Podcasts about at ibm

Listen as Raven Heyward, founder and host of DiversifyHER, converses with Neville Poole. With a proven track record at global powerhouses including IBM and Accenture, Neville has partnered with Fortune 50/100 executives across financial services, retail, insurance, logistics, and hospitality sectors to implement lasting organizational change. Her expertise in operating model design and leadership coaching has made her a sought-after advisor for companies navigating complex transformations.Prior to fluent, Neville served as Managing Director and Business Agility Practice Leader at Accenture, where she led the largest pure-play global agile consultancy. At IBM, she was a key leader on the company's largest modernization project while serving as Partner and Enterprise Agility Strategy Leader.Bringing extensive education and professional credentials in organizational transformation and leadership development, Neville balances her executive career with community leadership, having served on the United Way Board of Directors and as chairperson for Southern Fried Agile for five years.Connect with Neville:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nevillepoole/

Today I am chatting with Polly Sanderson,About how she became a privacy person.Polly recently moved to Texas,At IBM, she works at the privacy and AI nexus!

Bridger (Waleed) Ammar has been leading top-tier, high-impact data-modeling projects since 2006 in research, education, engineering and product. Sponsor The Jason Cavness Experience is sponsored by CavnessHR. CavnessHR provides HR to companies with 49 or fewer people. CavnessHR provides a tech platform that automates HR while providing access to a dedicated HR Business Partner. www.CavnessHR.com Go to www.thejasoncavnessexperience.com for the podcast on your favorite platforms  Bridger's Bio Bridger (Waleed) Ammar has been leading top-tier, high-impact data-modeling projects since 2006 in research, education, engineering and product. A few experiences which particularly helped shape his thinking: - Co-founded the ACM chapter at Alexandria University. Defended his PhD in Language-Universal Large Models (L-ULM), in 2016, with Tom Mitchell and Kuzman Ganchev as examiners. - Taught at Alexandria University, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of Washington. Published at Nature, JAMA, NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP among other top-tier venues. Advised mission-critical organizations on AI strategy, including the NSF (USA), SDAIA (KSA), a leading gaming platform (USA), a leading freight forwarding platform (KSA). At King Saud university, he learned the holistic power of safely integrating different cultures for global good. - At Alexandria University, he contributed to a digital model for historical artifacts, in collaboration with the Alexandria Library. At P&G, he learned the holistic power of mapping the manufacturing process in a data model. - At IBM, he contributed to the state of the art (SOTA) in using statistics to model biological sequences, in collaboration with DARPA. - At eSpace, he learned the basics of building sustainable businesses, in collaboration with Alexandria University. - At Microsoft, he contributed to the then-SOTA in statistical machine translation models, in collaboration with the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center. At Carnegie Mellon University, as a Google PhD fellow, he developed the SOTA in language-universal models (L-UMs). At Google Shopping, he contributed to the SOTA in mixing random forests with neural networks. - At the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, he learned the SOTA in managing science from his mentor Oren Etzioni, then developed the SOTA in modeling science. At Google Health, he contributed to the SOTA in building the digital manifestation of living cells in species-agnostic models. - At Google Research, he learned the SOTA in cost-effective scaling of LLM inference to a Billion users. - At Google Assistant, he learned the SOTA in scalable distribution of data products. At Burning Man, he learned how to safely integrate freedom and self expression. We talked about the following and other items Burning Man Experience and Philosophy Scientific Progress and Its Impact  Ethics in Science and Peer Review Purpose of Science and Future Discoveries Encouraging Young Scientists and Scientific Discoveries Future of AI and Its Impact on Various Industries Global AI Development and Personal Background  Is Singularity coming Paddle boarding and dancing AI/ML How were the pyramids built Are humans becoming smarter AI ethics Bridger's Social Media  Bridger's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/waleedammar/  Bridger's Email: wammar@higg.world Company Website: https://higg.world/ Company Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/holistic_intelligence/  

Do we have your permission to share this episode of Screaming in the Cloud with you? Sonrai CTO and Co-Founder Sandy Bird is back on the show to help Corey break down the woes that come with granting permissions in the world of cloud security. As they catch up, the pair touch base on how automation can create major headaches, what goes into navigating the minefield of granting permissions, and if the future of adoption patterns is as grim as Corey predicts. Sandy also answers one of Corey's long-time questions: how do you pronounce “Sonrai?” Who knows? Maybe Corey will finally learn how to say it properly...Show Highlights:(0:00) Intro(0:30) Breaking down Sonrai's name(1:45) Sonrai sponsor read(2:25) Getting alerts vs. fixing the root of the problem(4:50) The problems with granting permissions(7:34) The dangers of automating permissions(10:10) "Where do I make this change, and how do I enforce it?" (13:46) The security concerns that come with tagging automation(16:12) Sonrai sponsor read(16:53)  Properly deploying permissions access(21:16) Woes of running reporting in the middle of the night(23:21) Are adoption patterns getting worse?(29:01) Where you can find more from Sonrai SecurityAbout Sandy BirdSandy Bird is the co-founder and CTO of Sonrai Security, helping enterprises protect their data by securing cloud identities and access. Sandy was the co-founder and CTO of Q1 Labs, which was acquired by IBM in 2011. At IBM, Sandy became the CTO for the global security business and worked closely with research, development, marketing and sales to develop new and innovative solutions to help the IBM Security business grow to ~$2B in annual revenue. He is a trusted and experienced cloud security expert., Sandy Bird is the co-founder and CTO of Sonrai Security, helping enterprises protect their data by securing cloud identities and access. Sandy was the co-founder and CTO of Q1 Labs, which was acquired by IBM in 2011. At IBM, Sandy became the CTO for the global security business and worked closely with research, development, marketing and sales to develop new and innovative solutions to help the IBM Security business grow to ~$2B in annual revenue. He is a trusted and experienced cloud security expert.LinksSonrai Security: https://sonraisecurity.com/Sonrai Security free trial: https://sonraisecurity.com/trial/Sonrai Security demos: https://sonraisecurity.com/demo/Sonrai Security learning resources: https://sonraisecurity.com/resource-library/Sonrai Security blog: https://sonraisecurity.com/blog/Sonrai Security ACCESS Virtual Summit: sonrai.co/access-on-demandSponsorSonrai Security: https://sonraisecurity.com/

Interview with Paul Zikopoulos – Vice President, IBM Skills Vitality and Enablement In our latest episode of CGE Radio, J. Richard Jones speaks with Paul Zikopoulos, Vice President, IBM Skills Vitality and Enablement about artificial intelligence you can trust and deploy at scale in government / public sector. Paul is a renowned writer and speaker on AI and Big Data, consulted by "60 Minutes" and NATO generals. Named on numerous global "Experts to Follow" and "Thought Leader" lists, he has authored 21 books and over 360 articles. At IBM, Paul directs strategic initiatives for the IBM Technology Unit's sales and learning programs. He actively promotes Women in Technology, winning IBM Canada's “Women in Technology Ally of the Year” and serving on several advisory boards. Despite his success, Paul stays grounded, always learning from his experiences and his daughter Chloë. Follow him on Twitter at @BigData_paulz. IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting services provider, helping clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,800 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently, and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to their clients. All of this is backed by IBM's legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity, and service. For more information, visit www.ibm.com In this episode: How public sector should organize to prepare for generative AI How Generative AI can help in Canada and abroad The practical use cases that IBM focusses its innovation around How IBMs work with AI differ from others And more!

In this episode of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BragTalks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, host Heather VanCura interviews Emily Jiang about mentorship and communities. Emily shares her experiences with mentorship and engaging in communities. Listen to hear about how she approached mentorship and the impact it made in her career. Season 7 is about sharing the experiences of technical professionals and building on the interviews from the recently published book '⁠⁠Developer Career Masterplan'⁠⁠. This episode is a story that links to Chapter 7 of the book..hope you enjoy our new look and Season 7 of BragTalks! Bio: Emily Jiang is a Java Champion. She is Liberty Cloud Native Architect and Chief Advocate, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) in IBM, based at Hursley Lab in the UK. Emily is a MicroProfile and Jakarta EE guru and also a book author ofibm.biz/MicroProfileBook. At IBM, she leads the effort of implementing MicroProfile and Jakarta EE specifications on Open Liberty.She is passionate about MicroProfile and Jakarta EE. She regularly speaks at conferences, such as QCon, Code One, DevNexus, JAX London, Voxxed, Devoxx, EclipseCon, GeeCon, JFokus, etc.Connect with Emily on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Description:AI is transforming the world, and William is working on how IP is impacted in an AI world… William Carbone is an AI expert, former IBMer, and now a seasoned entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in aerospace, quantum computing, and AI.At IBM, William's main focus was to identify opportunities, driving business & technology strategies and roadmap for the industries worldwide. He led the Business Development for IBM's Global Automotive, Aerospace & Defense industries. Currently, William is the CEO and co-founder of Evalify, a flagship venture under Nobody Studios, and the CEO and co-founder of The Adjacent Possible. He also serves as the Program Director for the Master in AI at the Rome Business School (RBS) and advises the European Commission as a senior consultant. From creating an innovation studio to developing cutting-edge tools for intellectual property assessment, His work spans Quantum, Spacetech, AI, and various domains.In this episode hosted by Barry O'Reilly, William discusses his journey, including his transition from corporate life and the transformative experiences that shaped his entrepreneurial path. He delves into the practical aspects of innovation and intellectual property, offering advice on navigating these complex areas. This episode is packed with insights for anyone looking to improve their approach to entrepreneurship and understand the value of mental health in the process.Key Takeaways from the episode include:Entrepreneurial Journey: The transition from corporate life to entrepreneurship involves significant rewiring of the brain and requires navigating uncharted territories with curiosity and resilience.Parallels with Music: William's self-taught journey as a pianist highlights the importance of playfulness and self-expression, which he parallels with the creative process in entrepreneurship.Innovation and IP Assessment: William discusses the development of a tool that evaluates the patentability and intellectual property risks of startup ideas, providing investors with quick and affordable insights.Unlearning Traditional Methods: The necessity of unlearning conventional approaches to intellectual property and embracing new technologies and methodologies to stay competitive.Mental Health for Founders: The critical importance of mental health for entrepreneurs, with William sharing his experience of attending a silent meditation retreat to find clarity and balance.Future of Intellectual Property: The potential of AI and advanced tools to democratize access to intellectual property insights, helping entrepreneurs and investors make better-informed decisions.Additional Insights:Leadership and Innovation: This episode emphasizes the role of leadership in fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration within startups.Role of AI in IP: The discussion involves the advancements in AI that have made tools like E-Verify possible, highlighting the transformative potential of these technologies in the intellectual property space.Practical Applications: This episode provides insights about real-world examples of how the IP assessment tool has helped investors make quicker and more informed decisions, reducing the risk and enhancing the potential for successful investments.Episode...

On this Featured Guest episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey is joined by Sandy Bird, Co-Founder and CTO of Sonrai Security. The two discuss the current state of cloud permissions security, and Sandy details the company's breakthrough Cloud Permissions Firewall which promises fast and scalable cloud least privilege all with one click. Corey and Sandy also talk about bunk AWS tools in this space, the insanely high “zombie” population in the cloud, and how Sonrai works for companies of all sizes.Highlights:(00:00) Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn(00:50) Sponsored Ad(01:32) Exploring Sonrai Security's Mission and Challenges(03:38) Introducing the Cloud Permissions Firewall Concept(05:59) Comparing Cloud Providers' Permissions Models(09:49) Sponsored Ad(10:12) Addressing the Zombie Identity Problem(16:44) Scaling Solutions for Different Company Sizes(20:10) Navigating Cloud Security Challenges(23:38) Innovative Approaches to Permission Management(25:27) Optimizing Permission Requests with Statistics(27:04) Improving Cloud Security with Permissions on Demand(35:15) Concluding Thoughts and ContactAbout Sandy: Sandy Bird is the co-founder and CTO of Sonrai Security, helping enterprises protect their data by securing cloud identities and access. Sandy was the co-founder and CTO of Q1 Labs, which was acquired by IBM in 2011. At IBM, Sandy became the CTO for the global security business and worked closely with research, development, marketing and sales to develop new and innovative solutions to help the IBM Security business grow to ~$2B in annual revenue. He is a trusted and experienced cloud security expert.Links referenced: Sonrai Security Website:  https://sonrai.co/screaming-cloud Free 14-Day Trial:  https://sonrai.co/screaming-trialSandy's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-bird-835b5576/* Sponsor Sonrai Security: https://sonrai.co/screaming-cloud 

As an amateur boxer, Raul was giving hits to the face, How did Raul's career fall into place? In law school, he interned at JP Morgan Chase, At IBM, it's tech transactions he's embraced!

Andy Binns joins again! He works with CEOs, boards, and senior teams as they lead significant business change. He manages Change Logic, a firm he co-founded with Harvard Business School's Michael Tushman and Stanford's Charles O'Reilly. With twenty-five years of experience as both an external and internal consultant, he also held positions with McKinsey & Co. and the IBM Corporation before co-founding Change Logic.At IBM, Andy was deeply involved in the ‘Emerging Business Opportunity' program, for which he received an award from IBM's Vice-Chairman. That experience deeply influenced his belief that corporates can outpace startups at innovation and shaped his work on Corporate Explorers- a breed of managers who have the capability to build new ventures from inside established organizations. Drawing on nearly twenty years of research and work with these innovators, he wrote the books “Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game (2022)” and “Corporate Explorer Fieldbook: How to Build New Ventures in Established Companies,”Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/success-made-to-last-legends--4302039/support.

Andy Binns joins again! He works with CEOs, boards, and senior teams as they lead significant business change. He manages Change Logic, a firm he co-founded with Harvard Business School's Michael Tushman and Stanford's Charles O'Reilly. With twenty-five years of experience as both an external and internal consultant, he also held positions with McKinsey & Co. and the IBM Corporation before co-founding Change Logic.At IBM, Andy was deeply involved in the ‘Emerging Business Opportunity' program, for which he received an award from IBM's Vice-Chairman. That experience deeply influenced his belief that corporates can outpace startups at innovation and shaped his work on Corporate Explorers- a breed of managers who have the capability to build new ventures from inside established organizations. Drawing on nearly twenty years of research and work with these innovators, he wrote the books “Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game (2022)” and “Corporate Explorer Fieldbook: How to Build New Ventures in Established Companies,”

Join co-hosts Richard Coyne & Bill Zahller as they interview guests who left successful careers to pursue a different path on the Road Less Traveled Show! In this episode, we spend time with Joseph McElroy!  Joseph is a technologist, artist, poet, and hotelier!  Joseph spent time at IBM and lead the development of internet gateways that allowed traffic to flow over IBM's proprietary networks!  Joseph went on to have a long career in tech and marketing working with some of the biggest brands in the world.  Now Joseph has his own consulting company and has purchased his childhood home which is a motel in the Smokey Mountains!  Joseph is growing revenue at that motel as he has done for many of his clients!   A bit more about Joseph: Joseph McElroy is a technology, marketing, hospitality, and search engine optimization expert who understands it takes much more than “words” to enhance a brand. It takes wise words and wise content. Joseph possesses the depth that allows him to live and breathe a brand and realizes the emotional and psychological elements of marketing. Joseph's experience with big-data tools, AI, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy and implementation, and wise content development have brought him in contact with some of the top brands in the world. Joseph is a graduate of Computer Science and Economics from Duke University, which he attended on a full mathematics scholarship won via a national competition. Joseph was a former team leader at IBM. At IBM he led the development of Internet Gateways that allowed Internet traffic to flow over IBM's proprietary networks worldwide. While at IBM, he won IBM Division Award for Technical Excellence. Joseph became an entrepreneur and marketer after his time at IBM and was part of the original dot-com boom and bust, where he raised millions of dollars and successfully brought the startup to profitability. He became an expert in SEO and led many SEO efforts for companies ranging from startups to international companies like Welada. Joseph recently had a large team helping Marriott International generate worldwide search engine traffic. Joseph's experience with Marriott, Hilton, and Wyndham helped him purchase his childhood home, a 1950s roadside motel in the Smoky Mountains called the Meadowlark Motel that has a Restaurant and Bar. Now critically acclaimed he is busy building a hospitality brand based upon Memorable Tourism and Food experiences. Joseph is a museum-recognized artist and cultural supporter. He has performed internationally in acclaimed performance artwork and has had his poetry published on the Jumbotron in Times Square. From the magazine "Open" - "The McElroys kick open the doors of old business models and capitalize on what they believe."   Contact Joseph! Email: joseph@galileotechmedia.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/josephmcelroy/ Website: galileotechmedia.com   Contact Bill Zahller Phone: 828-275-5035 Email: Bill@ParkCapitalPartnersLLC.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/billzahller   Contact Richard Coyne Phone: 404-245-9732 Email: Richard@ParkCapitalPartnersLLC.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/richardjcoyne   If you would like to learn more about: How Park Capital Partners connects investors with passive income-generating opportunities through real estate, Our Park Capital Value-Add Fund (a 506c fund), Our latest multifamily acquisitions, or The Park Capital Partners Foundation, Inc. (a 501(c)3 non-profit).   Please contact Park Capital Partners LLC in the following ways:  Website: ParkCapitalPartnersLLC.com Email us: info@ParkCapitalPartnersLLC.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ParkCapitalPartners/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/park-capital-partners-llc/   Music by Aliaksei Yukhnevich/Jamendo. Audio and Video Production by Kerry Webb of KLAW Machine Media.   If you would like to be a guest on our show and have a “path change” story, please reach out to Richard at Richard@ParkCapitalPartnersLLC.com.  We would love to chat with you!    

EP 193 Vivek Bajaj About Meeting Again After 11 Years, His Life Lessons, Cultural Differences Between India, US and Europe And So Much More | What's On Your Mind? Personal Development, mindset & selling are on my mind all the time. My name is Peter and I created a weekly Podcast called What is on YOUR mind. Learn from my entrepreneurial guests how they overcame challenges, growth, failure and massive success. Today, this is Vivek Bajaj. Vivek has spent the vast majority of his adult life living and working across countries/cultures and this fuels his passion in business as well.  He moved from India to Europe when he was 21. And he has been at the junction of Financial Services and advanced technologies working directly with C-suite executives to enable business transformation. Prior to joining RMS, Vivek was Global VP for IBM's AI Financial Services unit. Vivek is now proud to lead the Continental Europe and Asia-Pacific Business for RMS. At IBM, 11 years ago our paths split and today you are the witness of reconnecting again. I started the recording immediately, so the energy you will hear and see is the fresh and reconnection energy of the two persons meeting after 11 years which feels like yesterday. I asked Vivek as he has been writing his life lessons every year on his birthday on Facebook. And as some of those lessons are quite deep, which showed another side of Vivek.Amazing conversation of two different men with different upbringings searching for the same 'thing' in life !For online recording, I use Riverside.fm to record high quality audio and video. I have been using Riverside.fm for more than 1 year as I was not happy about the audio quality of Zoom. Next to this, I also wanted to do something more with the video than just 2 faces next to each other. Check out Riverside.fm on https://riverside.fm/?utm_campaign=campaign_2&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=rewardful&via=peter-snauwaert Music: Intro Peter Snauwaert (Copyright) Voice-over: Stemmig by Sara Fiems Let's connect: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petersnauwaert Twitter: @petersnauwaert Instagram: @ps_grow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PSGROW E-mail: peter@psgrow.com Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Part 2 is now out!Let's continue the conversation with expert Paul Zikopoulos, the Vice President of IBM Skills Vitality and Enablement to explore AI fundamentals, job elimination or creation, using the cloud for storage, and the future of AI.Paul is an award-winning professional writer & speaker who's been consulted on AI & Big Data by the popular TV show “60 Minutes”. Paul's been named to dozens of global Experts to Follow & Influencers lists, including Analytics Insight's Top 100 Global AI & Big Data Influencers. Paul's written 21 books - including The AI Ladder, Cloud without Compromise, and 3 ‘for Dummies' titles - and over 360 articles during his accidental 28-year career as a data nerd. At IBM, Paul leads from the front, helping to shape the strategic direction in a ‘tech years are like dog years' world for the IBM Technology Unit's (all IBM software & hardware) sales, tech sales, and partner ecosystem learning journeys and upskilling programs.Paul actively supports Women in Technology and is a seated board member for Women 2.0 - now called Switch which he became involved with after his tweet was mentioned on the TV show, The View. He's the only and first male to win IBM Canada's Women in Technology Ally of the Year award, and is at the forefront of general workplace inclusivity, completing an intensive D&I certificate at Cornell University. Lastly, Paul is a seated board member of Coding for Veterans and sits on the world-recognized Masters of Management Analytics & AI program boards at Canada's prestigious Queen's University.Conquer Local is presented by Vendasta. We have proudly served 5.5+ million local businesses through 60,000+ channel partners, agencies, and enterprise-level organizations. Learn more about Vendasta, and we can help your organization or learn more about Vendasta's Affiliate Program and how our listeners (like yourself) make up to $10,000 off referrals.Are you an entrepreneur, salesperson, or marketer? Then, keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

Everyone's biggest buzzword right now is Artificial Intelligence, but what is it really, and what does the future hold for AI?Let's find out in our 2-part episode as George Leith chats with expert Paul Zikopoulos, the Vice President of IBM Skills Vitality and Enablement to discuss fundamentals, ethics, and the future of AI.Paul is an award-winning professional writer & speaker who's been consulted on AI & Big Data by the popular TV show “60 Minutes”. Paul's been named to dozens of global Experts to Follow & Influencers lists, including Analytics Insight's Top 100 Global AI & Big Data Influencers. Paul's written 21 books - including The AI Ladder, Cloud without Compromise, and 3 ‘for Dummies' titles - and over 360 articles during his accidental 28-year career as a data nerd. At IBM, Paul leads from the front, helping to shape the strategic direction in a ‘tech years are like dog years' world for the IBM Technology Unit's (all IBM software & hardware) sales, tech sales, and partner ecosystem learning journeys and upskilling programs.Paul actively supports Women in Technology and is a seated board member for Women 2.0 - now called Switch which he became involved with after his tweet was mentioned on the TV show, The View. He's the only and first male to win IBM Canada's Women in Technology Ally of the Year award, and is at the forefront of general workplace inclusivity, completing an intensive D&I certificate at Cornell University. Lastly, Paul is a seated board member of Coding for Veterans and sits on the world-recognized Masters of Management Analytics & AI program boards at Canada's prestigious Queen's University.Conquer Local is presented by Vendasta. We have proudly served 5.5+ million local businesses through 60,000+ channel partners, agencies, and enterprise-level organizations. Learn more about Vendasta, and we can help your organization or learn more about Vendasta's Affiliate Program and how our listeners (like yourself) make up to $10,000 off referrals.Are you an entrepreneur, salesperson, or marketer? Then, keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

Overview Today's guest is Dipti Borkar, Vice President and General Manager, SaaS, Azure Databases at Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dipti was the Founder and Creator of Ahana, a cloud managed service. Dipit has vast experience working in startups such as Counchbase, and Marklogic, and began her career working as a software engineer for IBM. In today's episode, Dipti shares how Databases have evolved over the past 15 years, her predictions for the future of technology and provides actionable advice for those looking to start a career in technology. About Dipti Borkar Dipti is a senior technology executive and entrepreneur with over 18 years of experience in cloud, open source and distributed data / database tech including relational, NoSQL, and federated systems. Dipti is the Vice President & General Manager at Azure Data, Microsoft where she leads product and engineering teams to make cloud databases simple and smart. She founded Ahana and created a cloud managed service for SQL on data lakes where she played many roles including Chief Product Officer and VP of Cloud / Open source engineering. Prior to Ahana, she held various different executive roles at Alluxio, Couchbase and IBM. At Couchbase she held several leadership positions over the years leading and building out the product, engineering and world-wide solutions engineering teams. At IBM, Dipti managed large world-wide dev teams for DB2 Distributed where she also started her career as a software engineer in the DB2 LUW kernel. She also served as Chairperson of the Linux Foundation / Presto Foundation community for many years. Dipti holds a MS in Computer Science from UC San Diego with a specialization in databases and holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. She is very passionate about empowering and mentoring women in tech and open source. Learn more about our mission and become a member here: https://www.womenindata.org/ All Data Bytes listeners get 20% off of WiD membership by using the code: DATABYTES20 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/women-in-data/support

Jane Creswell is an innovator and leader in the field of corporate coaching. She leveraged 17 years of product development and management experience at IBM to invent the role of “Organization Coach” and become the founder of IBM Coaches Network. At IBM, she focused her organization on achieving extraordinary results by individual coaching of the leaders at all levels of the organization.     Currently, Ms. Creswell is utilizing those experiences to help corporations worldwide wanting to establish a long-term, self-sustaining system of internal coaching and reap the benefits of a coaching culture. Her focus is on helping leaders make the high-impact transition from merely influencing others to developing excellent leaders who develop excellent leaders. Her work can be characterized as maximizing the strengths and knowledge of individuals for the benefit of both the person and the organization.    Jane has authored 3 books, including The Complete Idiot's Guide- Coaching for Excellence, and Christ-Centered Coaching: 7 Benefits for Ministry Leaders, and God Nods (co-authored with Joey Faucette). Jane was the inaugural recipient of the Thomas Leonard Achievement Award granted by the ICF Midwest Conference in June 2014 for her impact throughout the coaching industry for over 20 years.   In this episode, Jane shares with Courtney and Missie:  How she transitioned from coding at IBM to becoming the first Organization Coach at IMB and founding the IBM Coaches Network How she views herself as a missionary to the corporate world What Christ-centered coaching is and how it differs from Christian counseling Why it's important for women in particular to receive professional coaching Trends she sees in the areas of work or life that women seek coaching in How she actually helps women move forward through coaching How to step forward with confidence in your unique gifts and strengths   Resources Mentioned: God Nods: Discover the Greatest Treasure at Work The Complete Idiot's Guide to Coaching for Excellence Christ-Centered Coaching: 7 Benefits for Ministry Leaders Patterns of High Performance: Discovering the Ways People Work Best  By Jerry L. Fletcher  

Picture two cafes that serve precisely the same coffee. The first cafe has friendly baristas, comfortable seating, free WIFI, and great music. In the second cafe, the employees are bored, the music is bad, and the WIFI is slow. Most of us would choose the first one. This is because our experience of a product goes far beyond the product itself - it's closely linked to the services that deliver it and how companies and customers co-create the value of that service. These are a few of the fundamental insights of service science, an approach to service innovation co-created by today's guest – Jim Spohrer. In this episode, Dart and Jim discuss how service science can help us deliver a better experience of work. They provide examples of how service science has changed the work landscape as we know it, how service science leads to innovation, how AI will influence our experience of work in the near future, and much more.Topics Include: - Understanding service science- The future of employee/employer engagements in our changing economy - International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP)- The biggest service innovations in history- Ethical concerns of artificial intelligence- Digital twins, and how they'll affect employees- Servant leadership- And other topics…Jim Spohrer is the co-creator of service science and open-source, trusted AI. He is a retired IBM executive and is a member of the Board of Directors of the non-profit International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP). At IBM, he served as Director for Open Source AI/Data, Global University Programs, IBM Almaden Service Research, and CTO IBM Venture Capital Relations Group. At Apple, he achieved Distinguished Engineer Scientist Technologist (DEST) for authoring and learning platforms. After MIT (BS/Physics), he developed speech recognition systems at Verbex (Exxon), then Yale (PhD/Computer Science AI). With over ninety publications and nine patents, awards include AMA ServSIG Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions to the Service Discipline, Evert Gummesson Service Research, Vargo-Lusch Service-Dominant Logic, Daniel Berg Service Systems, and PICMET Fellow for advancing service science. In 2021, Jim was appointed a UIDP Senior Fellow (University-Industry Demonstration Partnership).Resources Mentioned:Succeeding through service innovation: A service perspective for education, research, business and government https://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/uploads/Resources/080428cambridge_ssme_whitepaper.pdfBooks Mentioned:-Service in the AI Era, by Jim Spohrer: https://www.amazon.com/Service-AI-Era-Architecture-Perspectives-ebook/dp/B0B2H87LFS-Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright: https://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-Logic-Destiny-Robert-Wright/dp/0679758941-If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes, by Nick Donofrio: https://www.amazon.com/If-Nothing-Changes-Donofrio-Story-ebook/dp/B0B178D91G-The One Minute Manager by, Kenneth Blanchard: https://www.amazon.com/Minute-Manager-Kenneth-Blanchard-Ph-D/dp/074350917X-Breakthrough: A Growth Revolution, by Martin Fleming: https://www.amazon.com/Breakthrough-Growth-Revolution-Martin-Fleming/dp/1637423098

Jonathan Adashek is the Chief Communications Officer and Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications at IBM. Before joining IBM, Jonathan was at Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance in Paris, as well as Nissan Motor Co. in Yokohama, Japan, and prior to that had stints at Microsoft and Edelman.  One of Jonathan's first roles was as a special assistant at the White House before becoming director of the national delegate strategy for the John Kerry presidential campaign. At IBM, Jonathan leads a team of 800+ professionals in more than 170 countries with responsibility for IBM's global communications, corporate citizenship, and CSR, as well as strategic events and social media. Without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with IBM CCO and SVP of Marketing and Communications Jonathan Adashek.  Here are some key takeaways from this conversation with Jonathan.  Simplify your message. As a company, IBM has thousands of products, services, and solutions, and prior to Jonathan coming on board, there was an overwhelming amount of different marketing and communications campaigns for these different products. This caused confusion among the general public over what IBM really stood for as a brand. One of Jonathan's first orders of business was to significantly simplify IBM's message into one slogan: “Let's Create.” A brand can only get so much attention which is why it's important not to diffuse your brand's message across a number of separate campaigns. Furthermore, emotional statements like “Let's Create” can transcend product features and benefits and get to the heart of your company's real mission, which is way more effective than focusing on the products.  Admit failure early & honestly. Jonathan mentioned committing an epic failure at IBM recently. Instead of blaming someone else, shirking behind it, or attempting some sort of internal coverup, he sent out an all-employee message outlining what had happened while owning up to it. He claimed the experience was more cathartic than scary and set a standard for radical honesty at the company that was unprecedented. Embracing humanity on an executive level with this kind of honesty is the foundation for creating extremely healthy and effective company cultures.  Be client zero; practice what you preach. All products and tech solutions conceived of and created by IBM must be used internally as a standard for their creation. Jonathan states that clients and customers will not stand by any other standard. By being client zero, IBM is able to only create products and solutions that they stand by after a lot of trial and error. This ensures a level of trust with customers that simply cannot be bought. Thanks for listening, don't forget to subscribe! ----- Produced by https://podcastlaunch.pro (Simpler Media)

Tony O'Driscoll is a professor, speaker, author, and advisor whose engaging message emphasizes that the key digital-age differentiator is not technology, but people.Tony has spent the bulk of his professional and academic career at the nexus of Business, Innovation, Technology, Change and Learning, creating and implementing strategies that enable organizations to realize the full potential of their most valuable asset: Human Beings.His current appointments as Adjunct Professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the Pratt School of Engineering coupled with his role as Research Fellow at Duke Corporate Education afford him the unique opportunity to apply cutting-edge academic research to address increasingly complex business challenges.During his 18-year corporate career, Tony held several strategic leadership positions. At Duke Corporate Education, he launched the company's Asian operation and led innovation at CE Labs.  At IBM, he was a founding member of IBM Global Service's Strategy and Change consulting practice where he consulted at the highest level with business executives on creating competitive advantage in increasingly complex environments. He also served as a member IBM's Almaden Services Research Group where he investigated the changing roles of leadership, innovation, and collaboration as enterprises become more global, virtual, open and digitally mediated. At both IBM and Nortel Networks, Tony had strategic responsibility for crafting and implementing enterprise-level learning, transformation, and human performance improvement strategies. A frequently invited speaker at both corporate and academic conferences. He has been a keynote speaker, workshop leader, moderator, speaker and panelist at over 130 national and international conferences. He has also provided expert analysis and interviews to media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Wired Magazine, The Financial Times, India Today, Chief Learning Officer Magazine, Training Magazine and for industry analysts such as Gartner and Forrester.Tony has authored and co-authored articles for business periodicals such as Harvard Business Review, The Financial Times, Strategy and Business, and Dialogue and writes a column for Training Magazine.  He has also published two books on Learning and Organization Performance: Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration, and Achieving Desired Business Performance. His new book, Everyday Superhero, proposes a revolutionary People-Centered Transformation (PCT) approach to enable sustained and sustainable organization agility.He has contributed to science via publications in journals such as Management Information Sciences Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Performance Improvement Quarterly and the Journal of Product and Innovation Management. His current research and practice examines how rapidly emerging technologies are disrupting existing industry structures and business models. He specifically focuses on how to develop leadership systems that enable organizations to adapt and evolve in increasingly unpredictable and turbulent business environments.Along with his teaching, research and formal speaking engagements, Dr. O'Driscoll maintains an active consulting practice.  His client list includes Fortune 500 companies across a broad range of industries including High-Technology, Banking, Biotechnology, Software Development, Gaming, Energy, Retail and Professional Services. Dr. O'Driscoll holds an Ed.D. in Organization Learning and an M.S. in Management from North Carolina State University.  His B.S. in Electrical Engineering is from Virginia Tech. 

About BenjaminBenjamin Anderson is CTO, Cloud at EDB, where he is responsible for developing and driving strategy for the company's Postgres-based cloud offerings. Ben brings over ten years' experience building and running distributed database systems in the cloud for multiple startups and large enterprises. Prior to EDB, he served as chief architect of IBM's Cloud Databases organization, built an SRE practice at database startup Cloudant, and founded a Y Combinator-funded hardware startup.Links Referenced: EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com/ BigAnimal: biganimal.com 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.I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Fortinet. Fortinet's partnership with AWS is a better-together combination that ensures your workloads on AWS are protected by best-in-class security solutions powered by comprehensive threat intelligence and more than 20 years of cybersecurity experience. Integrations with key AWS services simplify security management, ensure full visibility across environments, and provide broad protection across your workloads and applications. Visit them at AWS re:Inforce to see the latest trends in cybersecurity on July 25-26 at the Boston Convention Center. Just go over to the Fortinet booth and tell them Corey Quinn sent you and watch for the flinch. My thanks again to my friends at Fortinet.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at EDB. And not only do they bring us this promoted episode, they bring me their CTO for Cloud, Benjamin Anderson. Benjamin, thank you so much for agreeing to suffer the slings and arrows that I will no doubt throw at you in a professional context, because EDB is a database company, and I suck at those things.Benjamin: [laugh]. Thanks, Corey. Nice to be here.Corey: Of course. So, databases are an interesting and varied space. I think we can all agree—or agree to disagree—that the best database is, of course, Route 53, when you misuse TXT records as a database. Everything else is generally vying for number two. EDB was—back in the days that I was your customer—was EnterpriseDB, now rebranded as EDB, which is way faster to say, and I approve of that.But you were always the escalation point of last resort. When you're stuck with a really weird and interesting Postgres problem, EDB was where you went because if you folks couldn't solve the problem, it was likely not going to get solved. I always contextualized you folks as a consulting shop. That's not really what you do. You are the CTO for Cloud.And, ah, interesting. Do databases behave differently in cloud environments? Well, they do when you host them as a managed service, which is an area you folks have somewhat recently branched into. How'd you get there?Benjamin: Ah, that's interesting. So, there's a bunch of stuff to unpack there. I think EDB has been around for a long time. It's something like 13, 14, 15 years, something like that, and really it's just been kind of slowly growing, right? We did start very much as a product company. We built some technology to help customers get from Oracle database on to Postgres, way back in 2007, 2008.That business has just slowly been growing. It's been going quite well. Frankly, I only joined about 18 months ago, and it's really cool tech, right? We natively understand some things that Oracle is doing. Customers don't have to change their schemas to migrate from Oracle to Postgres. There's some cool technology in there.But as you point out, I think a lot of our position in the market has not been that product focused. There's been a lot of people seeing us as the Postgres experts, and as people who can solve Postgres problems, in general. We have, for a long time, employed a lot of really sharp Postgres people. We still employ a lot of really sharp Postgres people. That's very much, in a lot of ways, our bread and butter. That we're going to fix Postgres problems as they come up.Now, over the past few years, we've definitely tried to shift quite a bit into being more of a product company. We've brought on a bunch of people who've been doing more enterprise software product type development over the past few years, and really focusing ourselves more and more on building products and investing in ourselves as a product company. We're not a services company. We're not a consulting company. We do, I think, provide the best Postgres support in the market. But it's been a journey. The cloud has been a significant part of that as well, right? You can't get away.Corey: Oh, yeah. These days, when someone's spinning up a new workload, it's unlikely—in most cases—they're going to wind up spinning up a new data center, if they don't already have one. Yes, there's still a whole bunch of on-prem workloads. But increasingly, the default has become cloud. Instead of, “Why cloud?” The question's become, “Why not?”Benjamin: Right, exactly. Then, as people are more and more accepting of managed services, you have to be a product company. You have to be building products in order to support your database customers because what they want his managed services. I was working in managed databases and service, something like, ten years ago, and it was like pulling teeth. This is after RDS launched. This was still pulling teeth trying to get people to think about, oh, I'm going to let you run my database. Whereas, now obviously, it's just completely different. We have to build great products in order to succeed in the database business, in general.Corey: One thing that jumped out at me when you first announced this was the URL is enterprisedb.com. That doesn't exactly speak to, you know, non-large companies, and EDB is what you do. You have a very corporate logo, but your managed service is called BigAnimal, which I absolutely love. It actually expresses a sense of whimsy and personality that I can no doubt guess that a whole bunch of people argued against, but BigAnimal, it is. It won through. I love that. Was that as contentious as I'm painting it to be, or people actually have a sense of humor sometimes?Benjamin: [laugh]. Both, it was extremely contentious. I, frankly, was one of the people who was not in favor of it at first. I was in favor of something that was whimsical, but maybe not quite that whimsical.Corey: Well, I call it Postgres-squeal, so let's be very clear here that we're probably not going to see eye-to-eye on most anything in pronunciation things. But we can set those differences aside and have a conversation.Benjamin: Absolutely, no consider that. It was deliberate, though, to try to step away a little bit from the blue-suit-and-tie, enterprise, DB-type branding. Obviously, a lot of our customers are big enterprises. We're good at that. We're not trying to be the hip, young startup targeting business in a lot of ways. We have a wide range of customers, but we want to branch out a little bit.Corey: One of the challenges right now is if I spin up an environment inside of AWS, as one does, and I decide I certainly don't want to take the traditional approach of running a database on top of an EC2 instance—the way that we did in the olden days—because RDS was crappy. Now that it's slightly less crappy, that becomes a not ideal path. I start looking at their managed database offerings, and there are something like 15 distinct managed databases that they offer, and they never turn anything off. And they continue to launch things into the far future. And it really feels, on some level, like 20 years from now—what we call a DBA today—their primary role is going to look a lot more like helping a company figure out which of Amazon's 40 managed databases is the appropriate fit for this given workload. Yet, when I look around at what the industry has done, it seems that when we're talking about relational databases. Postgres has emerged back when I was, more or less, abusing servers in person in my data center days, it was always MySQL. These days, Postgres is the de facto standard, full stop. I admit that I was mostly keeping my aura away from any data that was irreplaceable at that time. What happened? What did I miss?Benjamin: It's a really good question. And I certainly am not a hundred percent on all the trends that went on there. I know there's a lot of folks that are not happy about the MySQL acquisition by Oracle. I think there's a lot of energy that was adopted by the NoSQL movement, as well. You have people who didn't really care about transactional semantics that were using MySQL because they needed a place to store their data. And then, things like MongoDB and that type of system comes along where it's significantly easier than MySQL, and that subset of the population just sort of drifts away from MySQL.Corey: And in turn, those NoSQL projects eventually turn into something where, okay, now we're trying to build a banking system on top of it, and it's, you know, I guess you can use a torque wrench as a hammer if you're really creative about it, but it seems like there's a better approach.Benjamin: Yeah, exactly. And those folks are coming back around to the relational databases, exactly. At the same time, the advancements in Postgres from the early eight series to today are significant, right? We shouldn't underestimate how much Postgres has really moved forward. It wasn't that long ago that replication was hardly a thing and Postgres, right? It's been a journey.Corey: One thing that your website talks about is that you accelerate your open-sourced database transformation. And this is a bit of a hobby horse I get on from time to time. I think that there are a lot of misunderstandings when people talk about this. You have the open-source purists—of which I shamefully admit I used to be one—saying that, “Oh, it's about the idea of purity and open and free as in software.” Great. Okay, awesome. But when I find that corporate customers are talking about when they say open-source database, they don't particularly care if they have access to the source code because they're not going to go in and patch a database engine, we hope. But what they do care about is regardless of where they are today—even if they're perfectly happy there—they don't want to wind up beholden to a commercial database provider, and/or they don't want to wind up beholden to the environment that is running within. There's a strategic Exodus that's available in theory, which on some level serves to make people feel better about not actually Exodus-ing, but it also means if they're doing a migration at some point, they don't also have to completely redo their entire data plan.Benjamin: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I mean, I like to talk—there's a big rat's nest of questions and problems in here—but I generally like talk to about open APIs, talk about standards, talk about how much is going to have to change if you eliminate this vendor. We're definitely not open-source purists. Well, we employ a lot of open-source purists. I also used to be an open—Corey: Don't let them hear you say that, then. Fair enough. Fair enough.Benjamin: [laugh] we have proprietary software at EDB, as well. There's a kind of wide range of businesses that we participate in. Glad to hear you also mention this where-it's-hosted angle, as well. I think there's some degree to which people are—they figured out that having at least open APIs or an open-source-ish database is a good idea rather than being beholden to proprietary database. But then, immediately forget that when they're picking a cloud vendor, right? And realizing that putting their data in Cloud Vendor A versus Cloud Vendor B is also putting them in a similar difficult situation. They need to be really wary of when they're doing that. Now, obviously, I work at an independent software company, and I have some incentive to say this, but I do think it's true. And you know, there's meaningful data gravity risk.Corey: I assure you, I have no incentive. I don't care what cloud provider you're on. My guidance has been, for years, to—as a general rule—pick a provider, I care about which one, and go all in until there's a significant reason to switch. Trying to build an optionality, “Oh, everything we do should be fully portable at an instance notice.” Great. Unless you're actually doing it, you're more or less, giving up a whole bunch of shortcuts and feature velocity you could otherwise have, in the hopes of one day you'll do a thing, but all the assumptions you're surrounded by baked themselves in regardless. So, you're more or less just creating extra work for yourself for no defined benefit. This is not popular in some circles, where people try to sell something that requires someone to go multi-cloud, but here we are.Benjamin: No, I think you're right. I think people underestimate the degree to which the abstractions are just not very good, right, and the degree to which those cloud-specific details are going to leak in if you're going to try to get anything done, you end up in kind of a difficult place. What I see more frequently is situations where we have a big enterprise—not even big, even medium-sized companies where maybe they've done an acquisition or two, they've got business units that are trying to do things on their own. And they end up in two or three clouds, sort of by happenstance. It's not like they're trying to do replication live between two clouds, but they've got one business unit in AWS and one business unit and Azure, and somebody in the corporate—say enterprise architect or something like that—really would like to make things consistent between the two so they get a consistent security posture and things like that. So, there are situations where the multi-cloud is a reality at a certain level, but maybe not at a concrete technical level. But I think it's still really useful for a lot of customers.Corey: You position your cloud offering in two different ways. One of them is the idea of BigAnimal, and the other—well, it sort of harkens back to when I was in sixth grade going through the American public school system. They had a cop come in and talk to us and paint to this imaginary story of people trying to push drugs. “Hey, kid. You want to try some of this?” And I'm reading this and it says EDB, Postgres for Kubernetes. And I'm sent back there, where it's like, “Hey, kid. You want to run your stateful databases on top of Kubernetes?” And my default answer to that is good lord, no. What am I missing?Benjamin: That's a good question. Kubernetes has come a long way—I think is part of that.Corey: Oh, truly. I used to think of containers as a pure story for stateless things. And then, of course, I put state into them, and then, everything exploded everywhere because it turns out, I'm bad at computers. Great. And it has come a long way. I have been tracking a lot of that. But it still feels like the idea being that you'd want to have your database endpoints somewhere a lot less, I guess I'll call it fickle, if that makes sense.Benjamin: It's an interesting problem because we are seeing a lot of people who are interested in our Kubernetes-based products. It's actually based on—we recently open-sourced the core of it under a project called cloud-native PG. It's a cool piece of technology. If you think about sort of two by two. In one corner, you've got self-managed on-premise databases. So, you're very, very slow-moving, big-iron type, old-school database deployments. And on the opposite corner, you've got fully-managed, in the cloud, BigAnimal, Amazon RDS, that type of thing. There's a place on that map where you've got customers that want a self-service type experience. Whether that's for production, or maybe it's even for dev tests, something like that. But you don't want to be giving the management capability off to a third party.For folks that want that type of experience, trying to build that themselves by, like, wiring up EC2 instances, or doing something in their own data center with VMware, or something like that, can be extremely difficult. Whereas if you've go to a Kubernetes-based product, you can get that type of self-service experience really easily, right? And customers can get a lot more flexibility out of how they run their databases and operate their databases. And what sort of control they give to, say application developers who want to spin up a new database for a test or for some sort of small microservice, that type of thing. Those types of workloads tend to work really well with this first-party Kubernetes-based offering. I've been doing databases on Kubernetes in managed services for a long time as well. And I don't, frankly, have any concerns about doing it. There are definitely some sharp edges. And if you wanted to do to-scale, you need to really know what you're doing with Kubernetes because the naive thing will shoot you in the foot.Corey: Oh, yes. So, some it feels almost like people want to cosplay working for Google, but they don't want to pass the technical interview along the way. It's a bit of a weird moment for it.Benjamin: Yeah, I would agree.Corey: I have to go back to my own experiences with using RDS back at my last real job before I went down this path. We were migrating from EC2-Classic to VPC. So, you could imagine what dates me reasonably effectively. And the big problem was the database. And the joy that we had was, “Okay, we have to quiesce the application.” So, the database is now quiet, stop writes, take a snapshot, restore that snapshot into the environment. And whenever we talk to AWS folks, it's like, “So, how long is this going to take?” And the answer was, “Guess.” And that was not exactly reassuring. It went off without a hitch because every migration has one problem. We were sideswiped in an Uber on the way home. But that's neither here nor there. This was two o'clock in the morning, and we finished in half the maintenance time we had allotted. But it was the fact that, well, guess we're going to have to take the database down for many hours with no real visibility, and we hope it'll be up by morning. That wasn't great. But that was the big one going on, on an ongoing basis, there were maintenance windows with a database. We just stopped databasing for a period of time during a fairly broad maintenance window. And that led to a whole lot of unfortunate associations in my mind with using relational databases for an awful lot of stuff. How do you handle maintenance windows and upgrading and not tearing down someone's application? Because I have to assume, “Oh, we just never patch anything. It turns out that's way easier,” is in fact, the wrong answer.Benjamin: Yeah, definitely. As you point out, there's a bunch of fundamental limitations here, if we start to talk about how Postgres actually fits together, right? Pretty much everybody in RDS is a little bit weird. The older RDS offerings are a little bit weird in terms of how they do replication. But most folks are using Postgres streaming replication, to do high availability, Postgres in managed services. And honestly, of course—Corey: That winds up failing over, or the application's aware of both endpoints and switches to the other one?Benjamin: Yeah—Corey: Sort of a database pooling connection or some sort of proxy?Benjamin: Right. There's a bunch of subtleties that get into their way. You say, well, did the [vit 00:16:16] failover too early, did the application try to connect and start making requests before the secondaries available? That sort of thing.Corey: Or you misconfigure it and point to the secondary, suddenly, when there's a switchover of some database, suddenly, nothing can write, it can only read, then you cause a massive outage on the weekend?Benjamin: Yeah. Yeah.Corey: That may have been of an actual story I made up.Benjamin: [laugh] yeah, you should use a managed service.Corey: Yeah.Benjamin: So, it's complicated, but even with managed services, you end up in situations where you have downtime, you have maintenance windows. And with Postgres, especially—and other databases as well—especially with Postgres, one of the biggest concerns you have is major version upgrades, right? So, if I want to go from Postgres 12 to 13, 13 to 14, I can't do that live. I can't have a single cluster that is streaming one Postgres version to another Postgres version, right?So, every year, people want to put things off for two years, three years sometimes—which is obviously not to their benefit—you have this maintenance, you have some sort of downtime, where you perform a Postgres upgrade. At EDB, we've got—so this is a big problem, this is a problem for us. We're involved in the Postgres community. We know this is challenging. That's just a well-known thing. Some of the folks that are working EDB are folks who worked on the Postgres logical replication tech, which arrived in Postgres 10. Logical replication is really a nice tool for doing things like change data capture, you can do Walter JSON, all these types of things are based on logical replication tech.It's not really a thing, at least, the code that's in Postgres itself doesn't really support high availability, though. It's not really something that you can use to build a leader-follower type cluster on top of. We have some techs, some proprietary tech within EDB that used to be called bi-directional replication. There used to be an open-source project called bi-directional replication. This is a kind of a descendant of that. It's now called Postgres Distributed, or EDB Postgres Distributed is the product name. And that tech actually allows us—because it's based on logical replication—allows us to do multiple major versions at the same time, right? So, we can upgrade one node in a cluster to Postgres 14, while the other nodes in the clusters are at Postgres 13. We can then upgrade the next node. We can support these types of operations in a kind of wide range of maintenance operations without taking a cluster down from maintenance.So, there's a lot of interesting opportunities here when we start to say, well, let's step back from what your typical assumptions are for Postgres streaming replication. Give ourselves a little bit more freedom by using logical replication instead of physical streaming replication. And then, what type of services, and what type of patterns can we build on top of that, that ultimately help customers build, whether it's faster databases, more highly available databases, so on and so forth.Corey: Let's face it, on-call firefighting at 2am is stressful! So there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that you probably can't prevent incidents from happening, but the good news is that incident.io makes incidents less stressful and a lot more valuable. incident.io is a Slack-native incident management platform that allows you to automate incident processes, focus on fixing the issues and learn from incident insights to improve site reliability and fix your vulnerabilities. Try incident.io, recover faster and sleep more.Corey: One approach that I took for, I guess you could call it backup sort of, was intentionally staggering replication between the primary and the replica about 15 minutes or so. So, if I drop a production table or something like that, I have 15 short minutes to realize what has happened and sever the replication before it is now committed to the replica and now I'm living in hell. It felt like this was not, like, option A, B, or C, or the right way to do things. But given that meeting customers where they are as important, is that the sort of thing that you support with BigAnimal, or do you try to talk customers into not being ridiculous?Benjamin: That's not something we support now. It's not actually something that I hear that many asks for these days. It's kind of interesting, that's a pattern that I've run into a lot in the past.Corey: I was an ancient, grumpy sysadmin. Again, I'm dating myself here. These days, I just store everything at DNS text records, and it's way easier. But I digress.Benjamin: [laugh] yeah, it's something that we see a lot for and we had support for a point-in-time restore, like pretty much anybody else in the business at this point. And that's usually the, “I fat-fingered something,” type response. Honestly, I think there's room to be a bit more flexible and room to do some more interesting things. I think RDS is setting a bar and a lot of database services out there and kind of just meeting that bar. And we all kind of need to be pushing a little bit more into more interesting spaces and figuring out how to get customers more value, get customers to get more out of their money for the database, honestly.Corey: One of the problems we tend to see, in the database ecosystem at large, without naming names or companies or anything like that, is that it's a pretty thin and blurry line between database advocate, database evangelist, and database zealot. Where it feels like instead, we're arguing about religion more than actual technical constraints and concerns. So, here's a fun question that hopefully isn't too much of a gotcha. But what sort of workloads would you actively advise someone not to use BigAnimal for in the database world? But yes, again, if you try to run a DNS server, it's probably not fit for purpose without at least a shim in the way there. But what sort of workloads are you not targeting that a customer is likely to have a relatively unfortunate time with?Benjamin: Large-scale analytical workloads is the easy answer to that, right? If you've got a problem where you're choosing between Postgres and Snowflake, you're seriously considering—you actually have as much data that you seriously be considering Snowflake? You probably don't want to be using Postgres, right? You want to be using something that's column, or you want to be using a query planner that really understands a columnar layout that's going to get you the sorts of performance that you need for those analytical workloads. We don't try to touch that space.Corey: Yeah, we're doing some of that right now with just the sheer volume of client AWS bills we have. We don't really need a relational model for a lot of it. And Athena is basically fallen down on the job in some cases, and, “Oh, do you want to use Redshift, that's basically Postgres.” It's like, “Yeah, it's Postgres, if it decided to run on bars of gold.” No, thank you. It just becomes this ridiculously overwrought solution for what feels like it should be a lot similar. So, it's weird, six months ago or so I wouldn't have had much of an idea what you're talking about. I see it a lot better now. Generally, by virtue of trying to do something the precise wrong way that someone should.Benjamin: Right. Yeah, exactly. I think there's interesting room for Postgres to expand here. It's not something that we're actively working on. I'm not aware of a lot happening in the community that Postgres is, for better or worse, extremely extensible, right? And if you see the JSON-supported Postgres, it didn't exist, I don't know, five, six years ago. And now it's incredibly powerful. It's incredibly flexible. And you can do a lot of quote-unquote, schemaless stuff straight in Postgres. Or you look at PostGIS, right, for doing GIS geographical data, right? That's really a fantastic integration directly in the database.Corey: Yeah, before that people start doing ridiculous things almost looks similar to a graph database or a columnar store somehow, and yeah.Benjamin: Yeah, exactly. I think sometimes somebody will do a good column store that's an open-source deeply integrated into Postgres, rather than—Corey: I've seen someone build one on top of S3 bucket with that head, a quarter of a trillion objects in it. Professional advice, don't do that.Benjamin: [laugh]. Unless you're Snowflake. So, I mean, it's something that I'd like to see Postgres expand into. I think that's an interesting space, but not something that, at least especially for BigAnimal, and frankly, for a lot of EDB customers. It's not something we're trying to push people toward.Corey: One thing that I think we are seeing a schism around is the idea that some vendors are one side of it, some are on the other, where on the one side, you have, oh, every workload should have a bespoke, purpose-built database that is exactly for this type of workload. And the other school of thought is you should generally buy us for a general-purpose database until you have a workload that is scaled and significant to a point where running that on its own purpose-built database begins to make sense. I don't necessarily think that is a binary choice, where do you tend to fall on that spectrum?Benjamin: I think everybody should use Postgres. And I say not just because I work in a Postgres company.Corey: Well, let's be clear. Before this, you were at IBM for five years working on a whole bunch of database stuff over there, not just Postgres. And you, so far, have not struck me as the kind of person who's like, “Oh, so what's your favorite database?” “The one that pays me.” We've met people like that, let's be very clear. But you seem very even-handed in those conversations.Benjamin: Yeah, I got my start in databases, actually, with Apache CouchDB. I am a committer on CouchDB. I worked on a managed at CouchDB service ten years ago. At IBM, I worked on something in nine different open-source databases and managed services. But I love having conversations about, like, well, I've got this workload, should I use Postgres, rr should I use Mongo, should I use Cassandra, all of those types of discussions. Frankly, though, I think in a lot of cases people are—they don't understand how much power they're missing out on if they don't choose a relational database. If they don't understand the relational model well enough to understand that they really actually want that. In a lot of cases, people are also just over-optimizing too early, right? It's just going to be much faster for them to get off the ground, get product in customers hands, if they start with something that they don't have to think twice about. And they don't end up with this architecture with 45 different databases, and there's only one guy in the company that knows how to manage the whole thing.Corey: Oh, the same story of picking a cloud provider. It's, “Okay, you hire a team, you're going to build a thing. Which cloud provider do you pick?” Every cloud provider has a whole matrix and sales deck, and the rest. The right answer, of course, is the one your team's already familiar with because learning a new cloud provider while trying not to run out of money at your startup, can't really doesn't work super well.Benjamin: Exactly. Yeah.Corey: One thing that I think has been sort of interesting, and when I saw it, it was one of those, “Oh, I sort of like them.” Because I had that instinctive reaction and I don't think I'm alone in this. As of this recording a couple of weeks ago, you folks received a sizable investment from private equity. And default reaction to that is, “Oh, well, I guess I put a fork in the company, they're done.” Because the narrative is that once private equity takes an investment, well, that company's best days are probably not in front of it. Now, the counterpoint is that this is not the first time private equity has invested in EDB, and you folks from what I can tell are significantly better than you were when I was your customer a decade ago. So clearly, there is something wrong with that mental model. What am I missing?Benjamin: Yeah. Frankly, I don't know. I'm no expert in funding models and all of those sorts of things. I will say that my experience has been what I've seen at EDB, has definitely been that maybe there's private equity, and then there's private equity. We're in this to build better products and become a better product company. We were previously owned by a private equity firm for the past four years or so. And during the course of those four years, we brought on a bunch of folks who were very product-focused, new leadership. We made a significant acquisition of a company called 2ndQuadrant, which they employed a lot of the European best Postgres company. Now, they're part of EDB and most of them have stayed with us. And we built the managed cloud service, right? So, this is a pretty significant—private equity company buying us to invest in the company. I'm optimistic that that's what we're looking at going forward.Corey: I want to be clear as well, I'm not worried about what I normally would be in a private equity story about this, where they're there to save money and cut costs, and, “Do we really need all these database replicas floating around,” and, “These backups, seems like that's something we don't need.” You have, at last count, 32 Postgres contributors, 7 Postgres committers, and 3 core members. All of whom would run away screaming loudly and publicly, in the event that such a thing were taking place. Of all the challenges and concerns I might have about someone running a cloud service in the modern day. I do not have any fear that you folks are not doing what will very clearly be shown to be the right thing by your customers for the technology that you're building on top of. That is not a concern. There are companies I do not have that confidence in, to be clear.Benjamin: Yeah, I'm glad to hear that. I'm a hundred percent on board as well. I work here, but I think we're doing the right thing, and we're going to be doing great stuff going forward.Corey: One last topic I do want to get into a little bit is, on some level, launching in this decade, a cloud-hosted database offering at a time when Amazon—whose product strategy of yes is in full display—it seems like something ridiculous, that is not necessarily well thought out that why would you ever try to do this? Now, I will temper that by the fact that you are clearly succeeding in this direction. You have customers who say nice things about you, and the reviews have been almost universally positive anywhere I can see things. The negative ones are largely complaining about databases, which I admit might be coming from me.Benjamin: Right, it is a crowded space. There's a lot of things happening. Obviously, Amazon, Microsoft, Google are doing great things, both—Corey: Terrible things, but great, yes. Yes.Benjamin: [laugh] right, there's good products coming in. I think AlloyDB is not necessarily a great product. I haven't used it myself yet, but it's an interesting step in the direction. I'm excited to see development happening. But at the end of the day, we're a database company. Our focus is on building great databases and supporting great databases. We're not entering this business to try to take on Amazon from an infrastructure point of view. In fact, the way that we're structuring the product is really to try to get the strengths of both worlds. We want to give customers the ability to get the most out of the AWS or Azure infrastructure that they can, but come to us for their database.Frankly, we know Postgres better than anybody else. We have a greater ability to get bugs fixed in Postgres than anybody else. We've got folks working on the database in the open. We got folks working on the database proprietary for us. So, we give customers things like break/fix support on that database. If there is a bug in Postgres, there's a bug in the tech that sits around Postgres. Because obviously, Postgres is not a batteries-included system, really. We're going to fix that for you. That's part of the contract that we're giving to our customers. And I know a lot of smaller companies maybe haven't been burned by this sort of thing very much. We start to talk about enterprise customers and medium, larger-scale customers, this starts to get really valuable. The ability to have assurance on top of your open-source product. So, I think there's a lot of interesting things there, a lot of value that we can provide there.I think also that I talked a little bit about this earlier, but like the box, this sort of RDS-shaped box, I think is a bit too small. There's an opportunity for smaller players to come in and try to push the boundaries of that. For example, giving customers more support by default to do a good job using their database. We have folks on board that can help consult with customers to say, “No, you shouldn't be designing your schemas that way. You should be designing your schemas this way. You should be using indexes here,” that sort of stuff. That's been part of our business for a long time. Now, with a managed service, we can bake that right into the managed service. And that gives us the ability to kind of make that—you talk about shared responsibility between the service writer and the customer—we can change the boundaries of that shared responsibility a little bit, so that customers can get more value out of the managed database service than they might expect otherwise.Corey: There aren't these harsh separations and clearly defined lines across which nothing shall pass, when it makes sense to do that in a controlled responsible way.Benjamin: Right, exactly. Some of that is because we're a database company, and some of that is because, frankly, we're much smaller.Corey: I'll take it a step further beyond that, as well, that I have seen this pattern evolve a number of times where you have a customer running databases on EC2, and their AWS account managers suggests move to RDS. So, they do. Then, move to Aurora. So, they do. Then, I move this to DynamoDB. At which point, it's like, what do you think your job is here, exactly? Because it seems like every time we move databases, you show up in a nicer car. So, what exactly is the story here, and what are the incentives? Where it just feels like there is a, “Whatever you're doing is not the way that it should be done. So, it's time to do, yet, another migration.”There's something to be said for companies who are focused around a specific aspect of things. Then once that is up and working and running, great. Keep on going. This is fine. As opposed to trying to chase the latest shiny, on some level. I have a big sense of, I guess, affinity for companies that wind up knowing where they start, and most notably, where they stop.Benjamin: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I don't think that we will be building an application platform anytime soon.Corey: “We're going to run Lambda functions on top of a database.” It's like, “Congratulations. That is the weirdest stored procedure I can imagine this week, but I'm sure we can come up with a worse one soon.”Benjamin: Exactly.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me so much about how you're thinking about this, and what you've been building over there. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to go to find you?Benjamin: biganimal.com.Corey: Excellent. We will throw a link to that in the show notes and it only just occurred to me that the Postgres mascot is an elephant, and now I understand why it's called BigAnimal. Yeah, that's right. He who laughs last, thinks slowest, and today, that's me. I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Benjamin: Thank you. I really appreciate it.Corey: Benjamin Anderson, CTO for Cloud at EDB. 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 you then wind up stuffing into a SQLite database, converting to Base64, and somehow stuffing into the comment field.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.

On this Podcast, Diana Paiva is joined by the director and co-founder of Change Logic and co-author of Corporate Explorer, Andrew Binns. Andrew gives an insight into his new book, Corporate Explorer and the highlights that readers can expect. He talks about the difference between large companies and start-up businesses, and he explained the importance of innovation in companies, even in those that are prospering. He also talks about the reasons companies go bankrupt. The importance of innovation in corporations Andrew Binns Diana is currently interning with Irish Tech News. She graduated from Birkbeck University, with a degree in modern languages and she is currently doing a master's in Journalism at the University of Roehampton. She has an interest in technology, fashion, and the environment. Starting her master's in journalism made her realise that she has a passion to report and write people's stories. After graduation, her main priority is to find a job in communications or public relations. Diana Paiva is active on social media platforms, including Twitter, and LinkedIn. About Andrew Binns Andy works with CEOs, boards, and senior teams as they lead significant business change. He is a co-founder of Change Logic and manages the firm on behalf of the partnership. Andy has twenty-five years of consulting experience as both an external and internal consultant for McKinsey & Co., the IBM Corporation, and Change Logic. At IBM, Andy was deeply involved in the ‘Emerging Business Opportunity' program, for which he received an award from IBM's Vice-Chairman. Looking forward to speaking with @Ulwick today about Corporate Explorer, my book with Charles O'Reilly and @MichaelTushman Andy Binns (@AJMBinns) May 25, 2022 Change Logic History Change Logic was founded in 2007 by Professors?Michael Tushman ?(Harvard Business School) and Charles O'Reilly ?(Stanford Graduate School of Business),? Andrew Binns?(Managing Principal), and Peter Finkelstein, M.D. (director emeritus). The firm was born from our shared experience helping leaders and organizations adapt to a changing world. We created the firm because we believe we have a unique perspective on what it takes to do this well, one that combines the best in strategic and organizational thinking with an ability to apply it with real people working in businesses around the globe. Our foundational experiences were at IBM, working to build the Emerging Business Opportunity program from 2000-2008 and the IBM Strategic Leadership Forum, an innovative approach to agile strategy formulation. At its core was the Business Leadership Framework (also known as Congruence Model). The firm has grown since its founding, adding Principals?Christine Griffin and Kristin von Donop in 2012. See more podcasts by Diana here

On this Podcast, Diana Paiva is joined by the director and co-founder of Change Logic and co-author of Corporate Explorer, Andrew Binns. Andrew gives an insight into his new book, Corporate Explorer and the highlights that readers can expect. He talks about the difference between large companies and start-up businesses, and he explained the importance of innovation in companies, even in those that are prospering. He also talks about the reasons companies go bankrupt. Diana is currently interning with Irish Tech News. She graduated from Birkbeck University, with a degree in modern languages and she is currently doing a master's in Journalism at the University of Roehampton. She has an interest in technology, fashion, and the environment. Starting her master's in journalism made her realise that she has a passion to report and write people's stories. After graduation, her main priority is to find a job in communications or public relations. Diana Paiva is active on social media platforms, including Twitter, and LinkedIn. About Andrew Binns Andy works with CEOs, boards, and senior teams as they lead significant business change. He is a co-founder of Change Logic and manages the firm on behalf of the partnership. Andy has twenty-five years of consulting experience as both an external and internal consultant for McKinsey & Co., the IBM Corporation, and Change Logic. At IBM, Andy was deeply involved in the ‘Emerging Business Opportunity' program, for which he received an award from IBM's Vice-Chairman.

This is the fourth episode of our DE&I series. In these conversations, we want to explore issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and our hope is that these help build a world in which people from all backgrounds and with different views can thrive. Our aim with these series is to chat with inspirational guests who can encourage us all to look at the industries we work in (media, comms and tech) from different perspectives.  Our guest for this episode is Ritu Mohanka, Managing Director for EMEA at Syndio, a technology company that helps companies measure, achieve, and sustain workplace equity. Ritu is passionate about making workplaces more diverse, inclusive, and fair. She joined Syndio with over 20 years of experience in senior leadership roles with HR and talent-focused businesses, including leading business development and strategic growth efforts in EMEA at Glint (now a LinkedIn company).  Prior to Glint, Ritu worked at Kenexa/IBM Smarter Workforce to drive rapid revenue growth across the EMEA region. At IBM she was a highly regarded and lauded Diversity Champion and an Executive Sponsor for several diversity groups. Winner of multiple awards, our guest has been recognised several times on the Empower Top 100 Ethnic Minority Senior Executive rankings.   Tune in to learn about Ritu Mohanka's incredible journey from a conservative Indian background to having spent over 20 years in leadership roles in the tech industry. Syndio's EMEA MD highlights the importance of representation and how to encourage businesses to make it happen, as well as what the company is doing to help others offer opportunity equity in the workplace. In the interview hosted by Tyto's Associate Director Shamina Peerboccus, Ritu also discusses imposter syndrome in women and how to help overcome it by “identifying allies and advocates in the workplace who believe in you and who are supportive of your work.” Recognition is a powerful motivator, and breaking barriers for women and acknowledging the professional achievements of the BAME community is something Ritu is hugely passionate about.   You can watch the recording on our YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/cFUdAhhtJgY

It was not long after Chris Greiner became CFO of IBM's fast-growing Analytics Division that the gravitational pull that IBM had maintained on Greiner's finance career-building began to give way. While his new divisional CFO title more than validated his 7-year career investment with the company, Greiner—like many divisional finance chiefs—discovered the next rung of the company's finance career ladder becoming increasingly obscured from view.   Meanwhile, his divisional CFO role afforded him a wider view into IBM's business development as he sat across the table from different owners of middle-market companies.    “What I saw was companies that were 200 to 400 employees in size, with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, that were being successful at disrupting markets, and I knew then that I wanted to be on the other side of the table one day,” recalls Greiner, who notes that the experience of dealing with business leaders intent on disrupting the market led him to his revise his career-building agenda. Says Greiner: “I knew that for me to get the experiences I wanted to get, I needed to take a leap.” One of those experiences, Greiner reports, had to do with talent development in midsize firms versus that at large enterprise companies like IBM. “At IBM, you can't empty the tank when it comes to talent because there is always another person looking to step in to fill a role when someone leaves,” observes Greiner, who points out that talent development in midsize companies is not always as robust. “That muscle for developing talent within an organization needs to be worked on,” comments Greiner, who found that his menu of responsibilities inside midsize firms also became more fluid.   Adds Greiner: “Another eye-opener for me—post-IBM —was how I needed to invest a disproportionate amount of time on the organization itself.” –Jack Sweeney

 Andrew Binns is a co-founder of Change Logic, a Boston-based strategic advisory firm. He works with CEOs, boards, and senior teams as they lead significant business change. His goal is to help organizations liberate their potential to excite the world with innovation. Andy has 25 years of consulting experience as both an external and internal consultant for McKinsey & Co., the IBM Corporation, and Change Logic. At IBM, Andy was deeply involved in the Emerging Business Opportunity program, for which he received an award from IBM's vice chairman.Andy is a frequent guest speaker and lecturer at companies and business schools. His article, “Three Disciplines of Innovation,” co-authored with Professor Charles O'Reilly, was named Best Article in the California Management Review for 2020. He also co-authored the “Ambidextrous CEO” in the Harvard Business Review, “The Art of Strategic Renewal” in the MIT Sloan Management Review, and a book chapter on “Getting Started with Ambidexterity.” He is an executive fellow at the Center for Future Organization at the Drucker School of Management and a member of the Fast Company Executive Board. Andy attended the University of Sussex, New York University, and the Quinlan Business School at Loyola University Chicago. He holds degrees in political science, marketing, and organizational development. https://twitter.com/AJMBinnshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjmbinns/https://www.thecorporateexplorer.com/bookRebel HR is a podcast for HR professionals and leaders of people who are ready to make some disruption in the world of work.We'll be discussing topics that are disruptive to the world of work and talk about new and different ways to approach solving those problems.Follow Rebel HR Podcast at:www.rebelhumanresources.comhttps://twitter.com/rebelhrguyhttps://www.facebook.com/rebelhrpodcastwww.kyleroed.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-roed/Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREEDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the show

Andy Binns, is the co-founder of Change Logic, a Boston-based strategic advisory firm.  More about our guest:Andy works with CEOs, boards, and senior teams as they lead significant business change. His goal is to help organizations liberate their potential to excite the world with innovation. He has 25 years of consulting experience as both an external and internal consultant for McKinsey & Co., the IBM Corporation, and Change Logic. At IBM, Andy was deeply involved in the Emerging Business Opportunity program, for which he received an award from IBM's vice chairman.------------------------------------------------Episode Guide:1:25 - What Is Innovation4:34 - Atlanta Opera Company: Approach to innovation5:48 - Japanese Firm: Approach to innovation7:19 - Adoption and Adoption Chains: Pfizer and inhalable insulin11:24 - Book: Corporate Explorer13:03 - Risk and Resilience14:33 - Silent Killers of Exploration14:55 - Silent Killer: Risk Aversion16:48 - Why "what isn't innovation?"17:23 - Stanford, Harvard, Corporations, and Research18:16 - The 3 Classic Errors21:44 - $10 billion companies: Pampers22:09 - Google and Microsoft23:08 - LexisNexis24:03 - Uniqa (European Insurance Company) and Shared Risk25:45 - Corporate Explorers' Compensation Models and Reputation Risks30:15 - Silent Killer: Professional Identity32:22 - Advice for Innovators-------------------------Resources Mentioned: Companies mentioned: Microsoft 365 LexisNexisGE DigitalUniqaHavasVictors and SpoilsDeloitteAtlanta Opera CompanyBooks Mentioned:Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game  by: Andrew Binns buy it HEREAuthors Mentioned:Ron Adner (Tuck Business School)related works: The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss--------------------------OUTLAST Consulting offers professional development and strategic advisory services in the areas of innovation and diversity management.

Joining the podcast today is Andy Binns, co-author of the book Corporate Explorer. This book and Andy's perspective goes against much of what we have learned as the right way to retain talent. What Andy brings to the table today is how to develop an entrepreneurial mindset to large corporate organizations. In his experience, large organizations are great to incubate and nurture this entrepreneurial attitude and skill set. Why is this important and why aren't more organizations implementing this? In addition, Andy and I discuss the challenges this current generation of talent is experiencing and what organizations can do to manage constant change. Developing an environment to retain people longer is different than it used to be and in this episode, you'll discover that it is entirely different than you might think. This topic is very timely in the current climate that we are in and I know you will find great value in Andy's perspective. His book Corporate Explorer is highly recommended. Enjoy listening to this conversation! What We Talked About in This Episode: Andy's Background and Experience Corporate Life and Entrepreneurship Can Go Together What is a Corporate Explorer? Large Companies Have Opportunities for Innovation What Companies Do to Foster Entrepreneurial Culture The Type of Culture for this Approach to Exist Cultural Incubators Within the Company Examples of Large Organizations That Use This Model Current Challenges in Business and Startups Things to Master and Managing Change Common Challenges for the Corporate Explorer Andy's Book Recommendations and Daily Rituals About Our Guest: Andrew Binns is a co-founder of Change Logic, a Boston-based strategic advisory firm. He works with CEOs, boards, and senior teams as they lead significant business change. His goal is to help organizations liberate their potential to excite the world with innovation. Andy has 25 years of consulting experience as both an external and internal consultant for McKinsey & Co., the IBM Corporation, and Change Logic. At IBM, Andy was deeply involved in the Emerging Business Opportunity program, for which he received an award from IBM's vice chairman. Andy is a frequent guest speaker and lecturer at companies and business schools. His article, “Three Disciplines of Innovation,” co-authored with Professor Charles O'Reilly, was named Best Article in the California Management Review for 2020. He also co-authored the “Ambidextrous CEO” in the Harvard Business Review, “The Art of Strategic Renewal” in the MIT Sloan Management Review, and a book chapter on “Getting Started with Ambidexterity.” He is an executive fellow at the Center for Future Organization at the Drucker School of Management and a member of the Fast Company Executive Board. Andy attended the University of Sussex, New York University, and the Quinlan Business School at Loyola University Chicago. He holds degrees in political science, marketing, and organizational development. Connect with Andy Binns: https://thecorporateexplorer.com/ Connect with John Murphy: LinkedIn Twitter YouTube Facebook If you liked this episode, please don't forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. Thanks for tuning in!

Welcome back to another episode in our Exponential Series here on the Innovation Show, where we explore how exponential technologies are colliding and changing the world. This is our grand finale with Ismail Amla on his book From Incremental to Exponential. Over the past two decades, our guest has participated in dozens of innovation exercises with numerous companies. He has guided legacy energy giants in creating marketing opportunities by taking risks on innovations and better business models. He has helped retail chains and supermarkets defend themselves against Amazon and other online-only vendors. He has even helped the British Government create a rapid-response program for adopting innovation and technologies and to rethink the resource allocation and strategy and future requirements of the British Army. Unlike most innovation experts, he has also served as a senior executive overseeing major innovation pushes. At IBM, he lived through one of the most difficult innovation periods in recent history as Big Blue struggled to pivot for a third time. By the same token, he has read as much of the scientific research as he could. In doing so, he realized that much research on innovation is of wildly varying quality. In today's episode, he shares what he has learned as we touch on his Playbook for Building Innovative, Exponential Companies We welcome back the author of From Incremental to Exponential, Ismail Amla

Corporate Innovation Innovation used to be seen as a game best left to entrepreneurs, but now a new breed of corporate managers is flipping this logic on its head. These Corporate Explorers have the insight, resilience, and discipline to overcome the obstacles and build new ventures from inside even the largest organisations. In this interview with co-author Andrew Binns, we explore how all companies and organisations can make innovation shine within. Connect with Andrew here. Guest Bio. Andrew Binns is a co-founder of Change Logic, a Boston-based strategic advisory firm. He works with CEOs, boards, and senior teams as they lead significant business change. His goal is to help organisations liberate their potential to excite the world with innovation. Andy has 25 years of consulting experience as both an external and internal consultant for McKinsey & Co., the IBM Corporation, and Change Logic. At IBM, Andy was deeply involved in the Emerging Business Opportunity program, for which he received an award from IBM's vice chairman.

Stanley S. Litow is Professor of the Practice at Duke University where he also served as Innovator in Residence and also teaches at Columbia University. He previously served as deputy chancellor of schools for New York City and as president of the IBM Foundation and vice president of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs at IBM. At IBM, he helped create Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH), the innovative grade 9 to 14 school connecting school to college to career. He is also co-author of Breaking Barriers: How P-TECH Schools Create a Pathway From High School to College to Career from Teachers College Press. Stan also serves as a Trustee of the State University of New York (SUNY) where he chairs the Academic Affairs Committee.  Show Highlights Why don't education reforms go to scale? P-Tech creates a pathway from high school to college to career.  Get past the politics in education. Education is the bottom line for profitability for all Americans. A formula that sets up conditions where ALL kids can soar.  An educational resource that can end the economic and cultural divide. Students determine when they are college ready. Billion dollar college saving and workplace ready plan.  Take down the silo between school to college for relevant learning.  “All of the assumptions about who can achieve go out the window if you provide students with the right opportunity.” -Stan Litow   Stan Litow's Resources & Contact Info:   Breaking Barriers P-TECH LinkedIn Twitter Buy Daniel's latest book: Mastermind: Unlocking Talent Within Every School Leader     Looking for more? Read The Better Leaders Better Schools Roadmap Join “The Mastermind” Read the latest on the blog   SHOW SPONSORS: HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION Transform how you lead to become a resilient and empowered change agent with Harvard's online Certificate in School Management and Leadership. Grow your professional network with a global cohort of fellow school leaders as you collaborate in case studies bridging the fields of education and business. Apply today at http://hgse.me/leader. TEACHFX School leaders know that productive student talk drives student learning, but the average teacher talks 75% of class time! TeachFX is changing that with a “Fitbit for teachers” that automatically measures student engagement and gives teachers feedback about what they could do differently.  Learn more about the TeachFX app and get a special 20% discount for your school or district by visiting teachfx.com/blbs. ORGANIZED BINDER Organized Binder is the missing piece in many classrooms. Many teachers are great with the main content of the lesson. Organized Binder helps with powerful introductions, savvy transitions, and memorable lesson closings. Your students will grow their executive functioning skills (and as a bonus), your teachers will become more organized too. Help your students and staff level up with Organized Binder.   Copyright © 2022 Twelve Practices LLC

Podcast: Control System Cyber Security Association International: CS2AIEpisode: 14: Consequence-Driven, Cyber-Informed Engineering (CCE) with Sara Freeman and Andy BochmanPub date: 2021-11-23Today, Derek Harp, the host of (CS)²AI Podcast, shares an episode of the Author Spotlight that features practitioners and contributors who do great work and write books about new modalities, new systems of organization, and new thought processes. In this episode, Andy Bochman and Sarah Freeman, authors of Countering Cyber Sabotage- Introducing Consequence-Driven Cyber-Informed Engineering, join Derek to talk about their book. Sarah has been an Industrial Control Systems Cyber Security Analyst at The Idaho National Laboratory (The Lab) for the past eight years. She did not get there through the traditional computer or cyber security background, however. Sarah studied Intelligence and Security Studies, focusing on terrorism in Graduate School, and came into cyber security through Language Services by assisting with certain investigations and operations on the language side. That eventually transitioned into industrial control systems when she joined The Lab. Sarah has a unique understanding of different kinds of threat actors from some of the work she has done in the past. The Lab focuses on bringing in people with different backgrounds, like cyber security researchers, malware reverse engineers, and engineers. That is invaluable when talking about attacks specifically leveled against industrial control systems because some things translate well between traditional IT attacks while others are completely different. Bringing in different groups helps with much of their work. One of the first companies Andy ever worked for was an applications security company that eventually got bought by IBM. He was also involved in some startups and some consulting. At IBM, Andy matched his cyber security day job with his night job, moonlighting as a blogger on the DOD Energy Blog and the Smart Grid Security Blog. While at IBM, he asked if he could cover energy from a cyber point of view, and they agreed. From that point, it became clear that he would eventually end up at the Idaho National Laboratory, where he has been for the last seven years. Show highlights:Sarah is valuable to the community because of her knowledge of the spoken and written languages used in certain parts of the world. (4:28) The genesis of their book and the philosophy behind it. (7:51)From about 2003-2004, Idaho National Laboratory has focused on electric grid security. (16:16)Whatever first hits the people on the street and then ripples up to the people on The Hill brings about a new level of awareness. (19:37)Critical infrastructure is sure to be targeted, and once something has been targeted it will be compromised. (20:40)Putting security into the design stage is a different approach that is now evolving out of The Lab. (24:23)Many opportunities exist for adversaries to get in and turn things to their advantage after a new software product has been deployed and begins to interact with other networks. (29:49)What initially prompted Andy to write the book before Sarah came on board. (30:35)How Andy came up with the title of the book. (36:43)When espionage turns into sabotage. (39:04)How you can use the book. (40:25)A partner program and another version of the book, known as “Bootcamp” or “Partner Training” are also available. (41:13)People are tired of the status quo and would be willing to explore a new way. (44:43)The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Derek Harp, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Today, Derek Harp, the host of (CS)²AI Podcast, shares an episode of the Author Spotlight that features practitioners and contributors who do great work and write books about new modalities, new systems of organization, and new thought processes.  In this episode, Andy Bochman and Sarah Freeman, authors of Countering Cyber Sabotage- Introducing Consequence-Driven Cyber-Informed Engineering, join Derek to talk about their book.  Sarah has been an Industrial Control Systems Cyber Security Analyst at The Idaho National Laboratory (The Lab) for the past eight years. She did not get there through the traditional computer or cyber security background, however. Sarah studied Intelligence and Security Studies, focusing on terrorism in Graduate School, and came into cyber security through Language Services by assisting with certain investigations and operations on the language side. That eventually transitioned into industrial control systems when she joined The Lab.  Sarah has a unique understanding of different kinds of threat actors from some of the work she has done in the past. The Lab focuses on bringing in people with different backgrounds, like cyber security researchers, malware reverse engineers, and engineers. That is invaluable when talking about attacks specifically leveled against industrial control systems because some things translate well between traditional IT attacks while others are completely different. Bringing in different groups helps with much of their work.  One of the first companies Andy ever worked for was an applications security company that eventually got bought by IBM. He was also involved in some startups and some consulting. At IBM, Andy matched his cyber security day job with his night job, moonlighting as a blogger on the DOD Energy Blog and the Smart Grid Security Blog. While at IBM, he asked if he could cover energy from a cyber point of view, and they agreed. From that point, it became clear that he would eventually end up at the Idaho National Laboratory, where he has been for the last seven years.  Show highlights: Sarah is valuable to the community because of her knowledge of the spoken and written languages used in certain parts of the world. (4:28)  The genesis of their book and the philosophy behind it. (7:51) From about 2003-2004, Idaho National Laboratory has focused on electric grid security. (16:16) Whatever first hits the people on the street and then ripples up to the people on The Hill brings about a new level of awareness. (19:37) Critical infrastructure is sure to be targeted, and once something has been targeted it will be compromised. (20:40) Putting security into the design stage is a different approach that is now evolving out of The Lab. (24:23) Many opportunities exist for adversaries to get in and turn things to their advantage after a new software product has been deployed and begins to interact with other networks. (29:49) What initially prompted Andy to write the book before Sarah came on board. (30:35) How Andy came up with the title of the book. (36:43) When espionage turns into sabotage. (39:04) How you can use the book. (40:25) A partner program and another version of the book, known as “Bootcamp” or “Partner Training” are also available. (41:13) People are tired of the status quo and would be willing to explore a new way. (44:43) Mentioned in this episode: Join CS2AI Join the largest organization for cybersecurity professionals. Membership has its benefits! We keep you up to date on the latest cybersecurity news and education. https://cs2ai.captivate.fm/cs2ai (Preroll Membership) Our Sponsors: We'd like to thank our sponsors for their faithful support of this podcast. Without their support we would not be able to bring you this valuable content. We'd appreciate it if you would support these companies because they support us! Network Perception Waterfall Security Tripwire KPMG Cyber

Gene Amdahl grew up in South Dakota and as with many during the early days of computing went into the Navy during World War II. He got his degree from South Dakota State in 1948 and went on to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for his PhD, where he got the bug for computers in 1952, joining the ranks of IBM that year. At IBM he worked on the iconic 704 and then the 7030 but found it too bureaucratic. And yet he came back to become the Chief Architect of the IBM S/360 project. They pushed the boundaries of what was possible with transistorized computing and along the way, Amdahl gave us Amdahl's Law, which is an important aspect of parallel computing - how much latency tasks take when split across different CPUs. Think of it like the law of diminishing returns applied to processing. Contrast this with Fred Brook's Brook's Law - which says that adding incremental engineers don't make projects happen faster by the same increment, or that it can cause a project to take even more time. As with Seymour Cray, Amdahl had ideas for supercomputers and left IBM again in 1970 when they didn't want to pursue them - ironically just a few years after Thomas Watson Jr admitted that just 34 people at CDC had kicked IBM out of their leadership position in the market. First he needed to be able to build a computer, then move into supercomputers. Fully transistorized computing had somewhat cleared the playing field. So he developed the Amdahl 470V/6 - more reliable, more pluggable, and so cheaper than the IBM S/370. He also used virtual machine technology so customers could simulate a 370 and so run existing workloads cheaper. The first went to NASA and the second to the University of Michigan. During the rise of transistorized computing they just kept selling more and more machines. The company grew fast, taking nearly a quart of the market share. As we saw in the CDC episode, the IBM antitrust case was again giving a boon to other companies. Amdahl was able to leverage the fact that IBM software was getting unbundled with the hardware as a big growth hack. As with Cray at the time, Amdahl wanted to keep to one CPU per workload and developed chips and electronics with Fujitsu to enable doing so. By the end of the 70s they had grown to 6,000 employees on the back of a billion dollars in sales. And having built a bureaucratic organization like the one he just left, he left his namesake company much as Seymour Cray had left CDC after helping build it (and would later leave Cray to start yet another Cray). That would be Trilogy systems, which failed shortly after an IPO. I guess we can't always bet on the name. Then Andor International. Then Commercial Data Servers, now a part of Xbridge systems. Meanwhile the 1980s weren't kind to the company with his name on the masthead. The rise of Unix and first minicomputers then standard servers meant people were building all kinds of new devices. Amdahl started selling servers, given the new smaller and pluggable form factors. They sold storage. They sold software to make software, like IDEs. The rapid proliferation of networking and open standards let them sell networking products. Fujitsu ended up growing faster and when Gene Amdahl was gone, in the face of mounting competition with IBM, Amdahl tried to merge with Storage Technology Corporation, or StorageTek as it might be considered today. CDC had pushed some of its technology to StorageTek during their demise and StorageTek in the face of this new competition ended up filing Chapter 11 and getting picked up by Sun for just over $4 billion. But Amdahl was hemorrhaging money as we moved into the 90s. They sold off half the shares to Fujitsu, laid off over a third of their now 10,000 plus workforce, and by the year 2000 had been lapped by IBM on the high end market. They sold off their software division, and Fujitsu acquired the rest of the shares. Many of the customers then moved to the then-new IBM Z series servers that were coming out with 64 bit G3 and G4 chips. As opposed to the 31-bit chips Amdahl, now Fujitsu under the GlobalServer mainframe brand, sells. Amdahl came out of the blue, or Big Blue. On the back of Gene Amdahl's name and a good strategy to attack that S/360 market, they took 8% of the mainframe market from IBM at one point. But they sold to big customers and eventually disappeared as the market shifted to smaller machines and a more standardized lineup of chips. They were able to last for awhile on the revenues they'd put together but ultimately without someone at the top with a vision for the future of the industry, they just couldn't make it as a standalone company. The High Performance Computing server revenues steadily continue to rise at Fujitsu though - hitting $1.3 billion in 2020. In fact, in a sign of the times, the 20 million Euro PRIMEHPC FX700 that's going to the Minho Advanced Computing Centre in Portugal is a petascale computer built on an ARM plus x86 architecture. My how the times have changed. But as components get smaller, more precise, faster, and more mass producible we see the same types of issues with companies being too large to pivot quickly from the PC to the post-PC era. Although at this point, it's doubtful they'll have a generations worth of runway from a patron like Fujitsu to be able to continue in business. Or maybe a patron who sees the benefits downmarket from the new technology that emerges from projects like this and takes on what amounts to nation-building to pivot a company like that. Only time will tell.

Jesse Rothkopf, was with IBM for 10 years prior to his current position as Managing Principal at LCE. At IBM, Mr. Rothkopf headed the North American Public Sector sales team and was heavily involved in a solutions-oriented approach to federal, state, and local governments. At LCE, Mr. Rothkopf leads transportation and non-manufacturing sectors with an asset-intensive approach that leverages advanced technology solutions and ISO 55000 to provide dramatic benefits to owner organizations. He has a background in logistics and supply chain management and likes to be a volunteer crew member on the tall ship Spirit of South Carolina when he has time. He will be talking about his upcoming White Paper on Resiliency co-published with the Asset Leadership Network, and other topics.

Today, business leaders have the power to create positive change. Not just within their organizations, but in society and in the world more broadly. In this episode, Host Gautam Mukunda speaks with Reverend Cornell William Brooks, former head of the NAACP and the Professor of Practice and Public Leadership and Social Justice at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Mohamad Ali, CEO of International Data Group, about the challenges and opportunities of corporations in the wake of COVID-19, profound social and economic upheaval, the death of George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter. “So, in terms of this moment in which we find ourselves, in terms of ethical leadership, and responsibility of those in the business community, I would just simply say this, that on a regular and recurring basis, people in the business community are charged with the responsibility of delivering products, and services for this country are not merely disaggregated marketplaces, but a democracy and republic.”   — Cornell William Brooks “Business leaders have a responsibility to our planet, our people, our justice. And so, the answer is that emphatic yes, that I think many business leaders recognize that they have this privileged position from which to articulate the need for justice. Businesses are in an interesting position, because yes, they can stand up.”   — Mohamad Ali Follow @GMukunda on Twitter or email us at WorldReimagined@nasdaq.com   Books Referenced: Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and Planet, by Klaus Schwab The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein   Guest Info: Cornell William Brooks is Hauser Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit Organizations and Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also Director of The William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at the School's Center for Public Leadership, and Visiting Professor of the Practice of Prophetic Religion and Public Leadership at Harvard Divinity School. Brooks was most recently visiting professor of social ethics, law, and justice movements at Boston University's School of Law and School of Theology. He was a visiting fellow and director of the Campaign and Advocacy Program at the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics in 2017. Brooks served as the 18th president of the NAACP from 2014 to 2017. Prior to leading the NAACP, Brooks was president and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. He also served as senior counsel and acting director of the Office of Communications Business Opportunities at the Federal Communications Commission, executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Greater Washington, and a trial attorney at both the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the U.S. Department of Justice. Brooks served as judicial clerk for Chief Judge Sam J. Ervin, III, on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Brooks holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Master of Divinity from Boston University's School of Theology, and a B.A. from Jackson State University. Brooks is a fourth-generation ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.   Mohamad Ali is Chief Executive Officer at IDG, Inc., the world's leading technology research and media company. Prior to this, Mohamad was CEO of Carbonite, a publicly traded data protection and security company where he grew the company's revenues four-fold to over a half-billion dollars in four years. Before that, Mohamad served as Chief Strategy Officer at Hewlett Packard where he played a pivotal role in the company's turnaround and led the decision process to split HP into two companies. At IBM, Mohamad acquired and integrated various companies to create the firm's eight billion dollar analytics software unit. At Avaya, he oversaw the two billion dollar services group and served as the head of the company's research labs. Mohamad holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering, a B.A. in History, and a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, each from Stanford University. He was named 2018 CEO of the Year by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, member of 2018 Public Board of the Year by National Association of Corporate Directors New England, 2011 All-Star by Massachusetts High Tech magazine, 2008 40-Under-40 by Boston Business Journal, and was a finalist in America's prestigious 1988 National Science Talent Search.

In this week's Work in Progress podcast, IBM's Justina Nixon-Saintil, VP and Global Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, joins me to discuss the company's expansion of its free SkillsBuild jobs and career training program. “At IBM, we believe everyone should have the chance to succeed. What's really motivating us is how technology is changing society,” […] The post Need cybersecurity or data analytics skills training? IBM can help appeared first on WorkingNation.

This week, James is joined by Sara E. Berger, Research Staff Member and Cognitive & Behavioral Neuroscientist at IBM Research. She holds a PhD in Neuroscience from Northwestern University, and a Bachelor's degree in Neuroscience from Macalester College. Sara's background lies in systems and cognitive neuroscience, with an emphasis on chronic pain conditions and psychology. In the past, she has focused on identifying, quantifying and predicting changes in acute and chronic pain in both animals and humans - with a decade of experience in the field of pain. At IBM, she is applying her knowledge of neuroimaging, psychology and clinical research to address a wide variety of questions and applications. IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. Get in Touch with Sara: sara.eberger@ibm.com Subscribe to Healthtech Pigeon

What role do corporations play in a functioning democracy? Is there a way to encourage companies to be more socially responsible? Guest: Stan Litow is the author of The Challenge for Business and Society: From Risk to Reward. At IBM he led the global corporate social responsibility program. Litow now teaches graduate courses at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He has held high level positions for the Mayor and Governor of New York, and served as New York City’s Deputy Schools Chancellor.

Come sit down with Dr. Mary Kay Vona—retired EY partner, adjunct Vanderbilt Professor, Zumba instructor extraordinaire, and Chair of the Akhilah Davis College board—as we talk transformation and change in the time of Covid. *If you want to learn more about Akhilah Davis College and their important work, helping to rebuild some of Africa's most fragile economies by educating women to allow them to enter the workforce, please visit, www.akilahinstitute.org or you can follow them on Facebook or Instagram by searching for Akhilah Institute. You can also reach out to Dr. Vona personally for more information at marykay.vona@yahoo.com———————————————————————————————— Dr. Mary Kay Vona brings over 35 years of industry and consulting expertise. She has a unique combination of practice leadership, strategy, innovation, change management, business transformation and talent strategy experience. During her time as an EY Partner, where she recently retired, Mary Kay led the region for FSO People Advisory Services (PAS) focused on business and workforce transformation, talent, change management and the human capital agenda for financial services clients. She also was the founding member of EY's Learning Services practice, creating the initial business case, resource model, service offering while supporting the acquisition of a leading digital learning organization. She established extensive relationships throughout the industry and has an immense passion for the consulting profession, client service, change management, diversity and people development. Prior to joining EY, Mary Kay held similar leadership roles at Price Waterhouse/PWCC/IBM for over 22 years and has served many industries including Media & Entertainment, Automotive, Oil & Gas, Power & Utilities, Communications and Telco. At IBM, she was Partner and Practice Area Leader for the Human Capital Management Practice in the firm's communication sector. She was IBM's Global Learning Partner, driving learning solutions, client relationships, staff development and thought leadership around the globe. After departing IBM, she served as Executive Vice President for Aon Consulting's Southeast Region practice where she was responsible for client service, people development and the region's operations. Outside of work, Mary Kay serves on the Advisory Board for The World Institute of Action Learning (WIAL) and after serving for several years as a Board Member of The Akilah Institute, was elected Board Chair in 2020. She also served on the advisory board for the Florida Holocaust Museum. Mary Kay is also an adjunct Professor at Vanderbilt University where she teaches Consultation Skills course to graduate students and Strategy/Analytics to doctoral students. She also spends that extra energy on weekends teaching ZUMBA and Hip Hop.

How does a 100-year-old company continually reinvent itself to change how the world works? By relying on and driving a high-quality customer experience. IBM's current success is built around its historic roots and the customer-first culture that has existed from the beginning. For CMO Michelle Peluso, that means standing on the backs of giants while also looking towards the future. The goal of IBM's customer experience is to create more one-to-one interactions and move away from mass marketing and experiences. Peluso says the most important thing is seamlessness. Silos are common in large companies like IBM, but IBM avoids them by creating agile teams that are focused on a common goal. Each agile marketing team has a mix of specialists from different areas, such as IT, marketing and product design. The teams are tasked with thinking about how to sell a particular IBM product. Bringing together different backgrounds and skillsets for a common goal allows for unique perspectives and a seamless approach to customer experience across the entire organization. Marketing plays a large role in making sure the client journey is well instrumented so that IBM gets feedback when things aren't going well. The right client feedback at the right points highlights areas for improvement. IBM's customer experience is driven by data and includes new technology like AI. Peluso's agile marketing teams use IBM Watson to get proactive alerts each morning about areas where they are underperforming. Watson also gives the teams reasons for the lack of success and suggestions for improvements. Instead of the human employees having to manually dig through endless amounts of data, Watson's AI capabilities provide proactive alerts that allow teams to move more quickly and accurately. Peluso says emerging technologies give customers more control and puts them in charge of their own experiences. This will only continue to grow in the future of marketing and customer experience. Along with AI and agile teams, Peluso believes blockchain will have a large impact on the future of customer experience and marketing. Instead of moving through a complicated process like media buying with numerous moving parts and limited accountability, blockchain could potentially connect different parts of the supply chain with one record of the truth. Media buying could potentially be more accurate and targeted to provide personalized customer experiences. A high-quality customer experience doesn't come from a single action or person, but from the collective efforts of many people working towards the same goal. At IBM, that translates into leveraging new technology and ideas while still holding strong to brand values from the past to continually driving forward-thinking solutions customers crave and expect. 

  Allen Slade, Ph.D., ACC, drives change for Slade & Associate clients by leading client engagements and creating innovative programs that spark insight. Allen coaches executives, leaders and individuals to breakthroughs. He also designs developmental activities and assessments to support effective leadership development and career coaching by Slade & Associates coaches and internal coaches. Allen is a proven expert in developing leaders and organizations through collaboration and data driven insight. Allen has balanced experience in industry, higher education and consulting. Allen has 13 years of Fortune 100 experience as a development expert, leader and executive. He created and delivered 360 assessment systems, employee opinion surveys and leadership programs. As Director of Microsoft People Research, Allen drove Microsoft's global employee survey, helped created Microsoft's 360 assessment and created Microsoft's retention intelligence system. At Ford Motor Company, Allen created Ford's web survey system, recreated and drove the Ford Pulse global employee survey, and helped create Ford's 360 assessment. At IBM, Allen helped create the a data-driven career development system that was the first use of PCs to provide career intelligence and insight. In 13 years as a fulltime professor, Allen has taught change management, leadership and organizational behavior at the College of William & Mary, Covenant College and the University of Delaware. Allen has published research in the Academy of Management Review, Personnel Psychology, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Group & Organization Studies.