, discoursive thought, and those kinds of things I find just very rewarding.Amy: That's fantastic. So for those who don't know, Homeboy Enterprises is--it's a lot of things, but primarily what they do is they take former gang members and teach them job skills, marketable job skills, and then they create businesses, right, with the people in their program. So they might create a whole t-shirt company that's comprised--the employees of which are maybe even rival gang members all working together in sort of this rehabilitative space to overcome the past and to contribute to the economy and to really heal through work and through shared goals.José: Exactly, exactly. I think they have, you know, four or five businesses. They have a cafe. They have a bakery and quite a wide variety of businesses, and about a year ago one of the organizations on campus, the [?] Center for Ethical Leadership, gave Father Boyle an award, and he came--he was invited to come and, you know, accept the award. Unfortunately he was under the weather at the time and I didn't have a chance to meet him at that time, but one of the Homeboys came instead, and Miguel, who was in charge of marketing, just delivered this speech that was stunning. There wasn't a dry eye in the room. It was just powerful, yeah. So very moving work.Amy: That's amazing, and all of that through storytelling and connectedness.José: Exactly, and it was all really through the power of language. A guy up on a stage with a microphone telling his story.Amy: That's beautiful. So in the time that we have left, I would like your perspective on code switching and on cultural dexterity. So you and I had a brief conversation about this before we started recording, and I just want to know, what do those terms mean to you? I know that you use the term code switching to talk about when you're flexing between English language communication and Spanish language communication, but what does that mean to you? What's the feeling behind that term?José: So code switching for me is, you know, experientally that capacity to go from speaking English to speaking Spanish, or then from speaking Spanish to speaking English, and being able to go back and forth from those linguistic traditions, and that's how I tend to use the term code switching, in a very basic, organic, lay type of meaning, right? So nothing too intellectual or crazy cerebral, very simple, and I mentioned that to you in our conversation because I did that in the TED talk. One of the things I wanted to do in preparing for that was to be able to code switch from English to Spanish and Spanish to English, one because I thought that would be really fun, two I hadn't really seen it done before--I'm sure somebody has, but it doesn't happen very often--and also to be able to express through the power of spoken word that capacity to navigate two languages and, by doing that, create a sense of community, reach somebody through an online medium or through the internet or through whatever that message gets sent that says, "Gosh, here's somebody speaking my language," or "Here's somebody code switching," or "Here's somebody kind of going back and forth," and having a moment of identification, and I think through those moments of identification we start to experience solidarity, a sense of unity, a sense that we're not alone, that there's other people out there in the community that are like us, that are human and are willing to put themselves out there and put out a message that can be unifying, can be compassionate, can be empathic and can be, you know, the beginnings of a healing moment, not only for us as individuals but for communities at large. So for me that's my best answer with code switching. I want to just switch to the other topic that you were asking about, which is cultural dexterity, and cultural dexterity comes from a body of academic work looking at cross-cultural or inter-cultural communication, advancing the idea that we need to adapt or to adjust as we shift from one cultural orientation to another, and being able to do that is to have cultural dexterity, to be able to navigate not just my culture of origin or my tradition but to be able to seamlessly adapt to different discourse communities, right, without, you know, excessive effort or, you know, stumbling around, and that capacity I think is a skill that, you know, we really need, not only in our world but in our country, to be able to communicate with people that I perceive are different from me. I think we all need to have that as a skill set, because that is a primary human experience. Difference is a primary human experience. Whenever we meet the other, we are in the experience of difference. And how do we bridge that difference? How do I navigate that conversation with someone that is different from me? For some people that's very easy, for others it's very hard, and cultural dexterity is a concept that tries to get at the ways that we do that. And, you know, as you might imagine, one of the simplest ways to do that is, again, navigating conversations in such a way that we find what we have in common as opposed to what we have in difference. And we do this very organically all the time. When we meet somebody for the first time we say, "Hey, how are you doing? What's your name? Where are you from? What do you do? What do you like? Where'd you go to school?" And we ask all these questions to try to gather enough information to find something that we have in common that we can then zero in on to develop a dialogue back and forth around an issue that we have in common. So if I speak with you and I know that you're interested in networking and diversity, well, then I'm also interested in that, and I go, "Gosh, that's a topic of conversation that we can bridge whatever divisions we might have or whatever difference we might have, because diversity and networking are such a thing that we have in common that the other stuff just is not all that important or is kind of trivial or isn't really central to this passion that we bring to diversity and networking and things of that ilk," and I think that cultural dexterity is an area of study, again, that tries to teach those skills strategically.Amy: Excellent. So I want to commend you on your bilingual TED talk, and the reason I say that is because I think that there's--I think in the current political climate with some of the news stories that I've seen about people who have been harassed or assaulted for speaking languages other than English in public spaces, to me, for you to speak Spanish from a stage is an act of profound resistance against a culture that seeks to punish difference, and I can only imagine what that meant to someone in the audience who, you know, is a first-generation immigrant or, you know, for whom Spanish is their primary language at home, but they have to navigate a world that is in many ways alien to them because, you know, the culture seeks to strip them of language. You know, one of the tools of colonialism has been to strip people of their language and to strip people of their culture by forbidding language, and so I commend you for that. I think that's such a profound act of resistance and a profound act of courage and solidarity to do that so publicly and with so much empathy for your audience.José: Thank you. No, I appreciate that. I have got to tell you, that was difficult to do, yes, yes. It is a challenge because, you know, for all the reasons that you're articulating and more. We live in a climate where it's extremely weird to get up on stage and then not only do that but realizing that you're being videotaped and that is going to be launched at some point all over the internet and people are gonna be able to see that, you know, forever, right? So there's this strange feeling of vulnerability that I never really experienced before because, you know, I'm not someone that does TED talks every day. That was my first one. But there was this whole sense of feeling very vulnerable, very open, very, you know, out there, right? Just without a safety net, right? Especially on the day of rehearsal where you see that there's all these lights on you, right? There's just you, the stage, and these massive lights where you can't see the audience because the lighting is so powerful. You know, in order to capture you brilliantly in all the color and the dynamics of, you know, the technical aspects of the filming, there needs to be just massive amounts of lighting, and at first it was just a shock to the system, you know? Rehearsals for me did not go too well. I was very frustrated because I was distracted. I felt very vulnerable. I felt very agitated, because it wasn't something that I had rehearsed before. And then I knew what I was gonna do. I knew what I was gonna get up there and say. And after saying it though, it felt really good, you know? It felt very rewarding. It felt very evocative. It felt transformative. It felt very emotional. There was a couple of times during the performance where I choked up, because I didn't want to go up there and just be safe. I didn't want to go up there and just be very logical. I didn't want to go up there and just say, "Well, you know, I'm gonna talk about my research and these three areas," and be very linear and Aristotelian and academic because I felt that if I did that I would put on a very easy shield and not really be of service, and I just felt called to just, you know, let it ride, and I was happy that I took that risk for sure, so I really appreciate the affirmation.Amy: Absolutely, and as I listen to you I think about--it was almost a coming out, a public coming out, right, where I've seen and I've experienced, you know, being in front of a room and coming out, and it is, it's terrifying. There's nowhere to hide. You know, physically you're probably safe, but tricking your brain into believing that when you're out there on your own, separated from a crowd, right, the spotlight is literally on you and there's absolutely nowhere to hide once those words escape. It can be incredibly freeing, but it can be terrifying as well, and so--you know, and again, given kind of where we are politically and culturally right now, I just think that was incredibly brave and, you know, probably very affirming to the people that were there listening to you.José: Thank you. That tension between terrified and then having an experience of freedom, right, that is the tension that, no question about it, you feel very liberated, but at the same time a feeling of terror, a feeling of excitement, and talk about intersectionality. Intersectionality as an inner experience of multiple intersections of oppressive, liberating energies in the simultaneity of an insane moment, right? Because, you know, how many people have the blessing or the opportunity to get up on a stage and have all the lights on you and deliver a message? It's such a blessing, such a gift, and I wanted to honor that moment, you know? TED has a great line or a great mission to deliver, you know, a message worth spreading, right? That idea, that brand, a message worth spreading, an idea worth spreading, and every time I prepared I wanted to make sure that I was saying something that was worthy of that mission, that was worthy of that statement, that was worthy of that ideal, and in doing that, right, in attempting my best to stay true to those ideals, it was terrifying, it was difficult, it was liberating, and all of that happening simultaneously, like, you feel like your heart's in one place and your mind's in another and your body's going in a different direction and you forget, and then you bring it back and then you don't know how you're gonna be and you can't predict the future, but you know it's gonna be great, but you're not sure, and it's these weird journeys of the heart and the mind and the soul, and you're hoping, "Gosh, once I go through this whole maddening process, I hope I arrive on the other side okay," right? But it's just really what we talk about in kind of classic stories about the leap of faith, right? Taking a leap of faith, taking the hero or the heroine's journey, finding a way to kind of navigate your journey one step a time by claiming your truth as best you can in the moment and allowing wherever you land to be okay.Amy: Love that, yes. And, you know, the leadership lesson in that, about authenticity and vulnerability, I think is not to be overlooked, because certainly as you're stripping away some of that facade and you're, you know, opening yourself up in that way, people are seeing you as a leader in a way that maybe they hadn't before, and they're identifying with you and your story, and they become personally invested then in your success, and I think that that's--I think that's the real gift of leadership in an authentic and vulnerable way is that other people become invested in your success because they sense that you're equally invested in theirs.José: Right, I totally agree. There's this interesting dialectic, right, there's this interesting reciprocal relationship where I think through vulnerability we make connections with the other because we come to understand, at a very evocative, embodied level, our essential humanity. So I'm a human being just like you're a human being, and we're having a moment of solidarity where you might be admiring me, which is great, but I think the bigger gift is that you see yourself, you see the beauty of you in those moments, because in my, as I like to call it "stumbling successfully," I have said something or I have done something that allows you to see what is already beautiful inside you and helps you recognize it in a moment. And then you might project that onto me, which is fine, but hopefully what happens is that you feel empowered, you feel motivated, and then you feel that you want to pay that gift forward by allowing someone in your life to know that they're not alone, that they have value, that they are here with you for a reason, and in dialogue you get to discover what that reason is.Amy: That's beautiful. And if it's okay, we will end there. Thank you so much for this conversation, and thank you for extending your vulnerability to my audience. I appreciate it.José: It's been a pleasure connecting with you. Always, always wonderful to talk to you. Take care.Amy: Thank you.

united states america california english google business education service career tech spanish diversity corporate inclusion cdc mentorship jos higher education ge long beach corporate america rodr solidarity poc guez california state university intersectionality melanin feeding america woc vsco rehearsals be it aristotelian ethical leadership see it long beach state profess podsincolor homeboys father greg boyle education industry father boyle living corporate amy love amy thank amy so amy c waninger amy oh pocintech blackandbrown vscocam

205 : White Fragility (w/ Dr. Robin DiAngelo)

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2020 56:38

Amy C. Waninger fills in for Zach to interview Dr. Robin DiAngelo, author of "White Fragility," about just that. She helpfully unpacks the concept of whiteness and what it means in the context of American society, defines the term white solidarity and discusses its impact on black and brown people at work, and talks about what it looks like for white people to take responsibility for being less fragile. She also touches on the topic of diversity of thought and explains why she believes that it is the way that homogeneous groups protect their hold on institutional power.Connect with Robin on social media! She's on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.Find out more about Robin's book "White Fragility" on Amazon.Check out her website.Read her piece, "Nothing to Add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions," by clicking here.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and look, really good news. First of all--the first thing. The first thing, right, 'cause I have two things. The first thing is my wife and I have welcomed our first child into the world. Her name is Emory, and she is great. In fact, her full name is Emory Jean Nunn. Beautiful. Gorgeous. I don't post pictures of my kids on social media, so if you don't really know me like that, if we're not really close, you're not going to get a picture from me. But that's okay, 'cause you don't have to see her. You know? It's okay. It's kind of like--who doesn't post pictures of their kids? Oh, no, Sia doesn't show her face. But, like, you know how Sia doesn't show her face? Like, that's how I'ma do my kids. Like, you know, you'll never see her face, but, like, she'll be covered up with, like, a lamp or something like that. But anyway, really excited about the fact that I'm a father. Really thankful for my wife. I was in the delivery room when she had her daughter, when she had our daughter, and man, just the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Shout-out to you, Candis. You're beautiful. Really thankful and appreciative to you for making me a girl dad, and yeah, that's the first thing. Like, that's the headline, okay? And then the second thing, far distant but still pretty cool news, we were able to get a very special guest today, and her name is Robin DiAngelo, Dr. Robin DiAngelo, and, you know, it was interesting because I was supposed to be the person who was to interview Dr. DiAngelo, but the date that we had to interview directly interfered with me welcoming my daughter into the world. So I was still in the hospital during my interview date. So I was able to prep Amy C. Waninger, wonderful consultant, subject matter expert, executive coach and member of Living Corporate and founder of her own company Lead at Any Level. She actually facilitated this conversation in my stead, and I just think that's really cool for a couple different reasons. One, Living Corporate has now gotten to the size and scope that we're able to attract a Dr. DiAngelo, but also our team is so capable that, you know, someone can check in the game and I can check out without there being a huge issue, and so shout-out to you, Amy. Thank you so much for facilitating this conversation. I know you all are gonna love this conversation, so make sure you check it out, and I'll catch y'all next time. Peace.Amy: Robin, welcome to the show. How are you?Robin: Well, I'm overall well in a very uncertain and frightening time.Amy: So let's get right into it, Robin. So before we talk about white fragility, can we unpack the concept of whiteness? Which is something we don't talk about a lot, and what that means in the context of American society?Robin: Yeah. So let's hold that note that you just made, that we don't talk about it a lot, because it's a key way that it stays intact and protected. So I'm gonna use Ruth Frankenberg. She's a sociologist, and she makes three points about whiteness, three dimensions. So it's a location of structural advantage, a position if you will within society, within institutions. It's a standpoint from which white people look out at ourselves, at others, and at society, and it's a set of cultural practices that are not named or acknowledged, right? And so to say that it's a standpoint is to say that it's a significant aspect of white identity, to see one's self as an individual outside or innocent of race, right? Just human. For most white people it's the last thing. [laughs] We'd have to be prompted to include being white in a list of, you know, "What you need to know about me," right? Characteristics of myself, things that have shaped my life. We're rarely going to name race as one of those things and yet, you know, before I took my first breath, the fact that my mother and I are white was shaping the trajectory of my life, and certainly the outcome of my very birth, right? So all of these things come together to create what you think of as whiteness, kind of the water that we interact within.Amy: I like that you called out "it's unnamed cultural norms," and I know in your book, and we'll talk about this in a minute, but naming those cultural norms, it violates the norms.Robin: It's this odd kind of tension if you will, right, that in talking about whiteness, of course, we're centering whiteness, right? We're kind of, you know, as always, positioning white people in the middle of the conversation, but in a very curious way whiteness stays centered by not being named, by not being acknowledged, and so to disrupt it you have to expose it. You have to make it visible. We can see this with patriarchy, right? The kind of unmarked, unnamed norm is "male" and then everything else is named as a specific position so that maleness is just human, and then femaleness is a variation and a deficient one of that, and the same of race. White is human, and everything else is a particular kind, and to be honest, a less than version of that human, and so by never naming that center from which we're proceeding you protect it.Amy: Absolutely. And I want to be sure and call this out right now, because when Zach asked me to stand in for him, you know, he knew that this interview was happening around the time of the birth of his daughter, and he called me and asked me if I would step in and sub for him, and I laughed and I said, "Really, Zach? You want a white woman--the only white woman on your team--to interview a white woman on a podcast for black and brown people?" You know? And I said "Are you sure that's what you want to do?" And he said, "Lean into that, go with it, and don't be afraid to call it out," and so I want to make sure that the audience knows that I know that I'm white, Robin and I both know that.Robin: Oh, I'm acutely aware.Amy: And yet we are recording this, you know, with the intent of sharing this conversation with a predominantly black and brown audience, and so I want to really, like, unpack this and do this justice, because I think we have such a unique opportunity here. You've used several times, in your book and in your talks, the term "white solidarity." Can you explain to us what that term means?Robin: Yeah. Maybe a couple of remarks about what you had just acknowledged, right? First of all, I actually think people of color know what it means to be white, know about dynamics such as white fragility to a degree that I never will, because they've been navigating it their entire lives. I think about it as it comes from me, not at me, right? And as an insider to whiteness, you and I do have something to offer, right, that people of color can't know or understand, and one piece of what we can offer is just to freaking admit to this, right? I mean, that in and of itself, you know, helps with the gaslighting, right? But I also want to be clear that--and I'm pretty sure this speaks for you too--we were not raised to see ourselves as white. Right now us acknowledging that, it's taken, you know, 20 years of my life's work to come to understand that I am white and that it shapes everything that I do. So it's not something that we are set up to understand at all, which of course is part of how it stays protected. And then to not name this, right? Audre Lorde has a beautiful quote about the master's tools. "How do you dismantle the master's house when you only have the master's tools?" So as you and I are two white people having this conversation, of course we're reinforcing whiteness, right? But for me to not use this position, this platform, this voice, this automatic granting of credibility and benefit of the doubt, to not use that to interrupt whiteness is to really be white. [laughs] And I'd like to be a little less white. And I always want to be really clear. What I mean when I say a little less white, I am not gonna tell you or tell white people that the answer to racism is to claim our ethnic roots, right? I'm not gonna say, "Let's all go and be Italian-American and Irish-American." No, for me to be a little less white means to be--to put it bluntly--a little less racially oppressive, a little less racially ignorant and yet arrogant in my ignorance, right? A little less certain and complacent and apathetic and silent and a little more humble and curious and breaking with white solidarity. So that leads us to that question. I see white solidarity as the unspoken agreement amongst white people that we'll keep each other comfortable around our racism, that we will privilege one another's saving face over actually being in our integrity and interrupted racism. So you say something, I'm cringing, right? I'm like, "Ugh," but I don't want to embarrass you so I'm not gonna say anything, plus I'm so relieved that it wasn't me, right? "It was you, not me!" You know, there's that individual piece where I think "Hey, as long as I didn't say it I'm not complicit with it," but of course my silence is complicit with what you just said, right? Yeah, so it's that dynamic of protecting one another, protecting our positions within this system. No matter how we rationalize it, that is what we're doing through white solidarity. Kind of pulling ranks.Amy: Mm-hmm. And there are real consequences for breaking with white solidarity, just like there are real consequences for not being white, and so as white folks we can either choose to remain protected by standing in solidarity with people that we maybe disagree with or have made us uncomfortable or we can choose to shed that protection and shed some of that privilege, but then we're also opening ourselves up to the same kinds of in the moment--not universally, but in the moment the same types of social outcasting we might receive if we were in fact other.Robin: Yes. You know, let's be really clear. There are consequences to white people for breaking with white solidarity. I mean, the term race traitor has an origin, right? And so that's in large part why we often don't break with it, but I also want to distinguish the differences, right? We're in this moment, right? We're at the dinner table. Uncle Bob says that thing. Everybody's cringing. Nobody wants to ruin the dinner. And I often ask, "Jeez, why would interrupting racism ruin the dinner and not interrupting racism not ruin this dinner," right? And yet, you know, i t's gonna erupt in conflict and so we keep quiet. So, you know, there are consequences, such as being dismissed, being trivialized, "You ruined the dinner," but it doesn't rest on a history. It doesn't trigger a history of harm, right, that it does for people of color when they break that silence, right? So that's one piece, and another piece is I am probably not going to lose my job. I am probably not going to be criminalized. I am probably not going to be institutionalized. But those threats and those fears are out there kind of circulating around people of color when they challenge white people, right? This is very real. The consequences are real.Amy: Absolutely. So let's talk about how white solidarity shows up at work, and specifically what are the impacts to black and brown folks at work when white people are engaging in white solidarity?Robin: Well, one of the ways it shows up is privileging white people's feelings over racism, right? So all of this, you know, tiptoeing and tying people in knots to, you know, make sure that white people are comfortable in this conversation, and we have to create a safe space, and we can't go too fast, and, you know, "Let's not call it racial equity. Let's call it D&I and D&E and DEI and everything, you know, vague other than racial justice, right? Because we need to keep white people comfortable," right? Let's get everything on the table. Well, how does that function? By getting everything on the table you can't do justice to anything, and you certainly can't do justice to race, right? So those are some really common ways that institutions privilege and protect white people's delicate sensibilities over the very real pain that people of color in primarily-white organizations are experiencing daily.Amy: Absolutely, and I want to be very clear about this. So it seems like the higher up people are in the organizational food chain, if you will, the more fragile they are, and the more power they have the more fragile they are in terms of conversations about race, the more they cling to that power and weaponize it. Do you think that's a fair take?Robin: Yes. Certainly, I mean, you see white fragility across, you know, wherever you have white people, but the impact of it is greater the higher your status is, right? So my training is in sociology, and it's just been invaluable to me, right? And there's a question that's just never failed me in my efforts, right, to unpack, you know, how do we keep getting these outcomes despite all the things that white people are gonna claim? And that question is not is this true or is this false, is this right or is this wrong, but how does it function? Who does it serve? So how does it function and who does it serve when the people with the most institutional power are the most fragile? Well, they certainly have the most to lose in a way, right? They are protecting their positions and their status. They likely feel the most threatened by a question, and I'm gonna offer they likely feel the most entitled to what they have, and so they have no ability or stamina to withstand questioning what they have, right? I mean, you're up against now idealogies of meritocracy, that "I have what I have because I'm the cream of the crop, and cream rises, and I've worked hard, and, you know, I'm special, and I went to the finest schools." You're questioning all of that idealogy when you challenge those at the top. Maybe there's something more going on here than just the cream rising. And I just have to say I grew up in poverty, so I didn't go to college until I was in my 30s, and I really did think that the smartest kids went to college. And then I got to college and I was dumbfounded, quite frankly, and then I went on to teach college, and I can assure you that the cream does not rise, that the smartest kids don't go to college, and that Ivy League schools are not filled with the best and the brightest. It's about access and opportunity, but that's a hard thing to look at when all your life you've been told how special you are.Amy: Absolutely. Now, in your book you said--and I'm quoting from your book here--"It's white people's responsibility to be less fragile. People of color don't need to twist themselves into knots trying to navigate us as painlessly as possible," and this seems to fly in the face of a lot of, you know, diversity and inclusion work that's being done in corporations right now. You alluded to this earlier, right? We call it everything but anti-racism, we call it everything but racial equity, and, you know, there seems to be a lot of making people comfortable, you know, setting ground rules so no one gets upset when we have these conversations at work, and kind of the prevailing notion or the unwritten, unspoken rule is "Both sides need to put in a lot of emotional labor to make this change happen." So let me ask you - what does it look like for white people to take responsibility for being less fragile? How do we do that?Robin: Let's back up a little bit and talk about that dynamic, right, where everyone's equally responsible. That does not account for the difference in power, in structural and institutional power. So that's like saying, if we're looking--I draw from patriarchy and sexism a lot. I'm a cis woman. You know, she/her pronouns. I'm white. And it's just so clear when I think about it. Well, both men and women have equal responsibility to dismantle patriarchy. Well, we all play a role, but who controls the institutions, right? Who holds that power? And so the weight of that responsibility I believe is in the hands of those who have more institutional power. And people of color of course have a role to play, in the same way that women have a role to play in challenging sexism and patriarchy, but it's a very different role. In a lot of ways it's about developing critical consciousness. It's about surviving the dynamics, supporting each other, getting away--getting space away from white people. I mean, these are the kinds of things that people of color--that have been in my life--have shared that they need to have, right? This is how they can kind of survive this whiteness that they're embedded in all the time, is to surround themselves with people who understand their experiences and share their experiences, right? So what are some of the things that white people can do? We simply cannot get where we need to go from the current paradigm, which is--this is the average white person's definition of what it means to be racist, right? A racist is an individual who consciously does not like people based on race and is intentionally mean to them. Individual, conscious mal-intent across race. That's racism, or a racist, and I don't know that you could come up with a more effective way to protect systemic racism than that definition, because it absolves virtually all white people. Most of the racism--I would say actually all of the racism--I have perpetrated in my life has been unintentional and unaware. That does not mean that the impact of it hasn't been harmful and painful, right? So you pretty much guarantee defensiveness and denial when that is what you think it means to be racist. You know, the average white person--I mean, I've been asking this question for 20 years - "What does it mean to be white?" - and most white people can't answer that question, and that's not benign or innocent or neutral. You know, the collective inability of white people to answer that question creates a hostile environment, because if I can't tell you what it means to be white, I cannot hold what it means not to be white, right? I'm gonna have no critical thinking on that. I'm gonna have no skills to navigate the conversation, and I'm gonna have no emotional capacity to withstand the discomfort of that conversation, and what that means is that people of color in primarily white environments can't be their authentic selves. They can't talk to us about what they're experiencing because things tend to get worse for them, not better for them, when they challenge us, right? So we white people have to stop thinking about racism as just people walking around saying the N word, you know, and going to rallies in Charlottesville. That's real too. That's another conversation, but again, it's the more--I'm gonna put air quotes around it--"subtle," but it's that inability to understand our own racial perspective and positions that creates that climate for people of color working with us, right? And that leads to this idea that racism is their problem, right? I mean, I was raised to see race as what--oh, let's name somebody. Van Jones has race, right? I don't have race, right? I'm just regular, you know? In my day we said things like "I'm just white bread," "I'm just Heinz 57," right? They have race, and so they also have the problems associated with race, and so you get this idea that they'll have to work that out, but thank goodness I'm not a part of that. I'll never forget a student--I used to always start my classes with that question, you know, how has your race shaped your life? And a white student wrote, "Well, I was really lucky. I grew up in an all-white neighborhood, and so I've never learned anything about racism." Amy: They've learned everything.Robin: Just in that one sentence, I mean, we can unpack--I could teach a whole freaking seminar on that one sentence it's so loaded. We could do some beautiful discourse analysis, right? But this idea that we're innocent of race, that white space is unracialized space and that we've absorbed nothing in that space--Amy: And I think that we're not missing anything by being in that space, right? [?] anything that would benefit us by staying in those, you know, all-white neighborhoods that are privileged, you know? It's just such a sadness to me. It's such a sickness that we have, that we think that by excluding ourselves from the conversation we are in some way privileging ourselves, when I believe the exact opposite is true.Robin: Yeah. I actually think the deepest message of all, of white supremacy--and let me just pause for a minute, because that's a charged term for a lot of white people. Yes, it includes people wearing white hoods. You know, that's how I was raised to understand the term, but it's actually a highly descriptive sociological term for the society we live in, one in which elevates white people as the norm for humanity, a lot of what we've already been talking about, and I think one of the deepest messages of white supremacy is this idea that there's nothing of value lost in white segregation, and in fact, that segregation is what we use to define that space as good. The whiter it is, the more it will be perceived as "good," valuable, safe. The profundity of that message is so deep. I just wish white people would just sit with it for a minute. "Wow," right? To call white segregated space good, right? We just came out of February, which was Black History Month, where we talk about the tragedy of enforced segregation of blacks in the Jim Crow South, and every day we talk in celebratory terms about white segregation. Those are very deep messages that we have to look at. Again, it's not the N-word for somebody like me, but it's that. Amy: Right, it's the coded language of good schools, good neighborhoods, low crime, you know, nice areas of town, good parts of town, right?Robin: Mm-hmm. "Oh, I'm shocked that crime happened here." Well, where is it supposed to happen?Amy: Right, or we don't even define it as crime when white people do it. White collar crime is its own kind of crime because certainly people who are in white collar jobs who are white people are not engaged in normal crime, right? Normal crime is for other people. And yeah, the vernacular around this, we could go on forever, but I want to get to Zach's questions because he's my boss. Robin: Yeah. Well, I want to say something about the ground rules. You mentioned ground rules, right? 'Cause we're talking about corporate settings. So you have these seminars and workshops and, you know, these guidelines for having a conversation, but they always assume equal power relations, right? There's no one set of guidelines that will ensure a quote-unquote "safe space" for everybody. Usually what they are all about is niceness, and a culture of niceness is just kind of deadly in terms of racial justice because challenging racism, naming racism, will not be perceived as "nice," right? "You've hurt my feelings," you know? "How could you assume I would be racist?" And so as long as everybody has to be nice, we can have no conflict or no strong feelings and we can't express ourselves in any kind of strong way. And so usually those ground rules function to stifle authentic conversation, authentic expression of pain that people of color are often in in primarily white spaces, particularly primarily white-controlled spaces.Amy: Well, it becomes another form of gatekeeping that white people do on conversations that don't center them. And so we keep those conversations to a minimum, we make sure that we reframe it so that it's palatable for the people that pay our salaries and that sort of thing, and, you know, I think to me one of the things that we can do as white people is to put ourselves less often in gatekeeper roles where we are, you know, less responsible for things like merit decisions or, you know, pay decisions, promotion decisions, content or tone decisions, right? Where we're not policing those things, we are handing that off to someone who is, you know, superbly capable of doing it from a completely different perspective, and I think especially in those kinds of conversations where we're in racial equity conversations, I think it's incumbent upon white folks, just like when you're in a performance review and your boss gives you feedback you don't like, you don't argue with them and cry and throw things and, you know, tell them, you know, "I can't believe you thought I did a bad job on that report," right? We don't do that because it would be ridiculous to do that in any other professional context, but then somehow we put ourselves in the position of gatekeeping on those conversations again through the weaponizing of our emotions in those conversations.Robin: Yeah, it reminds me of--as a woman in a male-dominated environment, I am not going to cry. No way. I might go in the bathroom and cry, but I am not gonna cry in front of those men. And yet, white women, how free do we feel to cry in front of people of color when charged with racism, right? When held accountable for our behavior, which is very revealing about our understanding of where the power lies, right? What is the difference between my tears in each of those contexts, right? And so your question about, you know, "How do we get there?" And I was saying we can't get there from the current paradigm, right? We just have to start from the premise, white people have to start from the premise, that we have been thoroughly indoctrinated and socialized into white supremacy and into ways of seeing and being that uphold white supremacy, and once you start there it's actually incredibly liberating, right? It's just transformative. I can stop defending, denying, debating, you know, and start just getting to work trying to unpack, well, how is that indoctrination into white supremacy manifesting in my life, in my work? It's such a different question because it rests on a very different premise, right? And so when you talk about white people kind of turning over some of those decisions in the workplace, I want to put in a plug here for, you know, if you're gonna put people of color on committees and, you know, token representation, they need to be paid more for that work, right? They need to be compensated for the psychic, emotional and intellectual labor that they're doing and the expertise that they're bringing that the rest of us don't have, right? And tart acknowledging--Amy: And not just one person of color on that board. You need a critical mass of people who can, you know, almost be a block of voices, because one person cannot do that work alone. I mean, that's violent to put one person in that position.Robin: Yes, yes.Amy: So let me ask you this while we're on the subject of corporate America and the way that we talk about diversity concepts. You know, we hear a lot about--so there are a couple places I want to go with this. The first is "Well, what about diversity of thought?" And I have so many things I'd love to save about that, but the other is, you know, this focus on gender as if gender equity is one thing. And so I want to leave that there and kind of get your response to those two terms. Robin: So we might as well just go for it. Diversity of thought is ridiculous - ridiculous. That is the way that homogeneous groups protect their hold on institutional power, right? "Yeah," you know, "There's all kinds of things," you know? "Somebody likes soccer and somebody likes volleyball." There are many forms of difference between us, but those seem, like, personality kinds of things, right? Race is very, very real. Racism is very, very real. That lack of representation is very real. We have to get real about it, right? Hold on, though. The other piece you asked--Amy: The gender equity piece.Robin: Yeah, I have to be careful here. So I think there's--Amy: Stop there for a second. I want to know, why do you feel you have to be careful there?Robin: Because there's a lot of social power behind the push for acknowledging gender binaries and gender diversity as you call it, and I do believe that there's a reason that that has spread. Look, I do not want to downplay patriarchy and sexism and heterosexism and transphobia. I don't want to downplay those things, and I think there's a reason that that has flourished in a way that you're gonna see on people's signatures their gender pronouns, but you are not going to see their race, and I'd like to see their race on there too. I'd like if, before we start a meeting, we go around the room, we say our gender pronouns, sure, but we also say our race, so we start noticing who's at this table and who's not at this table, you know? What decisions are being made at this table and who are they going to impact in what ways, and how do we know, and who's missing? So I think, again, I want to acknowledge that all of those variations of that oppression are real, but there's still a reason that that has become more widespread and acceptable, and I think it's because everyone pretty much knows somebody who is queer or non-binary. They're your brothers, your sisters, your family members, your cousins. So there's a human face to that, but most white people live profoundly racially segregated lives, and so we don't see that humanity in the same way.Amy: I think that's fair, and I think, you know, a lot of the gender equity focus, like, when a lot of companies do diveristy initiatives in their companies or inclusion initiatives, they start with gender because gender seems the most safe thing or the most relatable thing, and typically the beneficiaries of those initiatives are white women only, because what works for white women in corporate settings doesn't work for black women, Indian women, you know, Chinese-American women, indigenous women, Latinx women, right? And it's another way, I believe, of reinforcing the primacy of whiteness in the space as opposed to really making gains broadly in diversity and inclusion. Would you agree with that?Robin: Well, I see a lot of white gay men in positions, you know, head of diversity and equity in organizations, and I also notice that many of them have no racial analysis. So again, you want to use your oppressed experience, right, your oppressed identities, as a way in, not as a way out, right? So how can you use that understanding to see, "All right, well, where am I complicit in somebody else's oppression?" And I move back to gender and patriarchy a lot because I've thought about it most of my life. I was in my 30s before I ever considered how I was complicit with somebody else's oppression. So great, a white, gay man who has a strong anti-racist analysis? That's fantastic, but without that you're just gonna reproduce the same kind of daily agony for the people of color in your organization.Amy: Right, absolutely. Absolutely. And I want to get into this just a little bit, Robin, because, you know, we do similar work in that we are trying to, you know, build a more equitable culture, build more inclusive cultures within organizations, within our communities, within our country. You know, there is this fine line that people like you and I walk in speaking truth to power and getting paid, and I'm curious, because I know that that's a struggle not just for us, right? And we are maybe a little--it's maybe a little easier for us to do that because of our whiteness, but folks who really want to speak truth to power but have value to offer an organization and, you know, expect to be paid for their work, how do you balance that? What advice do you have for folks who are out there every day kind of balancing on that razor's edge?Robin: Yeah. Well, the first thought is relating to--we were just talking about who tends to be in these positions, right, and I want to be really clear that I don't think it's automatically people of color should be leading all of the diversity efforts. I think that's also problematic, right? We put them in those positions. We'll cover everything else, and we'll give them race work, even as they're not going to be listened to and heard in the same way. So it's not a given, right? So again, a white person in that position with a very strong anti-racist analysis can be incredibly effective, in some ways more effective in certain areas. My ideal is interracial teams that you actually put the resources behind, an interracial team at the head of your diversity initiative, because each member of that team can bring something and challenge something differently than somebody else, right? So I used to be a co-director with a black woman of equity at an organization. You know, there were things that I could push that she couldn't, and there were things of course that she could bring that I couldn't, and so that's for me a much more ideal than any just one person, 'cause that's a setup, you know, regardless. How I have reconciled that dilemma, right, in various ways. So first of all, sometimes people say "You're being paid for racism," and I would basically say, "Well, I'm being paid for anti-racism." My work is anti-racism, and we could make a case that everybody--if you are not anti-racist, you are racist, right? So as Ibram Kendi beautifully says, "The opposite of racist isn't not racist. It's anti-racist." So in a society in which racism is the norm, not an aberration, all of us are contributing to that if we're not explicitly challenging it, right? So the one way that I think about what I do, when I come into an organization and I give a presentation on whiteness and white fragility, I'm tilling the soil, if you will, as an outsider, as somebody with a lot of credibility behind my name and as a white person, there's a way in which I can challenge white people that I couldn't if I was inside that organization and that people of color are not gonna be able to, so let me come in and do that really hard, say that really hard stuff and soften the soil in a way that then people can hear the people of color inside that organization, right? And the white people inside that white organization. That is one of the ways I think about what I do, but let me name some of the ways that I seek to be accountable. I donate a percentage of my income to racial justice organizations that are led by people of color. I channel work to people of color. I promote the work of people of color. I have a platform to do that. When I am presenting more than a few hours I co-present in an interracial team. I have white people in my life with a strong anti-racist analysis that I consult with and work through my feelings with. You know, I'm not saying I don't get called in and have feelings about it and need to work through those feelings, but I also have a circle of people of color coaches who have agreed to coach me, to be there for me if I need to work through something, and I pay them for their time. That is critical. It is not something that I turn to them and expect for them to give me. And this is another challenge in organizations, is that labor is just expected with no sense of compensation. So I pay them for that time. Now, occasionally the people of color in my life say, you know, "We're friends, I'm not taking your money," and I say, "Great. I'm donating for the hour you just spent with me to a racial justice organization." I also pay rent in Seattle to the Duwamish people, who are the original peoples. This is the ancestral territories of the Duwamish, and I pay rent to the Duwamish people because they have yet to be federally recognized in the Seattle area. So I could go on, but those are some of the ways I seek to be accountable.Amy: Thank you for that, and, you know, I think that as we look at, you know, it is so easy to not be held accountable, right, as white people in this work and in this society. So one of the things that I've noticed--and Zach and I were talking about this the other day--you know, if certain things that I wrote in my book or that you wrote in your book that you say to white people, you know, is really ground-breaking, right, in an all-white room. Like, people are like, "Oh, my God. That's so radical. I can't believe we're having this conversation," right? They've never heard it before, you know? They've gotten to their mid-fifties and they've never heard somebody say some of these things before, and this is dinner time conversation for black families, right? And so one of the things I've noticed is a lot of times white people can't hear it if a white person doesn't say it, but--and I'll say that out loud, I'll say that in a group of people, and, you know, I'll see women of color especially nodding their heads, but, you know, how much of this work do you feel you're creating something new versus--and I don't mean this as a criticism. I think about this a lot myself. How much of this is you're creating something new versus you're taking what's being said around dinner tables in black families every day and just saying it in a different space where no one's heard it before?Robin: Yeah. Well, so the first thing I think about is that there's simply no clean space. In other words, there's no place outside of this. This is always going to be a [both and?]. You know, as we seek to de-center whiteness, we're centering whiteness, right? Again, we're in it. We're inside this construct. So you do your best to be as accountable as you can, but I don't know that we can ever get it exactly right, right? And the way that I think about what I do, absolutely, years and years and years of mentorship from people of color, years and years of being in rooms and hearing and bearing witness to the testifying of people of color, you know? Years of studying the works of people of color and years of self-analysis, self-reflection, talking to other white people. I do have the ability to take fairly high-level academic concepts and make them very accessible, right? I did put language to something that pretty much everybody recognizes, right? I mean, even people who are fragile around whiteness kind of recognize once you give language to it, and a lot of people of color have said, "Thank you for that language. I absolutely see this. I've dealt with it. I didn't even know how to express it," right? So I have something to contribute, and yes, I stand on the shoulders of countless people of color, right? I can't live with not expressing this, right? I can't live with being silent because of those dilemmas. I try to be as much in my integrity as I can. I try to get it as right as I can as often as I can by as many as I can. [laughs] And I'll never get it right by everybody. It's way too loaded. It's way too charged. It's way too messy.Amy: Absolutely, and I think too in the work of anti-racism it's a moment by moment choice for so many of us, right? That we're either actively deconstructing racism in this moment or we are actively not, and it's something that, coming from a place of privilege, we can choose to do or not, right? We don't have to do that work. No one will think less of us if we don't except that we'll think less of ourselves for those of us who are committed to this kind of thing, but at the same time it is--there's a balance there, right, of taking up space when it's needed and taking up space that we should or should not, and I think there's a lot of calculus that we need to do there, and I see you doing a lot of that in your work. Robin: Yeah. You know, I have a piece called "Nothing to Add: The Role of White Silence in Cross-racial Discussions." You know, I think silence from a position of power is a power move, right? So that's not the alternative either, and one of the things that I'm arguing in that piece is that any way that I engage that is a default, right, like, "Okay, I'm not gonna say a word in this conversation," right? "I don't want to get it wrong. I don't want to make a mistake. I don't want to dominate." Whatever my rationale is, "I'm just gonna listen." Or the other end, right? "I'm gonna speak up whenever I feel moved to speak up." Those are defaults. Those are not "I'm paying attention in every moment, and in each moment I'm asking myself what's happening in the room right now? What are the dynamics at play? What is my position within those dynamics? And given that, what would be the most strategic, constructive, anti-racist move?" And sometimes it would be silence, and sometimes it would be speaking up, and I'm not going to get that call right by everybody in the room, but that's the call I need to be constantly making. Paying attention and, to the best of my ability, using my position in strategic, anti-racist ways, right? Any default is problematic, I believe. Any kind of just--Amy: I agree, yeah. Because once you stop making conscious decisions, you're making decisions without realizing it, and making decisions without realizing you're making them is always a problem.Robin: Well, they tend to function for your own comfort. The "I'm not gonna say a word in case I make a mistake," come on. You don't want to take any risks. You know, you're looking to save face. "I don't want to show myself," right? "Lest you think I'm racist," and I always like to laugh. "Look, I already think you're racist, all right? I start from that premise." Let me just go there - all white people are racist in the sense that all white people have been socialized into a racist world view because we were born into a racist culture in which it's embedded, and we're back to just start from that premise and then get to work trying to impact how you were socialized into it and how you might challenge it rather than this constant denial, you know? That just because you don't want to be means you aren't.Amy: Right, absolutely. So I want to go back to this notion about people of color twisting themselves into knots to avoid, you know, weaponized whiteness so to not be punished. So recognizing of course that we're both white women having this conversation, you know, what do you think is left for people of color to do?Robin: Honestly? Like, survive this, navigate this in as healthy a way as possible. You know, I always feel a little uncomfortable, a little sheepish around telling people of color what is there for them to do, but Glenn Singleton, he is a black man who founded Courageous Conversations, and I've done a couple presentations for him at his conferences, and he has, like, a principle that everybody has a role, and he pushes me to speak to that very question. So with Glenn, I'll imagine him standing beside me saying "Go for it, Robin." [laughs] I mean, my work is to challenge white people, right? But there are a couple of very sensitive questions I do offer people of color, and one is what does anti-blackness look like among your group? Because anti-blackness runs across the spectrum of race, and anti-blackness runs amongst people of color. It runs amongst black people. So what does it look like amongst your group, and who have you aligned with? In particular for Asian heritage people who are often more likely to be comfortable for white people. This does not mean they don't experience racism, but the reality is that white people are more comfortable, in some ways because of our particular racism, because of the invisibility, some of the stereotypes we project onto Asian heritage people, but nonetheless, we are more comfortable overall, right? So I would offer that question to Asian heritage people in the workplace. Who have you aligned with? Have you taken up with the struggles of African-Americans in this country or have you aligned with whiteness, and what have been the rewards, and what has been the price that you paid for that alignment? So there's that work. There's the work of challenging the messages, you know? For white people, we need to challenge the messages of internalized superiority, and there's an opposite message for people of color to look at, and also just, like I said earlier, to get away from white people and build community in people of color spaces, you know? I'm a big believer in affinity work in the workplace, right?Amy: Mm-hmm, yes, and I would like to add to that if I may. I think it's incumbent upon people of color, when you find an ally, hold us accountable.Robin: Oh, yes. Thank you. Mm-hmm.Amy: Because we need that, right? We don't always see, and we may not be holding ourselves to a high enough standard, and, you know, if you have someone you consider a true ally, please, you know, call me on it. I want to know. And, you know, I will do my best to process it in a way that doesn't involve you, right? [laughs] But, you know, please hold us accountable as allies in this work, because, you know, if we aren't getting it right, we have, you know, a pretty poor shot of helping anyone else get there.Robin: Yeah, and what I would add is that then we also have to help each other as white people to hold each other accountable, because it's a tall order for people of color, right? Not only, you know, are there risks that we will respond well, but, you know, we're all inside this construct, so in the same way that, sure, I can seek as a woman to hold men accountable for sexism, half the sexism that's going around me I don't even see because I've been conditioned to collude with it, right? So if you just put it on my shoulders--you know, sometimes you can imagine a man saying, "Hey, just let me know if I do anything sexist," and then he's covered, right? Off he goes, and now I get to carry that, right? So we have to watch that piece of it, right, where a lot of white people will say, "Hey, let me know if I do anything," and now we can relax because they'll let us know. Well, that's a pretty tall order, right? So we have to do our work and hold each other accountable too, develop the capacity so that I can also call myself in, I can realize that I just stepped in it. I'm not completely dependent on people of color helping me with that.Amy: Absolutely, and, you know, there will be times when we step in it with each other, and there will be times we step in it when we're not around for each other, and so I think it's a team sport here, accountability is. So, you know, it's election year again here in 2020, and, you know, Zach says, you know, we're gonna relive the same frustrations and feelings of hopelessness and ostracization that black and brown folks felt in 2016. In addition to that, we have generational shifts coming in the workforce. We have a lot of changing demographics, right? We're at a tipping point demographically in this company in a lot of different fronts. Do you see this as a unique point in time, and if so, what are some things that leaders can do to capitalize on this moment in history to build more equitable outcomes for the future?Robin: Yeah. I think yes, I see it as a unique time in the sense that it's so much more explicit than it's been in a while. So what this is helping us see is that history is not just this arc of progress the way that I was taught to see it, that it's cyclic, and that you can never rest and never be complacent, right? So even the Voting Rights Act has almost been dismantled, something that you'd like to take for granted but you cannot take for granted. So this kind of "We're post-racial because we had Obama as a president," we're done with that nonsense, right? I mean, nobody pretty much that I'm working with is in denial. It was actually harder to do my work during the Obama years because so many people used that as their evidence that we were post-racial. Well, you know, we're so far from post-racial right now, so the explicitness of it, the permission that I actually think the resentment about Obama brought to the surface--it was always simmering under there, but there wasn't permission to express it, you know, post-civil rights. Well, you know, from the highest point we have that permission now, so that has exposed both the enduring nation of white hostility, white resentment, the cyclic nature of history so that we can never be complacent. And in the same way that it has made it more acceptable to be openly racist, it has put on--I never thought in my lifetime, on a debate stage, people would be talking about reparations for African-Americans, right? So there are also ideas that have been given air and legitimacy that we could never bring up before. So it's kind of this push/pull, right, that's going on. As far as the generational shift, I think one of the things we're up against with younger people is they believe that they are post-racial because "Oh, I'm fine with black people. I was on a sports team in school and it's no big deal," and so they have this really simplistic idea, again, of what it means to be racist, and one of the things that stood out to me--I did a year of intensive workshops for a large tech company that for some legal reason must remain unnamed, and what really struck me was that most of the employees there were under 30, and when we would have these workshops and people of color, black people in particular, would share the pain that they were in, their white colleagues under 30 years of age were dumbfounded. They were, like, flabbergasted that their colleagues were in so much pain. They simply had no idea, which means they have no critical thinking and they have no skills and they have no awareness even as they say, you know, they party on the beach with their black friend. That doesn't mean they're able to engage with what their friend is experiencing. This is a challenge we have with the new generation. And so organizations have to truly demonstrate that they're committed to this. They have to put some teeth behind their claim that they value diversity and take a stand, right? If you're gonna work for this company, you have to be able to engage with some complexity and nuance in this conversation, and if you can't you are not qualified to work here. If it was a qualification to be able to engage with some nuance in conversations about race, most of the people leading the organizations that are listening right now wouldn't have their jobs. Let's be honest. It doesn't mean you can't gain that, but you better show some capacity to gain that nuance and complexity or you're not qualified to work here. That's what I would love to see in corporate America.Amy: That would be beautiful. And with that, Robin, I thank you for your time. I thank you for joining us on Living Corporate. On Zach's behalf, I'd like to thank you for being here, and I know that he's thrilled to be home with the baby right now, but I know that he was so disappointed that he had to pass this off, so. It has been an absolute honor and privilege to talk to you today. Thank you so much.Robin: Well, you are so welcome.

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194 See It to Be It : Public Accountant (w/ Uso Sayers)

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 7, 2020 50:30

On the eighth installment of our See It to Be It series, our amazing host Amy C. Waninger sits down to chat with Uso Sayers, CISA, an IT Audit Professional with over 14 years of public accounting experience who currently works as a managing director at Johnson Lambert LLP. Uso graciously shares a bit about how she got involved in public accounting and what about it appealed to her, and she names a couple organizations that help people of color feel supported and connected within the public accounting and IT audit field. She also discusses what surprised her about this work that she didn't expect going in, and she and Amy emphasize the importance of finding the place where you're different and going to listen.Connect with Uso on LinkedIn.Learn more about the National Association of Black Accountants.TRANSCRIPTAde: What's up, y'all? This is Ade. Before we get into Amy's episode, I wanted to share some advice on working remotely. For those of us who are impacted by COVID-19, more commonly known as coronavirus--or if you're not at all impacted by COVID-19 but you are working and transitioning into a more remote lifestyle--I just wanted to share six quick tips that you want to try out to work for you. I do want to say that I don't necessarily abide by all of these rules. I simply know that they are good things to follow based off of me implementing them at some point or another or folks who are better, smarter than me offering these things up as advice. So first and foremost, I would set up a strict calendar. By that I mean I would accept every invite for every meeting. I would have any break times that I wanted to schedule. If there's a point when you're working remotely where you have a cleaner or a plumber or you have a doctor's appointment, keep an updated calendar and make sure that you are updating your team, because it helps you work asynchronously across your team. If folks know that you're not gonna be available between the hours of 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. Eastern time because you're asleep, or some psychos are in the gym, it gives them an opportunity to not pester you while you're away but also think through some questions of how they may better utilize your time when you do get back online. My second tip would be to use check-ins with your co-workers. By that, I mean use your daily stand-ups [?]. Use your Slack team channels if that's a thing. Use those things to keep in contact with your teams, because it's very easy to lose perspective in a sense and lose empathy for your friends or for your coworkers if they're not constantly top of mind. So in that sense, I would remember, you know, team birthdays. Maybe establishing a Slack reminder that it's someone's birthday [and] you all should go drop a Happy Birthday gift in their messages. All of that to say [laughs] that if you can remember to treat your teammates as teammates, as people, not just, you know, an avatar on the other side of the conversation you're having about poorly deployed code, it makes for a better work environment, as distributed as it may be. Thirdly--and these also sort of go hand-in-hand, but I would say that you should over-communicate. This also kind of ties into your strict calendar. Over-communicate. Ensure that any time away from your desk, any planned work that you're gonna be working on, any roadblocks that you're having, you say those things before they become problems, because it's so much easier to kind of get ahead of the horse before it gets out of the table. I don't know if that's an idiom that people actually use anymore, [laughs] but I do think that it's important to ensure that folks aren't caught blindsided, that if you've been working on something and you're stuck on it, give people an opportunity to help you out, and give others the grace to see you where you are so that you don't foster resentment. It's much easier to get something done if you speak up about it sooner rather than later, and it's difficult. I know, for one, it's something that I've had my issues with, especially in situations where you are, you know, bound to your home. Reduce your stress levels and just ask for help. Actually there was one thing that I didn't mention at the top when I said "Set up a strict calendar." On your calendars, I also recommend that you put your self-cues. If you're someone like me who--I drink a lot of caffeine over the course of the day, and I recently spoke to a nutritionist who kind of reminded me that when you work asynchronously and when you consume a lot of caffeine, caffeine suppresses your appetite, and it causes you to fall into really unhealthy eating patterns. More often than not, when you find yourself at home throughout the day you get really comfortable--too comfortable sometimes--so I kind of encourage that you set up your calendar so that you have a routine, so that you're not just, you know, at home and not separating what is home from what is official work time. So when you're working from home, set up your calendar so that you have a routine. Have, you know, time for a shower, time for breakfast, time for the gym if that's something you do in the morning, so that you have a much more regimented schedule. And on your calendar as well, put in your hunger cues. If you're gonna eat at, I don't know, 7:00 a.m., if you're gonna eat breakfast or drink a smoothie at 7:00 a.m., it stands to reason that by maybe 11:00 you might need a small snack, so put a snack cue in your calendar. Maybe at 12:30 you're going to need your larger lunch. Put your lunch on your calendar. These things are important to help you establish a routine around your new lifestyle. Okay, we skipped back up to one, so I'm just gonna finish up with five and six. #5 is to protect your space. Whether it's that you need a physical demarcation of where work happens versus where life happens or if you're the sort of person who is able to, you know, keep up with the simultaneous demands of your work life and your home life, then it doesn't really matter where you work as long as work gets done. Just make sure you're protecting your space. Make sure that, if your close of business is 5:00 p.m., you're not allowing the fact that you work from home to have you check, you know, e-mails at 11:30 p.m. when you're supposed to be asleep. Ensure that you're protecting your space and establishing boundaries in that way, and help others understand and protect those things by communicating what your boundaries are. Just because we're working from home and we're mandated to work from home doesn't mean that my time after, you know, 5:30 p.m. is available to you, and if you see me online, mind your business. As far as you are concerned I am off work, unless it is a dire emergency. And then the sixth thing is don't forget to move. It's very easy, I know. I fell into the trap of eating inconsistently, over-indulging, under-indulging, such that after I had worked remotely for a while I realized that it was getting harder for me to, like, move physically, and it's easier to get ahead of that by simply incorporating movement into your day so that you don't develop back problems or spine problems or anything like that as far as your abilities may allow, but I also think that it's a good way to get out of the monotony and to inject some freshness and a fresh perspective into your day. If you just incorporate a quick 10-minute walk or maybe do some squats or, you know, whatever it may be that you can incorporate into your life to make your life easier, that is helpful and beneficial to you and obviously doesn't take away from you enjoying your day, I would say you should incorporate those things. I've been blathering on for a while. I hope these tips helped you out. Please let us know if there are any tips that work for you when you work remotely or asynchronously with your teams. That's it for now from me. Thank you so much for listening in. Next up you have Amy.Amy: Hi, Uso. Thank you for joining me.Uso: Hello, Amy. Good evening. It's my pleasure.Amy: Thank you. So I was wondering if you can tell me a little bit about your job as a tech auditor and how you got into that work.Uso: Okay, sure. So being in public accounting, I guess you could say I happened upon it. So I had an undergrad in accounting, and I was in grad school studying finance. Given that I had accounting background I figured, "Hey, finance will be a good thing that can, you know, supplement and complement my accounting degree." So I started doing that and I realized I really didn't like finance, so I added information systems as a second major. But doing that opened up--because this was back in 2002 to 2004 when Enron was happening, [?] was going down, so SOX became a big thing. I graduated in '04, and SOX--you know, filers had to be compliant with SOX in 2004, and--Amy: And SOX is the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation that sought to put some protections in place for consumers because companies were behaving very badly.Uso: Exactly. [laughs] I could not have said that better. And so most companies, especially large companies, were required to have IT audits performed. They had controls that they had implemented, and these controls needed to be validated. So that's kind of how I got into the [?] realm. Now, fast-forward 15 years, I'm still doing it because I absolutely love it. I love learning about companies and understanding their control structure so I, you know, can figure out how we can help them, how we can give them recommendations that they can implement.Amy: And when you talk about control structures, you mean things like separation of duties or checks on security so that the people who are accessing the system only have certain rights, the minimum rights that they need to do what they need to do and not extra stuff, right?Uso: Yes, exactly. So, you know, most of the company's financials come from one of the systems, and what was happening back in the day, one person can take a transaction through the system without anyone else touching that transaction. So I can create a vendor, I can pay that vendor. I can then determine where that check goes where that vendor, which leads to fraud or could lead to fraud--errors too, but fraud is one of the bigger reasons, because one [?] could pretend to be a vendor and the company never get any products or services, but I'm also the receiving clerk, so I can check off that this item that we've ordered has been received, and then I send the payment. Or I can even do it for myself, you know? Create some type of a dummy company with my address and then pay myself that way, and a number of companies actually lost money that way. But then there are also other ways outside of just fraud. You can have errors. You can also just have things that are--when you are developing code, and I know we're kind of getting into the technical realm, but when you're--and that's where a lot of errors could potentially happen, but when you're developing code you have the ability to determine how things are being calculated. So you can determine that 1 times 1 is equal to 100 versus 1, and if there aren't checks and balances in place to validate that 1 times 1 is 1, then, you know, the company could be losing money and not realize it. I always remember when I was in college, one of the things they always talked about was the [Lloyd fraudware?]. I think the guy changed one of the configurations by, like, a penny, and he was siphoning that to his own account, and I think he ended up getting millions of dollars.Amy: Oh, my gosh.Uso: You know, so now having--ensuring that the same person who is creating and developing the configuration is not the person who is making that configuration the final configuration in the system, or at least having somebody inserted to check it and make sure it's doing what the company thinks it's doing, you know? That's kind of what we call the control structure.Amy: Got you. Uso: Now, with cybersecurity, the security piece is getting focus. I think with SOX, this change management piece was the big deal then. Security was important, but now with cybersecurity and personal information and protecting that personal information, security is being put on the map so to speak.Amy: Mm-hmm, very good. So I know you got into this kind of a little by accident, because you were down the accounting path and then you just got interested in the IT side of things, but what surprised you about this work that you didn't expect before you got into it?Uso: It is interesting. You know, when you--at least I when I thought of accounting, I thought "boring." And, you know, finance to some extent, but then even though IT audit is not truly core IT, you have the ability to learn a lot about the technical side of what companies do, because before you can offer a company recommendation you have to understand what they have configured and what they have in place, what systems they have, what infrastructure those systems sit on, and then how they're securing their environment, how they're ensuring that, you know, they're protecting--another big area in the IT control realm is that [?] recovery. If we remember 9/11, a number of companies went under because all of their operations were in that building. You know, Tower 1 or Tower 2. They did not have any of that information backed up to a different location. Now we all have phones, and you'd be surprised to know how many people do not back up their pictures and their contact information outside of their phones. So the phone falls in some water, and that's all of their information. And so, you know, that's also one of the areas that we look at, because in 2018, 2019, there's still companies that do not back up data or do not back up frequently, which may sound surprising. [laughs] But it is true. And helping them understand why it's important, or understand why it's important to back it up to something other than the machine where you have the information or outside of the building where you have your information so that you can access it if something happened. You know, you might have people say, "Well, we're not in a [?] plane." Okay, but a pipe could burst. You know? So [laughs] the risks are still there, and, you know, we help companies understand what their risks are so that they can design controls, they can help them make [?] those risks.Amy: That's terrific. So a lot of computing is moving to the cloud, and how are you managing those same risks when the companies don't own the servers and the computers that the work is really being done on?Uso: So two things. The company now has to hold their service provider, that cloud provider, accountable, and they also are still accountable, because at the end of the day it's their data. It's their information. As a client of theirs, I gave them my information. I did not give the cloud my information. So when something happens, I go to the company that I gave my information to. So what companies are doing, there's something called a SOC report, Service Organization Controls report. So the cloud service providers have auditors come in and review their controls, and one of the reasons why the cloud service providers are so successful [is] because they're doing such a large-scale operation. They can afford to have, you know, the best auditors come in, validate their controls, and they can afford to put robust controls in place. So a lot of these companies--the larger cloud providers I guess I should say, because some of the smaller ones are not as sophisticated, but the larger ones, they have very robust controls in place, and they love to have auditors come in and look at it and try to tear it apart so that they can demonstrate that their controls are robust. And even those large companies have incidents happen, you know? That's why the Amazons of the world, they have data centers on both coasts and different places, because things happen, and for companies that do not have the infrastructure in place to support that in house, putting it on the cloud is probably the next best thing because it's going into a secure infrastructure. Now, where some companies think, "Oh, I just put it in the cloud. It's okay." You have to ensure--the cloud companies, in those SOC reports there's something called complementary user entity controls, and what that says is I have this gate, but you design the lock, and you design who has access to that lock. And companies don't realize that, so they think "Oh, it's in the cloud. It's okay," but no, there are those complementary user controls. If you are not doing those things, then the cloud service provider can say, "Well, we did what we're supposed to do, but they came in through the gate. We put up the fence of the infrastructure, but the people came through the gate because they didn't put a lock on the gate like they were supposed to." They will tell you what are the things--you know, they may say, you know, "You must authorize all users that are granted access," or for firewalls, the firewall is kind of the router, I guess, so to speak. I'm trying to find a good way to explain it, but the firewalls protect the network. So, you know, if you have internet traffic, it has to flow through the firewall. The firewall validates that this traffic is coming from a computer that's authorized before it can view your information. But you have to set up the firewall to do that. The cloud service provider is not configuring your firewall to tell which of your people can come in and view your information, and sometimes companies don't realize that. So it's easier, but you have to take the steps to also ensure that you're doing those things that you need to do.Amy: Thank you for that. So, you know, I think it's fascinating the way this role is changing in terms of IT and just all of the technology that's available and the way our platforms are changing. I grew up in IT back in the day, and it seems like this is a place that is ripe with opportunity for people just coming out of college or maybe even looking for a career change. What would you say to someone who's interested in learning more about whether or not they might be a fit for this industry? What kinds of resources are available to them to learn more?Uso: And this is tricky, 'cause I wish schools--and I think some schools are getting there, 'cause ideally the colleges will be providing guidance in this area because there's so many career opportunities in the IT field, even in public accounting. So even the traditional--you know, even the traditional accountant or auditor is different now. For the financial audit teams, they're adding data scientists and they're adding data analysts, so those are fields that maybe five to ten years ago, it wasn't a thing, and people may not know that. Even four years ago, some people entered school and that was not a career path, and now in your graduating years it's an opportunity. Project manager, you know? You know, if you're on the company side, project managers are in great demand. Certified information systems security professionals, you know? They're in great demand. It can be intimidating, but Google's probably the best place to start because that usually has the most updated information. I can tell you a number of universities, and, you know, when you look up careers in auditing or careers in IT auditing, you'll see that it's no longer traditional just control management. There are risk management roles, security roles, the data roles like I said, and the data roles are becoming more and more important because of big data. You know, companies have all this data. Somebody has to analyze that data and assess it and determine, you know, how can we use it. Even for auditors, you're getting information from a company, you want to know if there's all of the information that I need. So let's say you're auditing an insurance company [and] you get a list of claims. You have to performance procedures to ensure that that list of claims has all of the claims that you wanted to see for the period of time that you wanted to see it. So you may see "I need to see all claims for 2018 over a million dollars." Well, how do you know that this report that they gave you has all this information on it? You have to do some type of validation procedures to get comfortable that the information on the report is complete and then do your auditing procedures to, you know, understand and test the accuracy of it. A lot of times also the bigger firms--so in public accounting the big four firms and some of the larger public accounting firms, they also have a lot of info on their website that can potentially help. But again, that may be skewed to their company. So I would say start with just, you know, a broad search on Google depending on what aspect of IT you're interested in and then kind of use--you know, I always go for a known site. So, like, if I'm Googling something and I see Harvard is in the top six, I probably will click on the Harvard Business Review's point of view and read there first before going to the next thing, 'cause there's some things that make you go like, "Hm, I don't know." [both laugh]Amy: So what about for people of color in this industry? I would imagine that there's a predominance, especially in management ranks and probably in some of the bigger companies--I know a lot of the bigger companies are really committed to diversity initiatives, but I would imagine that it's common for a person of color who goes into this work to be the only on their team or the only in their department. What resources or organizations are available in this industry so that people can feel supported, feel like they have a community in this space?Uso: Right, yeah. And it's interesting. So public accounting generally, yes, is still pretty traditional, all white male, but I noticed the IT audit side is very diverse. It's very interesting, because I think it's one of those areas where your skill--yes, politics play a part, but your skill set is needed and your skill set is valued and respected. And there are an number of resources. Most of the bigger firms have affinity groups that, you know, they're either women's groups, groups that are by race, and then even for sexual and gender-type diversity, there are groups for that. And then outside of the firms there are also various groups. You know, there's Women in Technology. There's the National Association of Black Accountants. There's the National Society of Black Engineers. There are a number of affinity groups that are out there that focus on helping minorities 1. connect with each other and 2. be exposed to the resources and development that they need in order to progress in their organizations, and it's one of those things where I personally feel like it's--when I started in public accounting, I was a member of the National Association of Black Accountants, and I felt like that really helped me to 1. understand what it takes to be a professional. It helped me to expand my network, because I got to meet not only people in my firm, but also people in other firms. I got to meet professionals at my level, professionals that were higher than me, professionals that were my gender, my race also outside of that, and that really helped me to have a wider view, a wider point of view and different points of view, as I progressed through my career. Some people feel as though these groups sometimes hinder your career, and I say it only does that if you're not being smart about how you're using your time. Because sometimes I think people only use this opportunity for social networking. They don't use it for any technical development. They don't use it to help auditors--like, one of the errors I have focused on as I was coming up in my career was the development of [?] students. So things that I learned, I would go back and present on campus or, you know, in that I was director of student [?] services, so, you know, help them build some of the governance documents, and even talk to some of the professors about some of the things that I'm seeing and things that they should be implementing and instilling in their students. So I'm a firm believer in it. Now, I can tell you that my white counterparts will always be like, "Well, why do we need a group for black people? What would happen if we had a group for white people?" It's like, "Kind of technically we do." [laughs]Amy: [laughs] Kind of all the groups are for white people unless they're saying specifically that they're not.Uso: Yeah, 'cause I think sometimes you get discriminated against. You know, people don't want to do it because they don't want to say that "I'm in this group," that, you know--and the group may be, you know, black or Latino or whatever in the name. There's alpha. There's also the [?] for the Asians, but even though the groups have that in their name, we welcome everyone, because we realize that we need that perspective from, you know, the white male manager, the white female manager, because they're the ones that can help us understand what their points of view are, and then we can also help them, because sometimes they realize, "Oh, wait. My view might be skewed," or "I was never exposed to anyone outside of my town, my city, my race," you know? So usually it's a two-way learning experience.Amy: So I want to put a really fine point on that, because I always tell people, "Go to the conference that's not for you. Show up at the meeting that's not for you. If you're at a conference, go to the breakout where you're not on the menu." Right? Like, find the place where you're different and go listen, because I think it's important for people--you know, the same person who says, "Why do we need an association of black accountants?" That's the person that needs to go to the meeting to listen, to learn why they need associations of black accountants, right? They have no ideas what kinds of barriers are in place for people who don't look like them, and so, you know, I always challenge people and they say, "Well, yeah, but, you know, how do I even learn about this?" Go sit down in the back of the room, don't raise your hand, take notes, pay attention, and--"What if someone asks me what I'm doing there?" And I say, "Tell them you're there to learn, and then zip it." [Uso laughs] Like, nobody's going to ever get mad at you because you want to learn more about their experience, right? So thank you for being on that train with me.Uso: And I've had people who have said being in that room where they were the only really opened their eyes, because they're sitting there and they're like, "Oh, my goodness. I'm so uncomfortable." And then they start realizing, like, "This is so-and-so from my group who is the only. This is probably how they feel." And I think sometimes that's such good advice to give, because going out there and experiencing, there's nothing that compares to that. Hearing second-hand about it, I don't think you could fully appreciate it. I also liken it to parenthood, you know? Before you have a child, you have all of these things that you know exactly how to raise a child, how a child should behave, everything, and then you have yours and you're like, "Oh, my goodness. This is not anything like I thought it would be. I can't control my child. My child runs wherever." You know, you can't keep up, and you start to appreciate parents more because you realize how difficult it is to be a parent. So sometimes you do have to sit in that person's shoes so you can understand what they experienced.Amy: Yeah, absolutely. And it's so funny because I--yeah, I think my kids--on that point, I think each one of my kids exists for the sole purpose of proving me wrong on something I said before I had children. [both laugh] I don't want to get off-topic, but yes, you are right about that. It is so much easier to be a good parent before you have kids. But I think for a lot of people, you know, that self-awareness and that self-consciousness that they feel for the first time, you know, people can go a long way through their lives with never having that kind of moment where they have to be self-aware and they feel very self-conscious, and when they realize in that moment that other people have felt that way for, you know, 25, 30, 45, 50 years, right, in their careers, and, you know, I think there's just an amazing amount of empathy that can happen in those epiphanies. So I'm so glad to hear someone else say, "Come to the meeting."Uso: Yes, it's so important. And you can never, never not benefit from being there. It will be uncomfortable. I cannot promise you that it won't be uncomfortable, because people will probably look at you like, "Hm. Is she [?]?" "Do I have to be careful what I say?" Because sometimes, you know, people do--in some of these meetings, people do get a level of comfort where they share openly, and sometimes when there's somebody in the group that's of that group that they're talking about they may not share as comfortably, but you need to be there. You need to understand some other things that people see. And I always, even to my colleagues and black friends, I'm like, "You have to also look on the other side." So some of them, you know, yes, at work we're usually only, but sometimes going to some of these other conferences and understanding the expectations can help us also. So I have always tried to go to my NABA conference, but I also go to my ISACA conference, which is, you know, the Information Systems Audit and Control Association, which governs the work I do, and now that I'm in the insurance industry I go to the, you know, insurance accounting and systems association conference because I want to develop the technical knowledge and the technical skills so that I can have those conversations and be comfortable. I mean, you start to realize there are some people who are just idiots and that's just who they are, but more and more when you go out and meet other people, you realize that getting people and having them learn a little about you and you learn about them breaks down some of those barriers, because a lot of things are just perception. They're not reality. They don't really just hate you because you're a black woman, you know? Sometimes they just--they don't know what to say to you, and for me it's a little harder because am I a black woman, I'm a black woman from a different country. [laughs] So some of the things that are culturally acceptable and expected, I don't always know about it, and my friends always--you know, they gave me the whole "Bless your heart" kind of thing [laughs]. There's some things that I just don't know, but I am not afraid to learn. I am not afraid to learn, and I'm always going out there so that I can learn and develop and become a better person.Amy: I think that's fantastic. So you and I had talked before about--I'm gonna switch gears a little bit on you, but you and I had talked before about how each of us, you know, people in general, we kind of contribute to the de facto segregation and the narrowing of our own professional networks and our own communities and, you know, only hanging out with people who are just like us until we had that moment when we realized, "Oh, my gosh. I've done this to myself and I didn't even realize it," and I was wondering if you could share a little bit about your experience with that.Uso: Sure. So when I moved to the U.S. and I started my public accounting career I was in New York, and I remember my first time going to training. It was, let's say, 2,000 professionals, and the black professionals were a very small group there. We were there for two weeks. The first few days, I would always go find my friends and, you know, go sit at that table, and I don't remember if somebody said something to me, I don't remember what it was, but one day I decided, "You know what? Let me just go sit at one of these tables," and I can tell you, I mean, of those 2,000 people, if we had 100 people who were not white, that probably was a large amount. So, you know, I'll go a little bit off-topic for a second. I always hear people say, you know, "Oh, is that so-and-so?" And they may take you for somebody else, and then black folks will be like, "Why do they think we all look alike?" Being in that room, like, there were, like, so many guys that, to me, I couldn't tell who was Joe from Jim from Bob. [That] made me, like, really understand how it is that we can all look alike, but side-note. But being in there and looking around and seeing all of these different people, you know, I thought "Let me go sit from people who are not from New York, who are not black, who I've never met before." So I started, for lunch and dinner breaks, just going to sit at random tables with people that I had not met before. You know, I developed relationships. I met people who I was so similar to that, you know, it was very interesting. And after that, even at work, you know, I started having conversations, and I remember I was on a team once, and then--you know, I always said that if you heard the conversations and the things we talked about as a team or the shows that we watch, the music we listen to, and people just told you the thing and you had to map it to the person, you would get it wrong, because the person who could quote the movie Friday was not the black girl on the team, and the person whose favorite movie was Pretty Woman was not the white girl on the team, you know? And that's when I started realizing that we have a lot more similarities than differences, and the only way I got to know that was to step out of my comfort zone and go meet people that I had not met before and be uncomfortable. And it wasn't even--I mean, yes, at first, you know, it takes a little [?], but once you sit there, people are pretty friendly. There are some who are not as friendly, but for the most part people were friendly and willing to, you know, open up.Amy: Thank you for sharing that. You know, I think if we all start with just being a little uncomfortable at first, and then what used to be a little uncomfortable becomes comfortable, and then we start to be a little uncomfortable again, and pretty soon you build that muscle memory to where it's not all that uncomfortable anymore.Uso: Yep. And I'll share another story. I have two kids. I have an almost 9-year-old and a 6-year-old, and I remember when my son, who's the older one, was in preschool and we had to look for an elementary school, we looked at a number of schools. Private schools, public schools, charter schools, and one of the things that--I think he was in pre-K, and he was telling us about a friend in his class and something that he said, but he wanted to--so he told us the boy's name, but we didn't know--we didn't recognize the name, so we were like, "Oh, which one is this?" And he's like, "Well, the one that looks like people on TV," and we realized he didn't have, you know--'cause he had just started his new preschool, but before that, all of the years that he was in preschool, it was a predominantly black preschool. So he didn't have any white boys in his school, and then we started looking around and realizing that that was our network. So we made a concerted effort that wherever he goes to real school is going to be a diverse place, because he really shouldn't have to describe somebody based on what they look like on TV. He should know them, be able to relate to them, and have relationships with them, and it's so great now to see that he has such a diverse network and that I feel like I can't wait to see kind of what their future looks like, 'cause I think they will have a different perspective on diversity than we do, 'cause to them it's like, "That's just my friend." "That's not my white friend, that's not my black friend. That's my friend." Amy: Oh, I sure hope so. And I think there's another angle to that too, which is that it's sad that the representation that he sees on TV is so predominantly white.Uso: Different story, but yes. [both laugh]Amy: I didn't want to let that moment pass. I think that there's another lesson in there about media and representation and those sorts of things, but, you know, I'm grateful. I'm grateful for other parents out there who can, you know, self-reflect on the kinds of experiences and exposure that their kids are getting and say, "Oh, we need to be intentional about this. We need to be intentional about bringing more diversity and exposing our children to different types of people." I was wondering. I know that you have experience as a volunteer leader within some of the companies that you've worked in around bringing together diverse employees and their allies, and I was wondering if you could share a little bit about what drove you, what motivated you to do that work--which can be exhausting and thankless and on your own time and in addition to your day job--and also just a little bit about what you got out of that experience?Uso: Yep, sure. I think I've always had a servant/leader-type mentality, because growing up my dad always, for birthdays and holidays, took us to places where we could volunteer to help others. He was a baker, so we would bake, and then we would serve--you know, he'd take us to different homes. One was a children's home for children who had polio and then one was an old people's home. When I moved to the U.S., I first started volunteering at the library for people who couldn't read, and I realized--the thing that attracted me was this flier that said, "If you can read this you can help, because there are people who can't read this." And I was like, "Really?" And I met people who were over 21, all the way up to, like, 60, who couldn't read, and I'm talking about don't know that t-o-i-l-e-t is toilet. They just use the picture of the door to know that that's where they go to use the bathroom. In school I volunteered. [?] I used to help kids with homework, but once I got into the profession and I realized that there are opportunities 1. to network with others like myself, but also to help others in the firms, I loved it. I jumped at that opportunity. So I moved from New York to Indiana in my second year as a professional, and being in Indiana, I did not have a lot of others that looked like me in the firm. We didn't have enough to have, like, a black employees network, so we ended up in a multi-cultural circle, which was great because we had people from different parts of the world, different genders, different thought processes, and because we didn't have, like, black partners or Indian partners, our leaders were the white partners. So that really helped us 1. we got the support we needed, but 2. we were able to have conversations and understand what it took to grow in the firm. One of the things that I did was to organize these many--what did we call them? It was, like, Breakfast with a Leader. So each partner would meet with three to four professionals from the group for either lunch or breakfast and just get to know each other. That was so powerful, and I still have relationships with some of those people today even though I'm no longer with that firm. And, you know, one of my partners was always telling me about this client contact that he wanted me to meet, and, you know, people always tell you they want you to meet people, but when I finally met the person he wanted me to meet, the first thing the person said to me is "This guy really respects you. He has been telling me about you for the past year." And that--sometimes you don't realize that. You don't have that. You don't get that. You know, people will say whatever, but they don't follow up with their actions and match it, and so I think that whole experience, I still say that I think 1. if I stayed in Indiana I probably would still be with that firm, but that just really helped me to grow as a person, helped me understand my weaknesses, things I need to develop, helped me educate others on us as a group and help them see, you know, us as we are high-performing professionals just like everybody else. We just have differences, but those differences are not hindrances. So, you know, educating them and then educating ourselves. It was just a really powerful experience.Amy: That's breaking down the walls between you, right? And I think so many times people look--when they look mentor, they look for people who are just like them because that's what's the most comfortable. Not because there's any animosity, right, between them and another group or not because they harbor any ill will, just because they don't want to be uncomfortable with that first minute either, and so what you really did was you took away that discomfort and opened up--you know, opened up the channel for people to be mentored and, you know, for executives to find mentors that didn't look just like them, and that's powerful.Uso: Yep, it was very powerful, and it's really helpful because a lot of times you really do try to go to people who look like you, and one of the things that I've learned is you need people as mentors who have had similar experiences to you, but it doesn't matter what they look like. If you are a high-performing individual who is on the fast track in your company, it is very helpful for you to have a high-performing mentor, because having a mentor that may take, you know, three or five years less than you would take to get to a level, they may not understand what you need to do to get there because they didn't do that, but having a white mentor versus a black mentor probably won't make a difference to you, because what you need more is someone who has the technical capabilities and the connections to get you where you need to go, and I think people undervalue the need to have advocates, 'cause the advocates are the people who have the power to connect you and also sell you and get you to where you aspire to go. Having a mentor is great, but if your mentor does not advocate for you, you know, then you may not be getting the best out of that relationship, and I think sometimes why people try to build the relationship, the mentor-type relationship, with people who look like them is because they may have tried to develop a trusting relationship with someone who broke that trust, and then they associated that, breaking that relationship, with the person's race. No, that person is probably a person who would have broken somebody's trust regardless of who it is that they're mentoring. And yes, I do, you know, accept that there are people who haven't [?] somebody different. They may have acted differently, but I'm learning now that it's a smaller group of people. It's not as large a group of people as we think, and sometimes we generalize that one-off experience and kind of take the brush and paint the whole wall with it to say, you know, "All white men, you can't trust them because this is what happened to me," but you'll learn that sometimes you can trust people more than you think and a lot of the people who have helped me in my career have not looked like me. A lot of them were not my same gender, and, you know, they were very honest with me, and I think what was helpful was for me to be open-minded and receive information, 'cause what I've learned is sometimes we're not receptive to constructive feedback, and because of that we are not given the truth, so we don't really know the reason why we didn't make it to the next level. And a lot of times it's not just because of what we look like, but it's because of what our work output looks like. Which, you know, as we all know, there is no color there, you know? But if you don't know if your work is not of the quality that is, you know, expected of you, you may not know that you need to improve your work quality.Amy: That is true, and a lot of times we have to have trusting relationships to get good feedback. You have to build that relationship first so that people know that they can trust you with their feedback. How you receive feedback is so important as to whether you will get it a second time, and I tell people, don't punish the people who praise you, because if somebody's giving you a compliment, if somebody's telling you you did a good job and you belittle that praise, they're not gonna tell you next time, and you're not gonna know when you're on the right track, and you may hear something constructive that you don't want to hear, but if you can say, "Thank you for making me better. I'd like to think about that," even if you do nothing with it--if all you say is, "Thank you. I'd like to think about that," that goes so far in building a relationship with someone. And then if you do actually think about it and come back to them with questions later, even better, right? Because they know that you really have a desire to improve. So spot on. Oh, I love talking to you. [both laugh]Uso: And it is hard, 'cause you do not want to hear that you suck. [both laugh] You know? You don't, and I can tell you that I have received feedback that hurt me to my core, and I'm sure my facial expression and my reaction was not the most receptive, but I went away and realized, "Oh, my goodness. This is true," and one of the things that I had to realize--there is this one person who I had one shot to work with her, and I had come to her with a lot of praise and, you know, all of this stuff surrounding me, and I screwed up, and, you know, she had a lot of influence in what happened to my career that year, and I was mad, but then, you know--it took a while, but then I realized she only had one shot at me, and I screwed that shot up, you know? She didn't find all of the errors in my work. I put the errors there. I missed the stuff. But at the time it was happening it was not easy for me to realize that, you know? You have to really sometimes, like you said, just say, "Thank you for making me better," and go away and think about it and not just be like, "What? When? Where? How? What? I didn't--" You know? "Thank you for making me better." I like that. I think I'm gonna use that. [both laugh]Amy: So in the time that we have left, I'd love for you to answer--like, finish two of my sentences. The first one is, "I feel included when _______."Uso: I feel included when my opinions are asked and respected.Amy: And the second sentence is, "When I feel included, I ________."Uso: When I feel included, I am happy, and I'm usually looking for ways to help include others. Amy: Thank you so much, Uso.Uso: My pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity.Amy: This was so much fun, and I hope we get to talk again soon.Uso: I'm sure we will.Amy: All right.Uso: All right, take care.

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172 See It to Be It : Risk Management (w/ Robert Cartwright Jr.)

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2020 34:15

In our sixth See It to Be It podcast interview, Amy C. Waninger speaks with Robert Cartwright Jr., a division manager of Bridgestone Retail Operations in the Northeast Region, about all things risk management. Robert is highly skilled and knowledgeable in risk management and is a very well-respected mentor and leader in the space. Additionally, he serves as chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council of RIMS. They talk a bit about how he got into the field, and Robert explains to us how risk management intersects with just about everything.These discussions highlight professional role models in a variety of industries, and our goal is to draw attention to the vast array of possibilities available to emerging and aspiring professionals, with particular attention paid to support black and brown professionals.Connect with Robert on LinkedIn and Twitter!Find out more about RIMS - they're on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.Visit our website!TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate. Now, look, every now and then we try to mix it up for y'all, 'cause--so look, dependency and consistency is really important, but even within those lanes of consistency, you gotta have a little bit of variety, you know what I mean? You don't come home and just eat the same thing every day, or even if you do--you know, you got a meal prep thing--maybe sometimes you put a little red sauce. Maybe sometimes you put a little green sauce. You know, you gotta just, you know, mix it up from time to time. Maybe sometimes you grill it. Maybe sometimes you saute. Maybe sometimes you rotisserie. You gotta just--am I hungry? Yes, I'm hungry, y'all. My bad. Listen, check it out. We have another entry for y'all from our See It to Be It series. Amy C. Waninger, CEO of Lead at Any Level as well as the author of Network Beyond Bias, she's actually been a member of the team for a while now, so shout-out to you, Amy. Yes, thank you very much for all of your work here. And part of her work has been in driving this series called See It to Be It, and the purpose of the series is to actually highlight black and brown professionals in these prestigious roles, like, within industries that maybe we--and when I say we I mean black and brown folks, I see y'all--may not even know exist or envision ourselves in, hence the name of the series, right? So check this out. We're gonna go ahead and transition from here. The next thing you're gonna hear is an interview with Amy C. Waninger and a super dope professional. I know y'all are gonna love it. Catch y'all next time. Peace.Amy: Robert, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?Robert: I'm doing great, Amy. How are you doing today?Amy: I'm doing quite well. I was hoping that you could tell me a little bit of how you got involved in risk management and what about it appealed to you.Robert: Okay. Wow, so I have to go back a little bit, because risk management was not a field that I had even thought about, because my background is actually HR, and I managed a couple of plants, manufacturing plants, and when I took over one plant--it was in Philadelphia, and they also made me head of plant operations, and the first issue I encountered was an OSHA citation. It was about $160,000, and it kind of threw me into the field of what is this all about and what are we looking at. So I didn't understand the term risk--and this is in the early 90s when this occurred--and I think it was more of a thing of, you know, the exposure or the things that we had to figure out with how we're going to manage that. So one of the things that the owner asked me to do was to look more into what that was all about, and so that was my first exposure to what risk management was. Now, going on another eight years, and then at this point now I'm working for Bridgestone. I was overseeing part of their [work comp?] program, and as I was moving further along with that I got exposed to, from the insurance side and the claims side of things, the exposures and the risks associated with it, and so I wanted to learn more about it, so I looked it up on Yahoo. That was before Google. Yahoo was a big search engine back then, so I'm dating myself, but Yahoo was a search engine, and it talked about risk management organizations, and I wanted to find out more about it. They directed me to Risk and Insurance Management Society, and they had a local chapter in the greater Philadelphia area, and I went to their meetings, and that's when I started to really learn more about all of the elements that involve risk management. It is a vast operation, and a lot of things that are done, especially from the RIMS perspective, is more volunteer-based. So there's a lot of volunteers that were trying to put together risk management programs for their communities and their communities spread across the world. So that was my first exposure to risk management. The other thing I found that was very interesting is that it was so interconnected with business, and a lot of times businesses are siloed. You have operations doing one thing and HR is doing something else, and, you know, finance is doing something else, you know? They're all kind of siloed, where risk management was really trying to be the gatekeeper for all of those and trying to put them all together and say they're all elements of exposure that will harm the company. We need to find ways to do a better job with that. So I think the short answer to that is that I kind of researched and fell into risk management. It wasn't a career that I chose. The career chose me, and so here I am 35, 36 years later, and just really being an advocate for risk management.Amy: That's fantastic. Did you go through any formal training for this or did you really just research this on your own and kind of pull from these different disciplines?Robert: Yeah. So I did get my CRM, my Certified Risk Manager designation. So I went through those five principles of risk management, risk finance, risk factors, risk analysis and things like that. It kind of gave you a basis of what risk management was for, and that really was I think the biggest education that I got, because I didn't know anything about it, and that was really the exposure. So I did that. I got my certification that way and started to bring some of that information back into my company, but at the same time I was getting more and more involved with the risk management organization, the RIMS orgnization, and so with the local chapter I was able to really kind of build a very robust program that was gonna benefit the community that we were serving, and then I found that it was on a global level, so I started to get involved in other committees and other counsels that handle other parts of what risk management is, and I had the opportunity to serve as their global president last year. So it was a crowning achievement to my career thus far.Amy: That is an amazing story, and it's exciting to me to hear how many people really fall in love with a career path or even get exposed to a career path through associations, because I think a lot of folks--because I didn't know about associations, and I think that's true of a lot of people, especially if you're first-generation in the professional workplace or a first-generation college student. You know, you may not realize that these associations are even out there and that they're a wonderful way to explore different career possibilities and network with people, find out what they like about their job, what they would change about their job if they could, and really get exposure to a lot of different disciplines along the way.Robert: Absolutely.Amy: So what's been the biggest surprise to you about risk management that you weren't expecting when you decided to take the leap?Robert: Well, let's see, I think the biggest thing I found was that I think the connectivity of it is a universal language, and I think going to the convention, to the annual conferences, that was a big thing for me, seeing so many people kind of doing the same thing. Then I realized I wasn't on an island by myself. Handling the issues that we were having in my company, sharing some of the best practices, the peer-to-peer connections, and then the networking aspect where the first time you go you don't know a lot of people. The second time you know a few more. They introduce you to some people. And after about three, four years, all of a sudden it's like a family gathering all over again. You're seeing people you hadn't seen before. They're gonna introduce you to more people, and so your network just gets bigger and bigger every year.Amy: That's fantastic. So what do you think the future holds for talent needs in risk management? Do you see this as something that's going to be--that there will be more jobs in this field, or do you see it as something that maybe artificial intelligence will be taking over? You know, are you going to be working with machines and robots in the future, or do you need more people in this space?Robert: Interesting thing about that, and this is one thing I've been championing. I've been talking about the 21st century version of risk management. The 21st century version of risk management is a person who bought insurance to protect any liabilities for the company. That was the basis for risk management, an insurance person and the person who bought the insurance, and the person who set up the policies and [?]. It has since expanded into a multi-dimensional I guess job description, because IT falls under risk management. HR falls under risk management. Finance falls under risk management. Safety falls under risk management. Audit falls under risk management. So all of these disciplines, any business, anything that a business is associated with, has an element of risk, and so the 21st century risk manager is not gonna look at things so much as "How much insurance do we need to have in order to cover our loss?" They have to look at risk management now from the aspect of saying "What are we gonna do to save the company money by putting processes and procedures in place to stop and mitigate the losses that we have?" Or, and here's the challenge for the 21st century risk manager, the unknown unknowns, the things you don't even know that you don't see. Yes, the company is doing great. We've had a three-year positive trend of losses and things that are happening in that regard, but what else is going to happen around the corner that we don't know about? That's what the future of risk management is. So in a visualization of risk management, that is very key, it's very critical. The next generation, we're looking to them to help lead us in that regard. So my push and my passion has been for 21st century risk managers, they're the ones who understand technology, AI, blockchain. All of the things that are out there that are coming on the horizon. You still need people to manage that level of risk, whether you're working with machines or whether you're working with AI, which is being done right now in the insurance field. AI is now writing insurance policies. So there's a lot of things that still need the people side to drive that and to understand and to direct AI to do those things, and I think my exposure this past year having traveled around the world a little bit has shown me that around the world there are a lot of things that are happening in spaces that we haven't even touched here in the United States. There's a need for people to understand how we can fix these problems. So I talk to college students now and I say, "Do you want to be a risk manager? Here is your job. Find the process solutions and problems." You say when you go into a company and say, "We don't really know what's going on." You're new to the organization and you start asking questions. Before you start asking questions about "Why are we doing it this way?" Ask yourself that question and come up with the answer. When you go into the next meeting and you ask that question, "Well, why are we doing it this way?" And they say, "Well, we've been doing it this way for 20 years and it's working, why?" When you come up with an answer or a solution that they didn't see, then you're the risk manager. All of a sudden now you're the problem solver. You're the one who's gonna help them save money, be relevant, and be able to take that company and move forward with it. The other thing I'll say is that the future of risk management is critically tied in with strategic thinking, because we are raising a group of students now who are getting risk management degrees. They didn't have that when I went to college. That just–that doesn’t exist. And so now people are coming out of college with risk management degrees, or they’re taking things that are tied in with that – actuarial, underwriting, or even on the broker side. Those are all things that they need to know in order to help their company go forward. So I tell people go into a company, and it doesn’t matter if–’cause there’s not a lot of risk management jobs that you can get right out of college. There’s not a lot of entry-level jobs that are like that. There's some companies that have risk management positions that they don't know what they call it. They'll put you into a different category, but it's really dealing with risk management. The thing I say to them is understand the mission and vision of your organization. Find out what that is, because that's your basis. That is your starting point to have a conversation with anybody in your company. Once you understand what the mission and vision is--becuase everybody's connected to it. They have to be. That's the basis of the company. So when you look at that, that's your catalyst to move forward. So yeah, 2020--risk management, oh, there's development in the 21st century. So Amy, here's another point to the whole thing. Persons like myself who have been in this industry 35, 40 years, for the next 10 years, there's a statistic that says 400,000 of us are gonna be sun-setting off into other pursuits. Who's filling that gap? So there's a need, a drastic need, for people to fill that gap who, in my opinion, know technology, have grown up on technology, know digital technology, they live, eat, sleep, breathe it. They're the folks that we need to have to understand how to take this to the next level, because there are things that aren't even regulated right now. We're talking about AI. Let's talk about drones. Let's talk about autonomous vehicles. There's no legislation for that. They're still trying to figure it out. So who's gonna figure this out? So there's definitely a need for that.Amy: Perfect. And what you're bringing up is the intersection of private sector initiatives, you know, public sector initiatives. There are community implications for this beyond the companies, beyond the legislators, but, you know, just really in small towns and cities and in terms of education. You know, schools need to be prepared for this. One of the things I love about the insurance industry as a whole is that it intersects every other part of the economy, and risk management is a little bit broader even than insurance in that it intersects all of these things but it also overlays them in a way that maybe some other disciplines don't. So I like the advice about if you're a strategic thinker this is a great place for you.Robert: Exactly. Well, you know, most organizations righ tnow, their focus is on strategic thinking. They're looking at leaders who can put them in a position to be more successful. Anybody can write a policy and can say that we're protected, but what does that really mean, and what did it really mean to the organization? Do you need a $10 million writer? Who knows? But that's the person who needs to examine that and find out what it is that they really need. And what are they doing to prevent the incidents or the issues that are happening? What are they looking at so far as other methods and means of making the company more successful without an expense? So I kind of look at--a friend of mine used the expression, "Loss prevention is profit retention," and a lot of times you don't think about it from that perspective, but that's really what it is after you put the elements in place.Amy: Is brand preservation, reputation, does that fall under the risk management umbrella as well? Robert: Absolutely.Amy: And I'm thinking specifically about some of the companies that we've heard about in the news lately where they have not--they've clearly not had diversity among their decision-makers, and they've made horrible, horrible mistakes in the marketplace--and very hurtful mistakes--in terms of how they've treated their workers, how they've treated their consumers, how they've established their brand. Do you see marketing as being maybe a primary stakeholder or maybe a future primary stakeholder in this work?Robert: I would say absolutely so. And to your point, we've seen a lot of things where even in marketing we're advertising that they've taken some polarizing images under the guise of "Oh, we didn't know it was offensive," but at the same time it bought them publicity. So there's, like, a double-edged sword with that. There's an ethical component I think to everything I think that most people are missing, and the ethical thing is not that it's the right thing to do, it's doing the right thing, and doing the right thing means you have a responsibility to your shareholders and to your public, where a lot of times people will focus on their rights. "We have a right to advertise this." "We have a right to market this." "We have a right to display this." And they don't look at the responsibility as the other side of that. So to answer your question, marketing, yes, that's a very big issue, and there's a risk management process that's tied in with that, because the thing you have to look at is if we market the wrong thing, how does it impact the bottom line of the organization? Nike did something just recently with a person who the NFL did not really want to be involved with. It was something that was controversial, kind of brought people's attention to something, but at the same time there was a backlash behind it too. But I think one of the--when you talk about marketing, one of the commercials for the Super Bowl was the one where "you call it crazy," and it talked about women and how they were "crazy to do that," women wanting to play sports or wanting to run in a marathon or, you know, she wanted to do these things, but she's too emotional or she's--and they're talking about all these things and--hold on, if that's the case, just show them what crazy is. Great advertisement, right? But the reality is that people still don't understand that that level of diversity is what is needed because women are the buying power. I mean, you have women as 60 or 70% of the buying power of this country. You're not going to cater to that? So the funny thing I found just in my travels is that now the hotels I've been staying at--I've noticed this in the last eight, ten, twelve years--are using more and more comforters and duvets and things like that. They didn't have that before. Why? Because there are more women travelers. Women want more comfort, and so they distinctly designed that to say "Well, we're adding more comfort to your stay." Everything is designed around comfort now. I don't mind it. So yeah, I don't think I would have asked for that because, you know, if I have a sheet I'm okay, but a duvet is kind of nice to have, you know? But there are a lot of things that if you don't include the population of which you're serving, you're missing out on a big part of humanity and what risk management is all about. Amy: Absolutely. To your point about hotels, if I go to a hotel and there's not enough counter space for my makeup, I don't stay there again, and the reason I don't is because I know that there were not women involved in the design of those hotel rooms, because no woman would design a bathroom where she didn't have a place to put her makeup. And so it's like, clearly you didn't want me bad enough to invite me back, so.Robert: So if you feel that way and you just happen to share casually with a friend who shares with another friend, now you have people where there's--and business people are not going to a certain chain. There's a reputational risk that they didn't even realize. So then the people who are marketing and saying, "We want to drive more revenue," or things about growth and sustainability, "We want to drive more revenue, and we know that men like to travel and do this." If you're missing that side of demographics, like you said, that becomes this whole silent killer. The next thing you know, boom, [?].Amy: Yeah, you'll spend millions of dollars renovating your property. You better make sure you get all the stakeholders in the room before you cut that check and before it's finished, because then it's too late. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about--you've already alluded to RIMS, but I know you're doing some more work in RIMS about future talent and diversifying talent in risk management, but what are some--so we'll just start there. What are some of the things that RIMS is doing to engage a different kind of workforce maybe than risk management has seen in the past?Robert: Right. So I think one of the things that--timing is always everything, right? And I am the first African-American president of this organization. So we've been in existence for about 67 years, so [?].Amy: Congratulations.Robert: Thank you, thank you. That was a milestone in itself. And I reflect back on a time when they asked me to be on the global board, and the person who called me was a friend of mine, but he was also involved in that whole process of selecting the next person that comes on. And first I thought he was kidding with me. I said "Yeah, whatever. You don't have any diversity on the board, so." And then we're going around and around and I said, "Okay, so is this, like, a backdoor deal?" And he says, "Robert, you can't get into the back door with this organization. You can only get in the front, and it's only by the way of what you do and your merits and leadership and things like that." I was like, "Well, okay, so--how did that even happen?" So as time goes on, and so now as a president, as I was thinking about my presidency and what I wanted to do, my thing was about legacy, and my thing focused on the fact of we need to know where we came from to know where we're going. If we're talking about risk management being relevant, yes, we need to understand our past, but we also need to understand the future and where we're going. Diversity is important. If you don't have diversity, then you're not gonna be relevant. Society is dictating that, they're insisting on it. I saw that in my travels around the world, where they're importing diversity, they're importing the talent, because they want to have what that is. Companies here in the United States are global. The majority of the big companies have a global presence, and if they don't include the type of marketing, like you said, as a woman, that doesn't have space for your cosmetics, then you're losing out on that part of it. So when I think about--what I wanted to expand on as president was diversity and inclusion, that it needed to be something where we get past the conversation of this as it's now something that we talk about. I want to get it to the point where it needs to be a verb. And so we took that, RIMS took that perspective, and we constructed a task force to delve into whether this was something that as an organization we wanted to be involved with, and I'm pleased to say that the board of directors created a new council, a diversity and inclusion advisory council, that was launched this year, and I was asked to be chair of that council. So we've got international presidents. We've got women, men. We've got the LGBTQ corner covered. We have every element covered when we talk about so far as what we want to do as an organization, 'cause we have to walk that talk in my opinion. So as a result of that it becomes more of a thing where we say "What is the next step?" So what RIMS is gonna look at, we're gonna dive into this using the collective firepower of the people on this council, and some of the people on this council are already in that field, from a global level to a local level to an international level. As a matter of fact, my vice chair is from New Zealand, just to kind of give you a perspective that way. But she brings another perspective to that. So what we want to do is we want to take this and say, "Okay, how do we help the next generation understand what this is? How do we help risk managers understand what that is?" As a part of the risk management discipline, D&I, or a diverse group, is a must. It can't be something that we just continue to talk about, but I'm really excited about this. There's just so much. You know, Amy, when I started my presidency, people were reaching out to me, and the first group that reached out was Women of Color, and they asked me to speak to their group, and from there I spoke to the National African-American Insurance Association, and then there was a Latin organization that asked me to speak to them. So there was an influx of people who were coming in, and for the first time RIMS decided that we wanted to have a D&I meeting at our conference in San Antonio last year. It was set up for about 100, 150 people. I'm standing in front 'cause myself and another person were speaking. People were filling in, and they were filling in, and then they were bringing more chairs in, and they filled all the chairs they brought in, and the last count was about 250 people that were crammed into that room over something that we thought might be a good idea, and that I think was a catalyst for us to say "Okay, you know what? We need to take this thing even further." So I'm honored to be able to lead this council going forward, but I just think that there's so much that's already been done that no one knows about. That's the second part. A lot of organizations are out there that are doing things that no one knows about, and I think from the inclusive part we can't just say it's the big organizations who are doing these things. There are other groups that are doing things as well. Let's bring them to the party and have them included as well. We need to hear their voice.Amy: Absolutely. It sounds like, with a response like that, that there was some pent-up demand and that people were excited to have an opportunity to learn more and to participate in this and even to see, you know, the head of the organization be a history maker. That's exciting to me, that other groups said "Oh, wow. You made history. Come talk to us." I think that's phenomenal.Robert: It is. Last year would have been a whirlwind without that, because I wanted to make that as my platform. It became almost double what I would normally have done or what a president would normally have done, and so, you know, everything is about opportunity, right? So right place, right time, right people, and you have to have a passion for it, and I believe in it. I firmly believe in it, because if you don't--I mean, I have found in my experience that if you don't have a different perspective outside of your own or people who look like you, then you're gonna be doing the same thing that you've always done and thinking that you're successful. Patting yourself on the back, "Yeah, we did a great job." Did you really? Who did you compare yourself to? Who did you ask? So, you know, when I bring my significant other into a situation, I say "What do you think about this?" and get her perspective, and "Man, that's something I didn't even see." So I think that's the benefit, yeah.Amy: So you've obviously done a lot of work to help people feel included in your organization. When do you feel included? Robert: I think that's kind of hard to define, because on the surface people can say, "Yeah, we invited you to the meeting. We need you to prepare a report." I think when you become included is when you're part of the decision-making, and when someone says "What do you think?" outside of the normal group or the people who are called on. I've found that for me, when I have a meeting, when I have a lot of folks or a lot of different groups in the room, I try to make sure that every voice is heard. That's not how it happens in real life. What happens in real life is that--and my daughters have already attested to this, 'cause I've asked them, and they're all professionals. They're all in that business world. One's in defense, one's in pharmaceuticals, and the other one's a nurse. And it's the same thing. The great ideas that they got get shot down because it wasn't their idea, but then someone else picks it up and all of a sudden it's their idea. So I think the inclusiveness is when somebody says "What do you think?" And they take your idea and say "Okay, well, why don't you run with it? Why don't you lead this project?" So the duty of RIMS as an organization is that that's exactly what they do, which is exactly why I'm here today, because every time I kept saying "How come we're doing it this way?" They'd say "Well, what would you do differently?" I'd say "Well, we should do that." "Oh, great. Why don't you lead that project?" And so I ended up leading projects and then becoming treasurer and secretary and vice president and president of the local chapter, and then you get onto a committee and "Why don't you do this?" And now you're on the board. "Why don't you do this?" And then you're president. So that's the thing right there. So in my company itself there's still a long way to go. I think in big companies, because there's such a culture that exists and that culture is a thing you need to understand, and that's what I tell a lot of young people. If you're going to walk into an organization, you need to understand their culture. Figure out what their culture is first. Understand the culture. Understand the language you need to speak, and by that I mean that there's certain expressions that opens everyone's ears. There's certain things that happen that everybody says "Hm, okay. That's pretty interesting." And it doesn't mean that you have to assimilate, it doesn't mean that you have to change who you are. It just means you have to understand the language. Now, you have to bring your spin to it, because as a woman you're gonna bring a different perspective. As a minority, you're gonna bring a different perspective. As an LGBTQ person, you're gonna bring a different perspective. Those are needed, and so I think that my drive for D&I now is to highlight the value of all of those different values, but it's a mandatory thing. Right now we're creating positions, but I don't see the action that needs to be behind it enough where it comes a norm where it's like--okay, let me use history as an example. Back in the 30s and 40s, a secretary was a man. It was not a field for women. Now when you talk about a secretary, they don't want to use the word secretary. It's an office manager, but it's mostly women. So we see the trend has changed, and so now people don't even blink twice when you say a secretary or an office manager. "Oh, yeah, of course it was a woman." So that's where we need to be when we talk about a diverse workforce. It needs to be something where we're not trying to put a checkmark and just saying "We checked the box. We have this person. We've hired a black man, a black woman, a gay person, or a lesbian or a trans person, and they're now on our group," but are they inclusive? Are they inclusive? Are they part of the group? And are they accepted for their voice? And I think that's a critical thing. The second part to the inclusion is that it also has to be inclusive of thought. We have five generations in the workplace right now. There's no inclusion of thought 'cause the younger person that comes in, they could have some great ideas, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, Robert. That's great, that's great, and we'll hear from you later." So therefore they have all this energy, you psyche them all up, you told them "Run with this project," they come back and they get slapped down. So after a while you stifle that growth, you stifle that creativity, and I think that the whole generational issue is another problem that we've got. We've got to be able to bridge that gap. So when I talk about diversity and inclusion, I'm thinking about diversity of thought, I'm thinking about inclusion of thought. That's a critical piece as well.Amy: Absolutely. Robert Cartwright Jr., thank you so much for you time today. Thank you for making history and for sharing that with us.Robert: Thank you, Amy. Appreciate it.

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162 See It to Be It : Marketing Keynote Speaker (w/ Chris N. West)

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 26, 2019 26:40

In our fourth See It to Be It podcast interview, Amy C. Waninger chats with Chris N. West, an opening keynote speaker and seminar leader on digital marketing. His talks have been presented to teams in Germany, Canada, and the UK. His career has taken him to 48 states. He is the Founder of LR Training Solutions, a corporate training company based in Houston, Texas. These discussions highlight professional role models in a variety of industries, and our goal is to draw attention to the vast array of possibilities available to emerging and aspiring professionals, with particular attention paid to support black and brown professionals. Check out some of the SI2BI blogs we've posted while you wait for the next episode!Connect with Chris on LinkedIn and check out LR Training Solutions!He also has Twitter and Instagram!Visit our website!TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate. Now, look, every now and then we try to mix it up for y'all, 'cause--so look, dependency and consistency is really important, but even within those lanes of consistency, you gotta have a little bit of variety, you know what I mean? You don't come home and just eat the same thing every day, or even if you do--you know, you got a meal prep thing--maybe sometimes you put a little red sauce. Maybe sometimes you put a little green sauce. You know, you gotta just, you know, mix it up from time to time. Maybe sometimes you grill it. Maybe sometimes you saute. Maybe sometimes you rotisserie. You gotta just--am I hungry? Yes, I'm hungry, y'all. My bad. Listen, check it out. We have another entry for y'all from our See It to Be It series. Amy C. Waninger, CEO of Lead at Any Level as well as the author of Network Beyond Bias, she's actually been a member of the team for a while now, so shout-out to you, Amy. Yes, thank you very much for all of your work here. And part of her work has been in driving this series called See It to Be It, and the purpose of the series is to actually highlight black and brown professionals in these prestigious roles, like, within industries that maybe we--and when I say we I mean black and brown folks, I see y'all--may not even know exist or envision ourselves in, hence the name of the series, right? So check this out. We're gonna go ahead and transition from here. The next thing you're gonna hear is an interview with Amy C. Waninger and a super dope professional. I know y'all are gonna love it. Catch y'all next time. Peace.Amy: Hi, Chris. Thanks for joining me.Chris: No problem. It's good to be here.Amy: Thank you. So as you know, this series is designed to help young people, particularly young people of color, see all of the opportunities that are available to them in their careers, in the economy, and we're gonna spend a little time later just talking about specific support systems available to people of color in your industry, but first, can you just tell me a little bit about how you got involved in digital marketing, then how that evolved into a speaking career?Chris: Okay, sure. How I started, it was a while ago. I got my degree in marketing, and then I got a job at Google as a marketing specialist, and through that job, part of it was we would go around the country to talk to small business owners about how to use Google products to grow. So this was anything from Google+, Google advertisements, Google map listings, and pretty much all of the Google tools that can help a small business and also a large company out as well. So through that experience, it really helped me figure out what I would like to do long-term in the future and what it meant to me to do that for small business owners and other organizations. And once I started doing that training through all of those small business workshops, that's when I started realizing that I have kind of a skill for [?] to people. And also, not only that, but skill in digital marketing in general. So I got certified a while back in some of the e-marketing topics and decided to keep pursuing it over time. So then I ended up learning more about the industry as far as speaking after my Google experience, when I started researching more about it.Amy: So was your background--before you went to Google, was your background in marketing or was it in technology?Chris: It was in marketing actually. So yeah, it was a degree in marketing. Some of the companies I've worked for in the past, it was specifically marketing jobs, and that's before even Google. And the good thing about my experience at Google is that I would do about two to three I would say different jobs every six months, and I got to really learn what I would like to do long-term. Amy: The reason I asked about your background before you went to Google is I think a lot of people think of Google as a tech company, and if you're outside looking in you might think "Well, how would somebody without a technical background get into a tech company?" And I think the lesson from your story is that marketing is a skill that's transferable to a lot of different industries, including tech, and so we have to think not just about our industry but also about our function and how that function can be used in different industries. Have you found that to be true?Chris: Yeah, that's true. I never really thought of it that way, but yeah, that makes sense. Like, doing something that you can use in different industries as well. Because even as I was there, I was probably, say, out of 100 people, I would say maybe 10 people, you know, were minorities. Yeah, so I think it's still a challenge for them as well as far as being more diverse with the teams that they have, and especially the marketing team I was a part of, it was rare to have diversity. But yeah, having something that you can transfer to go to multiple industries and try to figure out how to stand out is really important.Amy: That's great. And so what was the biggest surprise to you about--you know, as you kind of went through school and you decided, like, marketing was gonna be your focus, once you got into the work world, what surprised you about the job or about the function that you didn't expect while you were in school?Chris: Oh, okay. I didn't expect to have to kind of, like, have to deal with the politics side of everything, you know? Like, dealing with the organizational structure. I thought I would just get the job, everybody would be fun and happy, no issues, no drama. [laughs] You know? But going in there and learning that it's not just about the job, it's also about how you can deal with different types of people with different backgrounds within the organization? So that's one of the main things I learned, and then also being able to be a leader and communicating your ideas, where as before, when I was in college, I was kind of on the quiet side, you know? So, like, learning in corporate, you have to kind of, like, communicate your ideas to the right people. So that's the one thing that I've tried to get better at over time, right, when I got into the workforce.Amy: Yeah. I think so much of success in an office or success in a business is not doing good work. I think--so I know a lot of women and a lot of people of color, we tend to suffer from impostor syndrome. We're worried that we have to kind of prove ourselves and prove that we're good enough to be where we are, and I think what we tend to miss is the political side, and it's we're spending so much time with our heads down trying to do the best job we can that we don't take time to make sure that other people know that we're doing a good job. Have you found that to be the case?Chris: Yeah, I think that's true with many people that I've met in the past as far as anybody trying to go after, like, their goals. I think people have so much--many people, when they get into the workforce, they get so much experience, but nobody knows about the experience, you know? It's like everybody, so many of you are doing awesome things, and then they don't even put it on their LinkedIn profile what they've done, you know? They don't have a--if they're trying to market and they don't have a website to showcase what they've done. And I guess some people think it might be bragging and everything, but you've got to think about who's gonna tell the story. You know, who is really gonna tell your story, and in general, no one's really--not many people are gonna know what experiences you've had unless you tell somebody or you say exactly what you did. So you just--I feel like people gotta spend time to learn how to market theirselves and kind of showcase things that stand out with their career. Amy: Absolutely. Building a personal brand is so important, and it starts--whether you're doing it intentionally or not, it starts the minute you step into the job.Chris: Yep, the minute. Yeah, it definitely changes pretty quickly. [laughs] Especially if you're trying to network within the organization and trying to get promotions. [?]. It's not just about the good work you're doing.Amy: Yep. So your brand is really what other people are saying about you, and if other people don't know that you're there, then you don't have a brand, and that's tough. It's tough to overcome that. So I always tell people, "Look, it's not bragging if it's true." So if you've actually done it you better speak up, 'cause it's not bragging if it's true.Chris: Somebody else is going to speak up for theirs though, right? You gotta stand out these days.Amy: So if somebody's not in marketing and they're thinking that might be a really good field for them, first of all, what characteristics or what strengths do you think play well in a marketing space for a person?Chris: For a person? I would say being able to look at things and figure out how to make things better, how can you improve awareness about a brand. A lot of it I feel, when it comes to marketing, you gotta have new ideas on a constant basis. So if you're the type of person that is always looking at how to make something better or maybe make something look better or you're able to connect with multiple people, I think it's definitely a good career. And as far as--there's so many different types of marketing. There's marketing yourself and then marketing at a corporation level, and if you work at the corporation level you really need to know, like, the latest trends or what's going on, what companies are using to market their organization, and these days it's not about just being able to design a brochure anymore or just being able to create a logo, it's more so people want everything, you know? They want you to know about social media, something about it. You don't have to be a complete expert, but you need to know what's going on out there as far as, like, the different channels. E-mail marketing, social media, things like that.Amy: And so if somebody sees themselves in that profile, that they're an idea person and they like staying up on trends and that sort of thing, where can they go? What kind of resources are out there to help people learn more about the industry, learn more about the function and kind of feel out if it's a good fit for them?Chris: I would say the American Marketing Association. That's where I started. That's where I got a lot of my experience, and over there you're gonna meet people that that's what they do on a daily basis for a full-time job. They're marketing managers, marketing specialists, directors, executives. So pretty much everybody [?] goes there. So they have the national level, and of course they have, like, pretty much a lot of local chapters on the professional level in pretty much all of the major cities. And even if you're a student, they have, like, a college [?], which was a part of when I was a college student. So that's the best way to start. So every month they'll give you what's new, what's going on, and they'll give you ideas on how you can stay up to date. Amy: That's great. And so I'm guessing since you're a speaker you do a lot of work with the Association now. Probably on the other side, right?Chris: Yeah. You know what? I haven't really started. I plan on it in the future, you know? [?] But I do work with other associations, but yeah, that is definitely a plus that comes with me being a part of it. I'm probably more likely to be able to speak at some of those events, so yep.Amy: So I think it's interesting, because it took me so long to even realize that--so I'm a first-generation professional, and it took me so many years to realize that associations even existed and what they were for and how I could use them, you know? And to me it's a great tragedy of my career that I didn't figure that out sooner. And it's funny, because I've done a few of these interviews now, and every time I ask somebody "How do people learn more?" They always mention an association, and I wish I would have asked that question when I was younger to people who were experienced in different fields.Chris: Yeah. It's like--so many people that go to the associations, it's part of the same goal, you know? They're all trying to reach the same goal, but then what they're doing [is] they're trying to look for new ideas from other people, and it's just, like, a good environment, and it's not--I feel like it's different from just going to a networking event, 'cause a networking event, you have so many people with different types of goals. Some people are looking for a job. Some people are looking to network for business. So it's like... usually those don't work out, but if you go to an association, it's specifically what you need. So, like, targeted basically.Amy: Exactly, and they usually offer educational sessions at their meetings or their conferences, and so, you know, you can find something depending on what your skill level is or your experience level. You can find something that is applicable to you, and then you can network with people who have similar experience or more experience and get involved and really learn and kind of build a name for yourself within your industry just by volunteering, right?Chris: Yeah, just by volunteering. Yeah, that's a good way to really get to know the right people in there. So volunteer your time whenever you can, whether it's local or national. I highly recommended it.Amy: Excellent. So can you tell me a little bit about what you think about the current or future talent demands in marketing? Do you think that this is an industry or function that's going to need to staff up over time, or do you see it kind of leveling out or trailing off in the near future?Chris: I think that the demand is gonna get higher because more and more organizations are realizing the importance of being online and understanding what's going on. So you have many people that have been in marketing for a long time, but they've done it the traditional way, so there's still, like, a high need for people to come in to do, like, the online marketing side of it, social media and digital marketing. So that continues to grow as more and more people get online, more and more people depend on it. And I think especially since organizations these days are actually making revenue from online channels, you know? Like social media and the digital marketing channels. So it's more and more needs. So I think it's just gonna grow, but yeah, definitely understanding more than just one area of marketing is what I've seen, and if you look at many job descriptions, they're gonna ask you for those multiple areas. Not just being able to use Photoshop or just social media but e-mail marketing and, yeah, everything.Amy: Excellent. So you had mentioned that when you were at Google you were maybe one of a handful of people of color in the marketing team that you were on, and I would imagine that that's the case for a lot of people of color in different companies around the U.S. I know that there's--and I'm gonna screw up the percentage, but something like 3% of marketing executives are women or something like that. Like, a really low number. They have a whole conference around it now I think. So where can people go who maybe feel a little alone or they want to get involved but they don't want to be the only in their office? What kinds of communities exist for people of color that can help them feel connected so that they can maintain their stamina while pursuing their passion.Chris: Okay. A lot of times I think there's different organizations--and, you know, if they're part of an organization, many companies are starting to have, like, communities within their organizations, such as... I can't remember. Within Google, there's, like, Black Googlers or something like that, things that are specific to a niche within your organization so, like, people can have a different experience. I mean, even in different associations there's always--there could be subgroups, you know, that specifically target a different group of people. So I'll say it starts with the associations, and then from there figure out what the other organizations specifically on, who they are, like, what kind of culture they have.Amy: That's helpful, and I think too that the importance of employee resource groups or business resource groups or affinity networks, whatever they're called, the larger companies tend to have those, where you come in and you kind of, you know, pick a group that you feel more comfortable with and find a mentor maybe or at least, you know, know where to go for some help navigating all of the politics like you said earlier and, you know, kind of getting the inside scoop on some of the unwritten rules of the workplace, 'cause those rules change wherever you go, right?Chris: Yep, yep. Or you can always create one too. [laughs]Amy: That is true. So I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about your work as a speaker. We talked a little bit earlier about impostor syndrome, and I'll get to that in just a second, but as a speaker, you know, we have to position ourselves as experts, and the term "expert," right, there's no national certification of expertise that you go and you take a test and then somebody says, "Here, you're an expert. You can use that in your brand or your title." So what do you think makes someone an expert in their field? What makes you an expert in your field?Chris: When it comes to being an expert, I would say it's really just experience. Just, like, what kind of specific experience have you had when it comes to what you're talking about or what you're doing? Because there's a lot of--I mean, literally you could just wake up tomorrow and call yourself an expert. [both laugh] So how can you stand out from everybody else? And what I always recommend is specifically getting experience. I mean, sometimes people say they can't get a job so they can't get the experience to become an expert, but you can always volunteer. You can always, like, do stuff for free for an organization. So for instance, when it comes to marketing, I've done stuff for free for organizations just to get experience, and then once I learn it and once I get good at it, then I can say that I'm an expert, you know? That's when I know the ins and outs of it. And then you realize that you're more advanced than the audience that you're trying to reach as well. For example, if your audience is small businesses and they have nothing to do with marketing and I'm a marketing person, if I've worked with an organization for about six months or a year where I help them with their marketing and then help them drive traffic or revenue, then I'm an expert to the small business. Amy: Oh, I love that. So you see expertise on a continuum, and so long as you're ahead of the person you're talking to, you're an expert.Chris: Yeah, yeah. And then also experience though. [both laugh] So I'm not saying read an article and then you're an expert, but [laughs]--Amy: Right, actually knowing how to do it. No, I think that's brilliant. So have you struggled with impostor syndrome yourself?Chris: Yeah, I think so. I mean, sometimes--I'm trying to remember what impostor syndrome is. It's "not good enough," right?Amy: Yeah. It's the feeling that, like, the more you know, the more you feel like you don't know, so you never quite feel like you've arrived, or you feel like--the way I've experienced it is I feel like people are going to find out that I'm just faking it. And so, you know, the way that manifests itself for me is I have, like, a wall full of certifications to prove to myself that I'm not just faking it, right? [laughs] So what does that look like for you?Chris: Oh, okay. Yeah, that does happen, you know? Like, I feel like, depending on your--I mean, for me it was more so like since I was younger I started doing some of that speaking stuff, like, younger, and then of course being a minority I kind of have to say--I feel like I have to say every single thing that I've done, you know, because if I don't they're gonna go, "Oh, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about," you know? [laughs] So yeah, it does feel that way sometimes. It does feel like that sometimes, but I start to remember that "Okay, I do have legitimate experience," and I start to look at what have been the testimonials? You know, what have been the reviews? After the event, I look at the reviews. That kind of helps me understand that "Okay, I feel like I am at that level that I'm at right now." But yeah, I feel like it's a constant struggle, especially when you're trying to move forward. So, like, when I first started, I was so used to doing, like, really small events that I thought "Okay, I can't do an event with more than 10 people, you know?" [laughs] Like, and then realizing, like, just trying stuff and realizing "It's okay." You gotta grow somehow, right?Amy: Yeah. No, I think that's great, and I like that, that, you know, you just keep growing and just keep taking the steps. I think that's so important. Do you feel like you have to clear a higher bar than others? You said that, you know, you feel like because you're black you have to, like, list everything you've ever done so that people understand that you're the real deal. Do you feel like that there's a bar and then there's a bar for you that's higher?Chris: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I definitely feel that way, 'cause you have to--'cause yeah, I look at it as... when people see, like, people like myself, since I'm black, you know, they don't really see this type of person in that position, you know? Like, you don't see that many minority speakers out there, or even just like I said, like, when it comes to marketing and tech companies. Since they don't see it that much, they probably automatically assume that you don't know what you're talking about, you know? [laughs] There's been times where I walk in to the presentation and people don't think I'm the presenter. You know, they probably don't think I'm the presenter, so I have to, like, really show up and meet all of the expectations, and I feel like I have to do a little bit more too. So I gotta kinda give 110%, you know, instead of just trying to give an 80% or 70%, you know, and getting by. And people can get by, you know, but if you're in a different category, I feel like you do have to put a little bit more effort in. And I think one challenge is that initial reaction too. Initially when people see you, then after they hear your content and everything like that, that's when they kind of understand "Okay, this person is an expert," but the challenge is the beforehand. You know? What matters is before, right? In order to get a client, you still have to present yourself effectively and show that you know what you're doing. So that's where the challenge is. Like, everybody can like you, but it's like you still have to get that client first, right? [laughs] So there's the bar, right? Yep.Amy: Yeah. No, I definitely--I can definitely see how that's true, and I think the more differences a person has relative to the larger group the higher that bar gets and the more hurdles you have to clear and the more you have to prove yourself, you know? And that can be exhausting. I was a woman in tech for 20 years, and, you know, I would have men much older than me--when I was younger at least--who would say, "Oh, you're a really good programmer for a girl." I was like, "Hm. You know what? I fixed your code." [laughs] But they didn't want to hear that, right? So yeah, I can see how that could be a life-long frustration. Now that I'm older, I think that it's not as bad for me personally, but, you know, I'll never outgrow being a woman, right? I still get that occasionally, right? And we'll never outgrow our race, and we'll never outgrow our ethnicity or, you know, coming from another country or having a disability. Like, these are things that, you know, are a struggle over and over and over, but, you know, I long for the day when we can just all be taken on our merits and given the same benefit of the doubt.Chris: Yeah, that's--hopefully one day, right?Amy: We're a long way. [both laugh] We'll see, we'll see. So I want to ask you, in the time that we have left, to finish two sentences for me. The first one is "I feel included when ________."Chris: All right. So... I feel included when I'm informed about new opportunities. Amy: Ooh, I like that. Okay, and "When I feel included, I _________."Chris: When I feel included, I work better with the group and I give back.Amy: I love it. And I think that's true with most people, right? Most of us, we want to know what's going on, we want to give back, but if we don't feel safe to be ourselves, we can't put ourselves out there like that.Chris: Yeah. You want to feel included, right?Amy: Absolutely, absolutely. Chris, thank you so much for your time today.Chris: Yeah, it was great. Thanks.Amy: Okay, thanks.Chris: It was awesome stuff.

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157 See It to Be It : Holistic Living & Wellness Expert (w/ Lynnis Woods-Mullins)

The Passionistas Project Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 14, 2019 31:03

In our third See It to Be It podcast interview, Amy C. Waninger chats with PraiseWorks Health and Wellness founder Lynnis Woods-Mullins, a holistic living and wellness expert who focuses on helping women ages 40 and over embark on a successful journey to total wellness for their mind, body, and spirit using holistic practices, nutrition, and fitness. She shares with us how she navigated the transition from corporate America to where she is now and a lot more. These discussions highlight professional role models in a variety of industries, and our goal is to draw attention to the vast array of possibilities available to emerging and aspiring professionals, with particular attention paid to support black and brown professionals. Check out some of the SI2BI blogs we've posted while you wait for the next episode!Connect with Lynnis on LinkedIn and Facebook! She also has Twitter and Instagram!Check out the PraiseWorks website!Read about "Power Up, Super Women: Stories of Courage and Empowerment" on Amazon!Visit Living-Corporate.com!TRANSCRIPTAmy: Lynnis, thank you so much for joining me today.Lynnis: Well, thank you so much for asking me. It's an honor to be able to share with you, Amy.Amy: Well, it's an honor to speak with you. So I was wondering if you could share a little bit about the work that you do. I know that you're a health and wellness expert and a wellness coach, and I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what that means, what do your clients look like, what do you do for your clients, and we'll start there.Lynnis: Okay. Well, I'm a certified health and wellness coach, and I specialize in working with women over 40, teaching them how to be well and how to live a more holistic life, and I do that through my online magazine. I have online classes. I also have coaching services for groups and 1-on-1. I have a podcast and webcast, and I also just recently wrote a book, as you know, and I focus on helping women make incremental lifestyle changes that can give them big results. I have a weight loss, or what I like to call a weight release, program. I also talk with women specifically about hormonal changes. You know, things that happen as we age and how we can minimize the impact of the aging process. I talk a lot about stress reduction. That's my specialty, stress reduction and anxiety and depression, of which I suffered from all three. And so I really focus on those kinds of things that happen as we age from 40 on, because after 40 there's some things that start happening that are really interesting, and many times you think perhaps you're prepared for that because you've heard your girlfriends talk about it. You might have not heard your mom talk about it, but you witnessed certain things. I'm telling you, everyone is different and every experience is different, and what I really try to lay out to women is that they're not alone in terms of going through that experience, but sometimes it can be a lonely experience because while you're going through it, a lot of times it's you get this inclination to [?] out and suffer in silence by yourself. You don't have to do that. And so my job or my role is to familiarize women with all of the different symptoms that might happen and to give them some encouragement to get knowledge on how to deal with it, because I truly believe that knowledge is power.Amy: You know, as you're speaking, I'm reminded of this thought that I've had repeatedly, that to be a woman is to live in stages of secrets and shame. Lynnis: That's true.Amy: When we're very young, you know, we get the talk about what's gonna happen to our bodies in adolescence, and we're pulled aside, and it's all in very hushed tones and, you know, like, girls passing tampons, you know, like, in middle school. You know, like, you don't want to be found out, right? And then, you know, in our teens, 20s, even our 30s, you know, pregnancy is--there's a lot of mystery surrounding pregnancy, right? Women throughout history have gotten pregnant. Women throughout history have miscarried. Women throughout history have had complications with their pregnancies. But we don't hear those stories. We sort of--like you said, we suffer in silence. We suffer alone. We don't talk about it. We're taught to feel shame about it. And I guess it never occurred to me that I'm on the cusp of yet another, you know, quietly--"go quietly into the night" sort of process and that that's another aspect of our lives as women that we don't talk publicly about.Lynnis: No, you're absolutely right. And yeah, suffering in silence is really true on so many different levels, but I can just share from my own experience. Each time that I got pregnant--and I have four daughters, they're all grown. They're all in their 30s and stuff. Well, one will be 27--each time that I got pregnant, I didn't tell anybody right away. My first pregnancy I wasn't married, so I didn't tell anybody, not even my mom, until I was, like, about seven months pregnant. I lived in a different city, so I just didn't want to talk [about it] because I wasn't married, you know? And I invited her to come and see me for the weekend, and she knew as soon as I opened the door. It might have been because my face was fuller, 'cause normally I'm a really, really thin person. You know, that might have been it, but she said she felt it even before that time. And I think with the other ones I didn't want to tell anybody because I didn't want to be judged by my family or my friends. I was married, but it was like, "Again?" Because they were so close together. One of my daughters--the two middle ones, were born 17 months apart. And, you know, I just didn't want to deal with that. "Don't you know about birth control?" and "How can you be a career person?" and all that, so I didn't tell anybody, and I look back at that and now I'm thinking, "How silly." I was married. It certainly was my prerogative if I wanted to have children. They were not planned. They were all, you know, wonderful "uh-ohs," but I think my biggest thing was that this went against the grain in terms of all of my preparation when it comes to climbing the corporate ladder and here I am pregnant again. I was pregnant basically for 10 years. Basically, you know? Because the ages of my children now are 27, 30, 32, and 34. So pretty close together, and I just didn't want to deal with that "Again?" kind of thing, so I didn't tell anybody. I look back at that now and I'm thinking, you know, "How much did we as women, no matter what the age is, become vested in people's opinion of us?" You know? We spend a lot of time preoccupied with that, and it's very painful because of course we can't read their minds and many times what we're thinking they may be thinking--which many times they're not even close to that, they're too busy with their own stuff--is really just projections on how we feel about ourselves, and I think the biggest message that I'd like to try to send to women in particular over 40, even at that stage when we should be so wise and know it all and know it more, is the need for self-love, because we just don't do that. We are our harshest critics. We don't give ourselves a break, and our breaks--if we do give ourselves a break, there's all this [?] that goes with it. There's that shame and guilt. And in order to really be well, there comes a point in your life when you really have to make a decision to let all that go and to be more present and stop worrying so much about what happened in the past, because what happened in the past really has added to who you are as a person, and that's a good thing. And not to be too preoccupied with the future or the lack of it, depending on your age, because, you know, the future never comes. Tomorrow never comes. It's always today today. And learning how to be more present in terms of your day-to-day existence.Amy: So thank you for that. I think that's absolutely true, and I would imagine that a lot of wellness comes from mindfulness and presence. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got into this work?Lynnis: Sure. I have another life. I have had three lives, maybe. Three main lives. You know, [?] this was my third life. Before this, my second life I was a human resource professional and did very well and got up to the, you know, director level, and I had the equivalent of what could be considered the American dream. I was married, had four kids, a big house in [?] and kids going to school and doing well, you know, husband very successful. You know, all of the stuff that you would think is supposed to be the American dream, and being a woman of color even more so, you know? As an African-American, I was earning the upper .5% for an African-American woman and for a woman in general the upper 2%. So I was doing well. But there was something missing in my life, and I had developed an anxiety disorder and didn't even know it, and my anxiety disorder was based upon post-traumatic stress, and my post-traumatic stress was based upon an incident that happened in my life that was a total surprise. I didn't know how to quite deal with it, and my really dealing with had to do with, you know, controlling the outcome. No matter what happened, I was gonna control it. Whether it was controlling my coworkers, my kids, my husband, my neighbors, my friends, you know? My life in general. I was going to control it in such a way where there would never be anymore surprises, which of course is insane.Amy: Yeah, that's not possible.Lynnis: Right? That's insane. It's not possible. So over time, after 27 years of that, I finally had an epiphany--or a breakdown, whatever you want to call it--to the point where I had to take a sabbatical, and I left this wonderful job for a year with the idea of going back, and after a year of reflection and going to--you know, really digging down deeper, I realized that I wasn't happy and I needed to figure out what would make me happy. And in my exploration of what kinds of things I could do to heal myself from this anxiety disorder, because I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and they put me on medication. And I realize now that I was never good at pills and things. I've always been interested in nutrition. I was a dancer in my first life, you know, and I was a nutrition minor in college, so I decided that I was going to find out more about this mind, body, spirit wellness movement, which started, you know, a while back. I got started in 2009. This has been almost 10 years now that I've been in business. It'll be 10 years in April of 2019. So I decided that I wanted to figure out a way to help women not go through what I went through and to begin to take a look at how can we be well in our mind, body, and spirit and to make that our quest? Our quest to be well in our minds, in our bodies, and in our spirits, because it's a continuum. It's not all about the body. It's not all about your spirit. It's not all about your mind. It is a continuum, and if any of those things aren't being cared for, then we're off-kilter and we risk the possibility of being unwell. And so that's how it all started. I put together a company called PraiseWorks, because at that time I thought I would teach women over 40 how to dance, praise dance. I am a classically trained ballet dancer. I have danced professionally. And then when I got in my late 40s, I started doing praise dance at my church. So I was gonna teach them how to dance, and I quickly found out after my first few classes that these women needed so much more than just dance. I had women who were [?] survivors. I had women who were dealing with empty nests and [?] relationships [?] that ended through divorce. Women who had high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, and hormonal. Menopause. All of the things that you begin to deal with as you age, and so I thought "Okay, what else can I do?" And so that's when I went back, got my certification in nutrition and health and holistic living and yoga and Pilates and all this stuff, and came up with these different virtual programs that can help women to be well. And it's been really interesting. It's been quite an adventure, because one of the things that I didn't anticipate, which I'm learning now, is that a lot of the women who were my age--'cause at that time I was ... 51 when I [?]. I still had another 15 years or so of working for corporate America. So everybody thought I was nuts. "How could you just leave, you know, a six-figure salary like that and start your own thing from scratch?" But, you know, I think in many ways I saved my life. I could have still been there, still been working, probably doing okay, making lots of money, but would have had the anxiety disorder or would have gained a whole lot of weight as a result of the medication they wanted to put me on and probably would have began to start falling apart, because any time you're on any kind of medication, if it's not organic or holistic--any kind of pharmaceutical--it fixes normally the symptom and not the causation, and it causes other symptoms later on. So I feel like I saved my own life, and in the process of saving my own life I'm hoping that I've helped women begin to save theirs in terms of making other choices for their lives. And so that began my goal to really get the word out, virtually at first, even though like I said it was a challenge 'cause a lot of women my age, you know, weren't really into, you know, social media and things like that back in 2009, but that's changed over the years. [?] to not just inspire women 40 and over, but my children are saying "Mom, millennials, we need this kind of stuff. We need to know." They're on a quest and searching, and I never really thought about that, but they're right. So now I'm beginning to think about approaching--if you want to get to my age, [laughs] the ripe-old age of almost 62, then you're gonna want to do some of this stuff that, you know, I've [?] over the last 10 years.Amy: Absolutely. It's so much easier to prevent diabetes, heart disease and those kinds of things than it is to recover from them. High blood pressure, high cholesterol. The list goes on, right?Lynnis: And so many of those kinds of diseases, so many of them are lifestyle choices. And then coupled with the fact that growing older your body is gonna go through some changes anyway, and if you had decided to make a lifestyle choice to exercise more, to eat differently, to lower your stress levels, then your aging process could have been a lot more of a positive experience, and I'm trying to send that message out to women and all of the people who love them that there is a different way, that you don't have to go down that road.Amy: And I think, you know, going back to what you said about millennials, I just hearing millennial burnout is such a problem. You know, millennials and Gen Z are taking on so much stress because, you know, for example, college has gotten--the cost of college has gotten out of control. The return on that investment has diminished almost to nothing for a lot of people, and so they're trying to pay back more debt with worse--you know, with lower income than their parents, and then there's still the pressure of "When are you gonna start a family? When are you gonna buy a house?" Right? All of those expectations that we put on people basically from the 1940s, right? "When are you going to fulfill the American dream that's almost 100 years old?"Lynnis: Which is really the American nightmare, trying to achieve that right now, 'cause right now I'm visiting my daughter in D.C., and first of all, I'm immensely proud of her because she has done this by herself, and sometimes I would feel guilty about not being able to help her more once she finished her education, but I'm glad ultimately that she went this way, because I'm not always gonna be here. My husband's not gonna always be here. I had three other daughters I had to try to get through their phases of education, but it's interesting, the lifestyle that she's living is great, but it's extremely expensive. You know, her rent is more than my mortgage--and I live in California, so I don't have a cheap mortgage. But I look at how these--I don't want to say young people. I hate using that phrase because it makes me seem like I'm 1,000 years old, but I'm looking at how they're living and the pace within which you're living. I mean, they never--they're on all the time. They never relax. Even their social thing is--I don't want to say it's a competition, but it's stressful, you know, getting to the place because of the traffic, finding a place to park if you are driving. Or being in public transportation, having to be aware of your surroundings all the time. Then you get there and you have to deal with in your mind, "Okay, how much can I afford?" You know, when the bill comes, and then in-between that you're constantly on your phone. While you're talking to your friends and stuff, you're on the phone, you're doing all this stuff, and I'm thinking, "Wow, this is a lot of fun, but it's stressful fun." There's never a point where people just stop and just be, unless [?], like, "Yoga time," or "Medication time," you know? There's not--there doesn't seem to be a point of really disconnecting. And you're right, we in this society, no matter what age we are, have a tendency to want to meet the expectations of whatever was set before us. You know, for me it was being raised in the 70s and trying to meet the expectations of where my parents were, because they happened to have been college-educated, which was, you know, very unusual back then, because they were still in the early 50s. But now the expectation is my children do the same, but I realize that two of my girls, who had children in their late 20s, it might be a little bit more difficult for them to achieve the same level as I have, because times are different. Times are different. And so I think that part of being well is realizing that and giving yourself a break and realizing that these times are different, and you have to set your own expectations based upon what it is you want for your life. I mean, if you enjoy that pace and that's where you're at that's fine, but if you know that there's something else that you want to do, that's okay too. And with the college experience, I'm telling you--I've always felt this way, but I especially feel this way now. I wish we had more of the European model that gives people opportunities for apprenticeships and things like that, because college is not for everyone, and that does not mean that they're dumb or stupid or any of that. Ask Bill Gates. He'll tell you that, okay? And some of the other folks sitting up there in Google right now. They don't necessarily have, you know, grad degrees. The idea of getting a degree and then going on and getting the grad degree, because you don't know what else you're going to do, and then going on and getting your Ph.D., and then, you know, [?], I don't think that was the expectation at the time. So I think maybe perhaps we need to be more--I hate to use the word authentic. It's become such a buzzword. But more true to ourselves and that inner desire and tapping into that, because I do believe where your passion is, so lies your treasure. Amy: That's a beautiful sentiment. I love that. So for people who are where you were a few years ago, still climbing the corporate ladder, still trying to secure the bag, right, what can you offer them in terms of--what are the signs that they're approaching an unhealthy place? What do they need to watch for?Lynnis: Well, never disconnecting. For me it was two cell phones and a pager and my laptop, and this started back in '92 and went on until 2008, and I was raising kids at the same time and traveling. At one time I was about 60, 70% travel. I would make a turn-around--I would do a red-eye... an early-morning flight to Texas from California and take a red-eye back to be able to get there in time before they woke up the next morning, and then I would work from home because--I would, you know, dial into a landline or whatever back in the 90s, but never disconnecting and thinking that, by never disconnecting, you are being the best that you can be, that you're really doing a great job. The reality is more than likely you're not doing a great job. More than likely mistakes are going to happen. Disconnecting, and you start seeing those little mistakes pop up that, you know, normally you would not make. That's a sign, especially when you know that this a job that you're prepared for and that you're confident in and all of a sudden things start happening. Another sign is the inability to sleep, to be able to disconnect enough to sleep to calm down. Or if you're sleeping, your sleep is constantly interrupted by waking up, going to the bathroom several times during the course of the night, not having a deep sleep. That's a sign. Another sign is when you begin to realize that you don't have any relationships, and I'm not talking about love relationships. I'm talking about friendships. Your friendships are also tied to work, which is not a bad thing, but there was a time where you didn't work at that place and you had friends outside of work or friends outside of your profession. So disconnecting from relationships that aren't work-related. Also not being able to just sit and be. Feeling the need to always be doing something. And I'm not talking--and you can sit and be and binge watch, but you're still doing something, but the idea of just being in a state of being, if you're having problems with any of those things, that's a sign of burnout. Anxiety, which is a common thing that most Americans suffer from that no one is really talking about. My anxiety was so bad for almost 10 years that I thought it was normal. I started drinking coffee because of my anxiety, believe it or not. It seemed to be the only thing that would take away the scary feeling. The scary feeling was I would be going--I would wake up in the morning and it would feel like I was going straight downhill on a roller coaster with no restraints. I mean, like, going down the hill and nothing holding me in, but I'm still in the chair. Somehow I'm not falling out, but can you imagine how scary that is, thinking that you might fall out? That. It was the fear of the unknown. That all came from my post-traumatic stress that I found out later that I had as a result of not really going through the process of grieving. And the post-traumatic stress, and I talk about it in the book, it all came from how I found out that my mother had died. She was hit by a fire truck on her way to work. She was 56 years old. And how I found out was really traumatic, very traumatic, and I had just had a baby, 5 weeks old, and I had a 17-month old and a just turned 4-year-old. So it was--and I was on maternity leave at the time, but I was a regional manager, and I had, like, three or four branches I was in charge of, and what had happened was on the day that she died I had just seen her, and I said I would see her later and went to my office to show everybody my baby. And this was before cell phones. And my dad, I guess I must have mentioned it to him when I was over at the house in the morning, 'cause he was on his way to work too--'cause my parents were in my mid-50s. I was 31. And so I think I had mentioned to them that I was going by my office to show off the baby, and he called me there and he said, "I want you to go home," to the family home, because my grandfather was visiting from Georgia, my dad's dad, and he was just beginning to exhibit signs of dementia. So he wanted me to go home and stay with Grandaddy and that he would meet me there at the house a little bit later 'cause, he said, "Your mom's been in an accident. I don't know how serious it is, but I need you to go home." So I said okay, and, you know, I had a feeling something was wrong, and I had left my organizer--back then they had Ben Franklin organizers. I left my Ben Franklin organizer at work, and we didn't have cell phones back then. Didn't have any [?] numbers. Couldn't remember any numbers 'cause I was so scared. I suddenly wasn't feeling right. So I called my mom's office and, you know, Lucille [?], my mom's secretary, and I said, "Listen, I need to call someone to come and stay with me and I don't have any numbers with me," and she said, "Oh, yeah, I guess you would want to have someone come stay with you. You know, we are so sorry. We loved your mother." And I was like "...E-D? Loved? Past tense? You mean she's gone?" And that's when she realized, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" And then she dropped the phone, and I could hear--then I could hear people in the background crying. 'Cause I mean, it had been, like, not even a whole hour since this had happened, and that's when I began immediately to never have that shock again. Can you imagine? I mean, even now when I think about it I can still feel that... that decision. Boom. Because I have babies to take care of. I've got a job to do. I have a husband. I have a home. And my dad, I've got to be there for him, and I've got to be there for my sister who's still at school, at 17, graduating in a few months, turning 18 next week. I gotta call my sister in LA who just finished her master's [?]. I gotta take care of this stuff, so I don't have time to feel," and, you know, that's where [?], and that's where the anxiety sort of began, that moment, and that was definitely post-traumatic stress. And so I write about that and what I learned from that. They gotta read the book [?].Amy: That's right. So the book that you're mentioning is called Power Up Super Women: Stories of Courage and Empowerment, and Lynnis is one of 17 authors of this anthology, and I'm another author on this anthology. My story is not nearly as traumatic or dramatic, but all of these stories are designed to help women kind of come to terms with who they are, what they want out of life, and how to go about getting it, and there's some truly, truly inspirational stories in this. Lynnis, I have two more questions for you today. I wanted to ask you to finish this sentence. "I feel included when ______."Lynnis: I feel included when I'm contributing something of value to society, to my friends, to my family. I want to be of value. I just don't want to be taking up space. I don't want just because I am successful to be what defines me. I want that success to be tied to adding value, you know? Adding value to someone's life, adding value to someone's experience. I want to build a legacy. I just don't want to be successful and make a lot of money but no one remembers what I did. And I don't know why I tear up [?], but at 62, you know, that's something that's really important to me, to be of value.Amy: Yeah, to leave a lasting impact. I understand that, absolutely. Now can you finish this sentence? "When I feel included, I _______."Lynnis: When I feel included, I feel a sense of joy.Amy: Oh, that's beautiful.Lynnis: Yes. I never really experienced what true joy was until I left corporate America, quite frankly. And it's not that I'm saying corporate America is a bad thing. Corporate America is just a small sliver of what defines you, and if you can arrive at that early on in your career, then you'll be okay, because the real joy you're going to feel are the things that come at you unexpectedly, and in corporate America you don't want any surprises, but in life you do. You want good surprises in terms of, you know, the experiences that you have, and so yeah, it brings me great joy when I am able to feel included that way.Amy: Well, Lynnis, I can tell that you're having an impact, not just on your clients but on everyone around you. You have so much--you exude joy, you exude peace, and I am so grateful to know you. Thank you so much.Lynnis: Well, thank you, Amy. It's really an honor to talk with you. I'm so glad that you asked me. This is exciting.

america god women american amazon california texas google business anxiety americans tech european diversity courage wellness mom yoga african americans gen z corporate boom inclusion empowerment mentorship pilates medications menopause corporate america solidarity poc power up ben franklin melanin disconnecting woc wellness expert vsco be it holistic living grandaddy see it podsincolor amy you lynnis woods mullins lynnis right all amy well amy so amy oh amy c waninger praiseworks health pocintech blackandbrown vscocam

Movie Exec Amy Harrington Leaves Studio to Follow Her Passions

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 18, 2019 32:38

After becoming the first woman to ever hold the title of Vice President of Visual Effects and Post Production at a major movie studio, Amy decided to leave that world behind and start working with Nancy. Together they founded The Passionistas Project to share the stories of strong and empowered women who are following their passions to inspire others to do the same. Read more about The Passionistas Project. Sign up for the mailing list to learn more about The Passionistas Project Pack — a quarterly subscription box launching this fall. FULL TRANSCRIPT: Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. I'm Nancy Harrington and today I'm interviewing my business partner, sister, inspiration and best friend Amy. Amy left home right after college to follow her passion in Hollywood. She quickly rose through the ranks to become the first women to ever hold the title of Vice President of Visual Effects and Post Production at a major movie studio. After years in the film world she left all that behind to join forces with me to create the Passionistas Project where we share the stories of strong and empowered women who are following their passions through our podcast and our upcoming subscription box. So please welcome to the show my very special guest, Amy Harrington. What are you most passionate about? Amy: I'm most passionate about fulfilling my sense of curiosity and trying to learn something new every day. When I had my first job on the TV show Matlock, my boss at the time, John McClain told me as long as I learned something new every day, I feel like I had a good day and I've always carried that with me. Passionistas: So how does that translate into what you do for a living and with the Passionistas Project specifically? Amy: Well, when we started working for the Television Academy, 10 years ago at this point, and started to do interviews with people, I realized that that's what I love to do more than anything else. And it really fed into that sense of curiosity that I have because I love to talk to people about what they like to do and what their experiences have been. And I love, in the middle of an interview, when someone says something that triggers a question in my head that we hadn't prepared before. So for me, being able to do that with the Passionistas Project and to use that skill and to focus that passion on women who are following their passions and are really empowering and really inspiring, just brings that all together for me. Passionistas: So, let's talk about your background a little. You spent the summer of 1990 in Los Angeles at the Television Academy as an intern. So talk about what you learned from that experience. Amy: The first half of that summer I had been in New York and I worked at MTV and had an internship there. And that really made me even more excited to get into television because it was fun and energetic and everybody was young and it just felt like you could do anything cause you were, everybody was your age. The executive producers were probably late twenties early thirties so I felt like, okay so this feels doable. And then when I came up later in the summer to California for the Television Academy internship, I really felt like, okay, I am getting my foot in the door. I'm meeting other people my age and people who have experience who have been doing this for a really long time. And as long as I work hard and do a good job and prove myself, then the possibilities are endless. This is not just some crazy dream, a kid from the south shore of Massachusetts was having, but that, I could really move to California. I could really work in television and I could make it happen, you know? And if I hadn't had the Academy internship, I don't know that I would have believed that and I wouldn't have met the friends that I made who helped me get my first job when I moved back the summer after I graduated. Passionistas: Talk about what that first job was and what your path was that first few years of your work in Hollywood. Amy: So when I first came back to LA, I had a roommate lined up, Amy Toomin and she brought me back into a circle of friends that we had made the summer before. And one of them, Carolyn Koppel, who is going to be a Passionista soon, worked on a TV show called Matlock. She suggested I interview for the job of post-production assistant, which I at the time had no desire to be. I wanted to be a sitcom writer and TV producer. And I luckily had a professor in college who had told me, don't be so sure of what you want to do when you go out there, you know, keep your options open because you don't know what you actually are gonna like. And so I started working on Matlock and got into post production and one day my boss, at Matlock said to me, if you could be doing anything in Hollywood, what would you actually want to do? And I said, you know, if I could do anything I would probably want to be in what I thought at the time was called special effects and you know, build creatures. And you know, the Star Wars influence from my childhood was, was still very strong. And I thought like, I would really want to do that. And then coincidentally, my second year on Matlock, I was looking for a summer job and I got hired to be the visual effects coordinator on the feature film Coneheads. And that was how I got into the visual effects industry. So from there I went with that boss John Sheeley to Warner Bros. Where we worked on Louis and Clark and then ultimately helped... I was one of four founding members of Warner Bros. Imaging technology, which we called Wabbit. We actually did hands on visual effects for Warner Bros. projects like Batman Forever and The Adventures of Brisco County on TV. And then after I worked at Wabbit for a couple of years, um, the head of post-production at Warner Brothers proper, the studio proper, Mark Solomon hired John Sheeley and I to come over to the studio and actually be production executives basically dealing with visual at Warner Bros. Passionistas: Talk about your years at Warner Bros. And some of your best memories there. Amy: So John, Sheely and I went over to Warner Bros. And ultimately he left the studio and I was promoted to Vice President of Visual Effects and Post Production, simultaneously. I was the first woman to hold the job of a visual effects executive at a studio. What that meant was with Mark Solomon, who was my boss, we oversaw all of the teams who were doing the visual effects on all of the feature films at Warner Bros. And we oversaw editorial. So that was the editors and music supervisors and post production supervisors. And we basically saw every movie from development through final delivery for the six or seven years that I was in that position at studio. So I worked on movies like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and uh, the Matrix trilogy and Perfect Storm and You've Got Mail. Because we worked in development and because we worked all the way through delivery, we basically touched every movie that came through the studio in the time I was there. So I probably worked on about 200 to 250 movies when all of a sudden done. Obviously some more actively than others, but had at least a hand in seeing a lot of movies through. Passionistas: So in 2004 you and I started working together. So why did you decide to make that leap of faith and do that? Amy: By 2004 I, like I said, I had worked on hundreds of movies in one form or another, and the studio itself had changed significantly. When I started at Warner Bros., It was very old Hollywood. Bob Daly and Terry Semel were still the studio heads. And Lorenzo Di Bonaventura was the head of the creative production. And the film and the filmmakers and the, the movie came first. And by the time 2004 rolled around, the AOL Time Warner merger had happened. Everything was very budget driven. The climate at the studio was very different. And frankly, I remember being in a meeting on the third Harry Potter movie and the creative executive asking me how we were gonna make Harry Potter fly. And we had already made Harry Potter fly into other movies. And I just thought, if they don't understand this by now, am I really gonna spend the rest of my life explaining the same thing to everybody. And there was politics involved. And at the same time you, Nancy, were, you were ready to leave your job. And our friend Lisa Karadjian had an idea for a cable network and it was a great idea. And you and I both had the same time thought, well let's do it. Let's leave the jobs we don't like anymore and do this together. So even though that cable network never came to fruition, it was the stepping stone to moving on. Passionistas: In 2010 we founded Pop Culture Passionistas, and in addition to doing interviews and creating content for our own website, we've worked for a number of clients like the Television Academy and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So what do you think was the most significant work that we did for those clients that led us to the Passionistas Project? Amy: Meeting Karen Herman and starting to do interviews for the Television Academy and what was called the Archive of American Television at the time was the most significant moment in our path. I think of it Pop Culture Passionistas. We had obviously done a lot of interviews before Karen let us do an Archive interview, but they were phone interviews with other bloggers or they were not very high pressure or they were, you know, okay, you can ask a few questions and, and that was it. And then with Karen it became, this is how you sit down with someone for three or four hours and really go deep with questions and really get to know someone. And she just taught us how to do research and she taught us how to structure questions so that there was a flow to the interview. But she also gave us the freedom to ask a question in the middle of an interview if something came up that seemed like it should be followed rather than feeling, you know, tied to every word that was on the page. And I just fell in love with that process. And if we hadn't done the Archive interviews it would never have led to the Passionistas Project because the other interviews we were doing weren't that satisfying to me. They were fun and oh cool, we get to talk to this person and ask a couple of questions. But when you're actually get to sit down with someone and stare them in the eye for three hours and talk about their childhood and talk about those moments that you've seen on TV your whole life that meant so much to you, that was really life changing. Passionistas: We started the Passionistas Project in the advent of the #MeToo and the #TimesUp movement. What was your personal motivation for starting the podcast? Amy: We had wanted to start a podcast for a while. We'd probably been talking about it for a year or so and we were talking about doing a pop culture podcast and we couldn't figure out how to do it differently and make it interesting. And we'd certainly didn't want to do the kind of podcast that was us giving our opinion about pop culture and talking for an hour. You know, we wanted to bring our interview skills into it. So for me, the moment when we, when it came to us to do the Passionistas Project, it just felt 100% like what we had been searching for two years. And for me the idea was just, we were hearing all of these really incredibly important stories from the #MeToo movement about women who had been put in horrible positions and who were being really strong and coming forward and telling stories that absolutely needed to be told and almost everyone we know has experienced in one way or the other. But we also knew in our heart that there were a million stories of women who have had good experiences and have worked really hard and built something or been a part of something that was really positive and so in light of all of the darker stories that were being told, and again, they needed to be, I personally felt like we need to also have a platform or women are showing other women that there's a way to do this. You can do it. You can have a positive experience. You can build your own environment to make a positive experience and that was why I personally wanted to do it. Yes, I had ups and downs at Warner Bros., But I had an incredibly positive experience there. I was the only woman most of the time I was promoted very young. I was given access to everything. I got to work with the greatest directors of the time and the best visual effects people and editors and I was welcomed in to a certain extent, even though I was a woman and I wanted other women to know. It doesn't all have to be the negative side of things. You can follow your passions. Passionistas: What has the podcast meant to you personally? Amy: Now that we're over a year into it? I think the thing that surprised me most about doing it is how connected I feel to the women that we've been interviewing. You know when we do the archive interviews for example, you feel by the end of it, like you have a connection with Julia Louis Dreyfus, but you don't, you know, you're going to see Julia Louis Dreyfus again and she'll say hi cause she's polite but she's not gonna know why she's saying hi to you. I have become used to the fact that I have this intimate experience with someone and then we are strangers. Justifiably. So from that point on. But with the Passionistas Project, I have felt like there's a connection with these women and even if they're not people we're staying in touch with every day or you know, some we seem more than others. I feel like we've got a bond and there's a connection that is really special. And every single woman that we have interviewed has talked about their desire to help other women. And not to bring everything back to Warner Bros. but when I was there, I was the only woman most of the time, or maybe one other woman in a meeting, you know, studio executives. And it was never a real sense of camaraderie with the women. You know, I had my team of women that worked with me and my department and we were close, but the other women in the studio, we were nice to each other, but we didn't bond really. And everyone out to drinks with any of them. I'm finding with the Passionistas Project that women, I think especially in light of the #MeToo movement, women are looking out for each other. Women are trying to figure out how they can help each other and are trying to move each other's agendas forward in a way that I have never experienced before. I don't think it's unique to what we're doing, but I'm experiencing it first hand in a way I don't think I would be if we weren't doing the podcast. And so that's a selfish answer, but my hope and, and I think what we've already showing that we want to and can do is taking that and connecting people. Oh, you know, we interviewed a woman who has a farm. We interviewed a woman that has a mill, let's introduce them so that maybe they can help each other in some way. Passionistas: What have you learned about yourself from interviewing these women? Amy: I think I've learned that even though I consider myself shy and an introvert, that whether it's because of the project itself or just where I'm at in my life, I am way more determined to step out of my comfort zone and talk to people and open up more about myself than I might have before. Because again, I think the women that we're meeting have made me feel comfortable that flaws are okay in the midst of the positive stuff. And so I feel embraced by them. And so it's letting me, I think because I'm being more open, I'm getting more openness back from them. Passionistas: I'm Nancy Harrington and you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and my interview with my business partner, sister and best friend Nancy Harrington. Join our growing community of women supporting other women who are in pursuit of their passions on The Passionistas Project Facebook Group. And go to ThePassionistasProject.com to sign up for our mailing list and get 10% off our upcoming subscription box. Now here's more of my interview with Amy. Do you ever feel unmotivated and what do you do to get past that feeling? Amy: I don't feel unmotivated very often. I usually wake up feeling behind in what I wanted to get done for the day, so it's rare that I wake up and go, I don't want to work today. Especially because I love what we're doing so much that it's not like some jobs I've had in the past or it's like, ah, I don't want to. But when I do feel unmotivated, honestly, I just figure out like, okay, but what can I do right now? That's not the least favorite thing that I have to do and if I can get that done, then that'll probably lead me to something else and I try and get the things I want you to do least out of the way first so that I have the carrot of something that I really want to do dangling out there. So it's like, okay, if I get through this, then I will be able to do the thing that I really want to do. Passionistas: Is there one lesson that you've learned on your journey so far that really sticks with you? Amy: I think the thing that I've learned that sticks with me is that I can do anything I set my mind to. And I don't mean that in like a cocky way. I just mean every job I've ever been given or every job I've ever chosen to pursue on my own. I have never known how to do it. When I started to do it, I've never been given a job that was like, oh, we see that you have 10 years of experience in this particular thing, so we want to hire you. It's always been like, well I know you can do this, but now we need someone that can do this and we're going to give you the job. I remember when I Mark Solomon decided to make me Vice President of Visual Effects and Post Production at the same time at Warner Bros. He had already asked me to do the visual effects job and then he said, will you do the post production job too? And I said to him, I don't know how to do that. You realize that you're offering me this very like important position that I don't know how to do. And he said, yeah, but I know that you'll figure it out. I know you can do it. And I've been very lucky that a lot of people have thought that of me and it used to be that I didn't necessarily understand why or believed them when they would give me those jobs and now I feel like, okay, I can't, I can do, I can figure anything out, I can Google it. And I think that feeds, this feeds back into my original answer. What I'm most passionate about is like I want to learn new things all the time. So the more opportunities I get to do things I don't know how to do, that's what keeps me interested in working and living. So I feel like I'm finally at a point where I'm more confident in myself that I can take on anything than anybody throws at me. Passionistas: What's been your biggest professional challenge and how have you overcome it? Amy: I think my biggest professional challenge has been confidence in myself. I think when I was at Warner Bros., I was so young to have the job that I had that everybody else believed everything I was saying and I was right about what I was saying. Or I would bring in the right person to answer a question if I didn't know how to answer it. But I think the whole time I felt like they're going to figure out that I don't really. I don't think they should have given me this job even though I was doing a great job. So I think my biggest challenge has always been trusting myself and believing in myself and having the confidence that I belong at the table and that I'm good at what I do when I set my mind to it. So I've learned over the years to have more faith and, and the job at Warner Bros. I think was what taught me that. Like that feeling lasted for a little while and then it was like, oh wait, I have everybody sitting in this room. I actually am the one that knows what the answer to this question is. Once I get over that feeling of being a fraud and realizing I belonged there and that I had earned it since then, I've felt pretty confident and like, especially when the chips are down and I feel like I can really kick in if there's a crisis and take charge of the situation. So, but that was, that was probably my biggest challenge along the way. Passionistas: What's the most rewarding part of your career? Amy Harrington: Where I'm at right now is the most rewarding part of my career because I'm following my passions, I'm doing it with my best friend and I feel like what we are creating with the Passionistas Project is really important and there's so many elements to it that we haven't even started to explore that are going to give a platform for women and a voice to women and build a community. And so for me, getting to do this every day is so rewarding and I just want to throw all of my energy into it. Passionistas: Looking back on your journey so far, is there one decision that you think was the most courageous that changed your trajectory? Amy: Leaving Warner Bros. Was the most courageous thing because I thought I was going to work there my entire life. I thought, I thought I'd worked there till I was 65 and I would retire and I was making a very good salary. I had a very comfortable life. It was my entire life. During that period, I didn't really have much of a social life because I was so focused on what I was doing. I was the quintessential career girl. So the decision to actually leave all of that, especially because we were working on a cable network, but it wasn't a paid job and it wasn't okay, I'm going from this steady position to another steady situation. It was, I'm basically taking early retirement and figuring out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. It was very scary, but it was the best thing I ever did. Passionistas: When you were a girl, what lessons did your mother teach you about women's roles in society? Amy: Our mother was the greatest mother anybody could ever have. She was incredibly loving. She gave up everything she may have wanted for herself, for her husband and her children. She had studied to be an art teacher, but after she got married, she stopped doing that and she just raised a family, which was a very important job and she was, again, she was the best mother ever. But I remember throughout my life asking her like, will you draw something for me? You are an art teacher. You clearly loved art. You must have loved to draw, which she said she did, but our father was such a good artist that she would not draw because she said he was such a good artist. She didn't want to. Knowing my dad, I believe she didn't want to draw because I think she was probably a really good artist and she didn't want to steal any thunder from him, which was her way and made her as lovely as she was. But it also was an example to me that that's really not the way to live your life. By the time I got to high school, my sisters and brother were older. And I didn't date much in high school. I rarely had a steady boyfriend, but I would say to her, you know, I wish I had a boyfriend. She would say, don't worry about that, you know, don't focus on that. She basically would say to me, follow my dreams and that will come when it's supposed to come. If it comes, you'll be happy. And if it doesn't come, you're still going to be fine. But the most important thing is what do you wanna do and go out and do it. And I think if she had lived in a different time, she would have been an archeologist or she would have been an art teacher or some kind of teacher and she would have done something that she wanted to do. Because she was such a curious person. And I definitely got my sense of curiosity from her. So I know when she saw me come out here and do what I wanted to do and was around long enough to see me do well at it, that she got to live vicariously through me in a way. Passionistas: What about professional mentors along the way? Amy: In terms of what we're doing now and the Passionistas Project, without a doubt, Karen Herman was the biggest mentor that I could have had. She, again, we had some experience doing interviews, but I will never forget the day that she came to us and said, do you want to do an Archive interview and let us interview Melissa Gilbert, who was like the actress I was compared to constantly as a child because I had long hair. And Karen had no idea of that. And really taught us how to do what we're doing and again made it really fun and gave us opportunities like interviewing Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander. And the crown jewel of it all — Laverne and Shirley — partly because I know she trusted us that we would do a good job, but also partly because she knew it meant something to us. She knew that we would have fun doing it together without Karen. I don't know where we would be right now. Passionistas: Who are your favorite cultural heroines? Amy: All my cultural heroines growing up were TV characters. So I would have to say Laverne DeFazio, certainly Mary Richards, not Mary Tyler Moore because she was the go getter career girl working in television. Rhoda because she was the sassy neighbor who said what was on her mind, always made fun of herself so no one else could first. Those strong female TV characters that had a sense of humor and a little bit of an edge and were really super independent. Passionistas: What's your secret to a rewarding life? Amy: My secret to rewarding life is having balance, which I never used to have. So it's getting to do what I want to do for a living with the people I want to do it with and having a really nice home and boyfriend to go home to. And knowing that I can have both of those things even though it's not always easy to balance them. Knowing that I don't have to pick one or the other. Passionistas: Is there a mantra that you live by? Amy: I would say there are two. One comes from one of my favorite movies of all time. The Sound of Music, which is "Mother Superior always says, ‘When the Lord closes a door somewhere, he opens a window.'" And I do believe that as hard as it can be sometimes and you don't think that it's a good thing. Sometimes the universe pushes you, actually pushes you out the door. And slams it behind you so you can't go back in and you gotta climb back into something else or a window. That's that a huge mantra in my life. And the other is something our mother always used to say, which is "everything happens for a reason." And again, you may not always know what that is at that moment, but it always ends up being true. Passionistas: What's your proudest career achievement? Amy: Well, I think I have two, because I feel like I have two, I feel like I have two parts of my career. The first part, which is the Warner Bros. part, I would say I'm proudest of being a woman that accomplished so much, so young and worked so hard to play on that level and to get to work on movies like the first Harry Potter, and A Little Princess and to work with directors like Alfonso Cuaron and Tim Burton and Nora Ephron. To me, I get to, I get to work at these the studio that was at the top of its game and it pushed me to be the best I could be. So for that part of my career, that's my proudest achievement. But now, and forever, I think my proudest achievement is going to be what we're doing right now. I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg of what we're going to build and with the plans that we have to expand it into different areas. I think we are creating something that's going to last forever and be our legacy and carry on after we're gone. And I think it's to help women tell their stories that might not otherwise be heard and to hopefully inspire other women to do the same thing, which is just to follow their passion, whatever that is. I just think being able to do that is a true blessing and I already am proud of it, but I think I'm only gonna become more and more proud of it as we go on. Passionistas:What's your definition of success? Amy: For me, success is just following your passion and being able to sustain the lifestyle that you want to sustain. You don't need to be a gazillionaire. You need to be able to pay your bills and you need to decide what that comfort level is for you in terms of what your finances need to be. But if you're making money, doing something that you love, then you really, really lucky in this life. Passionistas:What does it mean to you to be a female entrepreneur in 2019? Amy: I feel like it's a good time to be a female entrepreneur and I feel like it's an important time for a woman to be an entrepreneur because on the tail of the #MeToo movement, it feels like doors are opening for women. And women are being more supportive of each other. But I think it could very easily slide back in the other direction and just be a moment. So I think it's really important that at this point in time we all do what we can to help each other be as successful as possible so that we build as strong a foundation as possible for women to build upon in the future. So I think what we are, I know what we're trying to do is help spread the word, you know, we're gonna have a subscription box. We're going to help get the product out there. You know, we're going to have an, we have an online community where we're inviting women to help each other. And I think now is a critical time for there to be as many female entrepreneurs in the game and supporting each other as possible. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and my interview with my business partners, sister and best friend Amy Harrington. Join our growing community of women supporting other women who are in pursuit of their passions on The Passionistas Project Facebook Group. And go to ThePassionistasProject.com to sign up for our mailing list and get 10% off our upcoming subscription box. While you're there, check out the gallery of our childhood photos as ThePassionistasProject.com/blog. And be sure to subscribe to The Passionistas Project Podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.

MP 066: How does being an empty nester impact my marriage? (with Brian & Amy Bloye)

Married People Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 10, 2019 36:52

So much of our culture is focused on parenting and kids. But what happens to your marriage when those move out and move on? To discuss this important topic with us Ted Lowe sat down for an interview with Brian and Amy Bloye. They’ve recently become empty nesters now that their two sons have grown up. Not only that, but the Bloyes have also been helping married couples for many years as founders of West Ridge Church in Dallas, Ga. They also help plant other churches across the country through the Launch Network. The Bloyes have some incredible insights on how the local church can help marriages and how couples can navigate the tricky season of being an empty nester. We hope you enjoy the conversation! A reminder for our listeners—we have a new resource we’ve created called MarriedPeople Membership. It’s an online library for married couples just like you. And it only costs $8/month or $80/year to get access to all of our premium resources in one place. The Interview Tell us a little about yourselves. Brian: Amy and I have been married for almost 26 years. I’ve been in ministry for almost 30 years and was in student ministry for nine years. In 1997, we moved with our two-year-old son to Georgia and started West Ridge Church. Now, we’re in a new season of our lives where we’re doing more conferences and traveling together. We’re finding life with our kids out of the home and we’ve written a book and done a few other things together in the last year. How have you kept a great marriage while planting churches and pouring into others? One of the things we’re passionate about is healthy marriage and family in ministry. But we focus on couples who have started churches and are pastoring them. Pastors are often ones who need the most help in their marriages. What are some common struggles with marriages in a church plant? You’re invested all in. When you move to a new city to start a church (or even start a business together), you’re all in. It’s a personal thing for you, your spouse and your kids. You’re taking a step of faith together and it impacts every part of your life. Churches are just like kids—they have different stages of life and you have to adjust to the phases of the organization and your family. It puts a lot of strain on your marriage and family. We see some unhealthy things sneak in and we want to help couples during those times. How do you set the limits on work to keep it from impacting your family? We encourage couples to build healthiness in from the very beginning. A lot of people don’t take time off because they’re going to rest ‘when this happens’. But that rarely ever happens. So we encourage people to build in rest at the beginning. You have to build in the rest and health rhythms, and you have to put boundaries around your home life. Usually, driven people start churches and organizations, so they start one thing and move on to the next thing. And they have driven children. Brian: To be honest, we didn’t do very well with this early on. I’ll tell you how things changed for us. I came from a student ministry world that was very busy. We kept a crazy pace going that continued to our church plant. We ran at such a heavy pace that it was impacting the behavior of our oldest son. When our second son was born, he copied the behavior of his brother. I sat down with Andy Stanley and asked him how I keep the church moving forward without losing my marriage and kids. Andy said, “You have to choose to cheat”. He told me I had to cheat the church on behalf of my family. He told me that God never promises to make up for misguided priorities. He helped me see what it’d look like to go from 75-80 hours a week down to 45-50 hours. I realized there was such a lack of boundaries and rhythms in people’s homes and family life. We became passionate about bringing that into our own home and helping others. Amy: If you can cheat the church and focus on your marriage and family, when you become an empty nester you can be healthy. You’re going to cheat something, just make sure you’re not cheating at home. How did you feel in that season of extreme busyness? Amy: I was so committed to make this work with Brian; we were so committed to what we were doing. I got to the point where I felt like we were just holding on. We were so excited about what we felt God had called us to do, we thought we’d do whatever it takes. But we were so unhealthy in our thinking, we didn’t know we should be valuing time margins. You can do so much more if you have margin in your life so you can be spontaneous and hang out with your kids. And they know they’re more important to us than the work. How could you tell the pace was impacting your kids? Brian: Obviously, their behavior. They’re both very driven, high spirited kids and we love that about them. I wasn’t around enough to be the consistent person who brought stability. I’ve learned over the years that time and talking is so important. Back then, every time the phone rang, I would pick it up—no matter what I was doing. I remember one time, I was on the floor playing with Taylor and about three times it rang and I picked it up. When I came back, he wasn’t there. Amy told me I was sending a message to him—that whoever was on the phone was more important than him. Why is taking a day off so important for your marriage? Amy: Brian takes Fridays off and so does the entire staff, unless something crazy happens. They close the church building. We usually go out to a movie, go to lunch and get refueled. We go really hard Monday through Thursday. On Friday, we know rest is coming. Couples always need to have something to look forward to together—a trip or just a day off. Brian: I heard this phrase yesterday from someone who said to “always have a mountain in front of you that scares you just a little bit”. We always try to have something in front of us that we’re looking to together – whether it’s traveling together or speaking together, a challenge. Amy is speaking into spouses and raising healthy kids. Getting this off the ground is a huge challenge we’re tackling together. We’ve also started taking our missionaries from all over the world and getting them together and speaking to them. We also always look at the next place we want to travel to together. What do you guys think about seeking marriage counseling? Amy: Brian brought a counselor to our staff when we went through a difficult time as a church. The counselor had some open slots. And Brian asked if we wanted to meet with him. By the time we got in there, both of us were in tears. He had unpacked stuff we didn’t realize we had. Everyone has issues and if we can make our marriage healthier—it’s something we don’t want to miss out on. We all have junk we bring into our marriage and bring our baggage in. Sometimes, it feels like it could get better but we’re afraid of the pain or of things blowing up. But you have to go through pain sometimes for things to get better but it’s worth it. If you make the commitment that you’re not going to give up on it, you can get anywhere. If you’re willing to stay in it and get through the pain, it’s so worth it. We’re so much healthier as a result of it. What was it like when your first son moved out of the house? Brian: I remember when we took our oldest son to college. People told us it’d be tough and it was just as tough as people said. Our oldest son actually came back and is living with us again. He plays pro baseball and is with us in the off-season. There are big adjustments at every level. You almost have to learn how to re-parent. We have to figure out how to put boundaries and see where they’re asking for advice and where we have to stop giving it. A few years ago, I interviewed Andy Stanley and asked how you know you’ve done well as a parent. He said if they want to come back home and hang out with you. Why do you think the divorce rate is so high for empty-nesters? Amy: So many of our friends have poured themselves completely into their kids. I sat on the bleachers for so many years with baseball moms and then when the last season was over and the kids left and went to college, some of those parents didn’t know each other. When our boys were little, we would go on a trip or go somewhere overnight or go on date night and leave the kids with a babysitter. I remember them being so upset, but as they got older they realized we were modeling for them what it’s like for our family not to revolve around the kids and their schedule. They’re an important part, but not the center of the family. I would encourage people to focus on the marriage and have fun together so when the kids are gone you’re still having fun together. Your one simple thing this week Have fun together and take time off to rest together. Show Closing Thanks for joining us for the Married People Podcast. We hope you’ll subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and leave a review – they help us make the podcast better. We want to hear from you! Share with us on Facebook, Instagram or our site. If you want more resources, check out Your Best Us. To find more from Brian and Amy Bloye, you can check out their book It’s Personal: Surviving and Thriving on the Journey of Church Planting.

The greatest present of all time

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2018 30:51

Amy: Hello listeners! This is Amy Smalley reminding you this holiday season that sometimes the very best present you can give your family is…...being….present. Michael: Oh Amy…. Amy: What? You don't get it? It's present like a gift but also like you know the present…. Michael: Oh no I get it, listeners I'm so sorry I think that may be the last time I let Amy open the show. Amy: Hey, everybody loves puns they're so, punny. Michael: oh no. Amy: You should probably put me in a punitentiary Michael: Listeners I'm so sorry I promise today's episode will not in fact be about puns. We are going to talk about how you need to make sure you remain present this holiday season so you don't miss out on all the wonderful memories happening all around you. Amy: So to find out about how to wrap up this present of presence, stay tuned! Distraction of the Day: I'm pretty excited about driverless cars but I just learned something from a legitimate scientific study that shows why driverless cars will be the greatest invention of our time! Amy, can you guess what would get me overly excited? BOOK US FOR A COMEDY NIGHT OR RELATIONSHIP EVENT https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/p/comedy-of-love Follow us on your favorite social app: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/smalleyinstitute/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MichaelandAmy/ Twitter https://twitter.com/Michael_Smalley

distractions michael oh amy you michael smalley amy so amy smalley

The greatest present of all time

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2018 30:51

Amy: Hello listeners! This is Amy Smalley reminding you this holiday season that sometimes the very best present you can give your family is…...being….present. Michael: Oh Amy…. Amy: What? You don’t get it? It’s present like a gift but also like you know the present…. Michael: Oh no I get it, listeners I’m so sorry I think that may be the last time I let Amy open the show. Amy: Hey, everybody loves puns they’re so, punny. Michael: oh no. Amy: You should probably put me in a punitentiary Michael: Listeners I’m so sorry I promise today’s episode will not in fact be about puns. We are going to talk about how you need to make sure you remain present this holiday season so you don’t miss out on all the wonderful memories happening all around you. Amy: So to find out about how to wrap up this present of presence, stay tuned! Distraction of the Day: I’m pretty excited about driverless cars but I just learned something from a legitimate scientific study that shows why driverless cars will be the greatest invention of our time! Amy, can you guess what would get me overly excited? BOOK US FOR A COMEDY NIGHT OR RELATIONSHIP EVENT https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/p/comedy-of-love Follow us on your favorite social app: Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/smalleyinstitute/ Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/MichaelandAmy/ Twitterhttps://twitter.com/Michael_Smalley

distractions michael oh amy you michael smalley amy so amy smalley

Calm down holiday drama in 3 minutes or less

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 13, 2018 21:55

In this corner, we have Uncle Joey who's had too much to drink and some strong opinions about the recent elections. Annnnnnnd in this corner we have our challenger Aunt Marge who feels the need to correct people about practically everything and is just itching for an opportunity to disagree. In this epic clash of opinions who will win in this holiday Battle Royale? Amy: Um, I don't really think anyone wins? Michael: *sarcastic* But there's always a winner! Amy: No, I don't think so. Really in these family battles no one wins and everyone just feels kinda awkward. Michael: So what you're saying is engaging in family drama doesn't actually fix anything and just creates more tension? Huh, who knew? Amy: So today we are going see how engaging in family drama isn't really helpful and how we, as Christ followers, should be seeking to de-escalate conflict instead of provoke it. Michael: And we're going to teach you a method that can de-escalate this conflict in just three minutes. For the Distraction of the Day, I've got a special video for Amy today. It's only a one minute commercial for Spotify, the music streaming service. There's no way their commercial could cause Amy to be afraid...is there? Stay tuned till the end of this podcast to find out whether or not I can succeed in terrifying Amy with a Spotify commercial. BOOK US FOR A COMEDY NIGHT OR RELATIONSHIP EVENT https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/p/comedy-of-love Follow us on your favorite social app: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/smalleyinstitute/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MichaelandAmy/ Twitter https://twitter.com/Michael_Smalley

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Calm down holiday drama in 3 minutes or less