Podcast appearances and mentions of Mark Schwartz

From Law to Leadership: Building a Culture of Growth with Mark Schwartz In this episode of One Sharp Sword, host Dr. Wayne Pernell sits down with Mark Schwartz, CFO, attorney, and transformation leader, to explore how authentic leadership and curiosity create lasting organizational growth. Mark's career journey spans finance, corporate law, and large-scale manufacturing and supply chain transformation — leading companies from single-site operations to billion-dollar enterprises. Now, as CFO of a private equity–backed machine learning company in the retail supply chain space, he's helping consumer brands recover lost revenue and drive efficiency through transparency and trust. In This Episode, You'll Learn: ● How to lead through complex change and transformation ● Why culture always wins over blame ● The power of perspective in leadership communication ● Lessons from scaling manufacturing operations to global success ● How curiosity, clarity, and collaboration redefine high-performance leadership Key Takeaway: True leadership isn't about having all the answers — it's about creating alignment, learning from mistakes, and inspiring your team to grow.

The Minnesota Pork Board recently formed an Animal Health Task Force. One of its members is Mark Schwartz, Director of Innovation and Research, Schwartz Farms Inc., and Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Medicine, University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine. Another member is Dr. Paul Yeske of the Swine Vet Center. Both state that the mission of the task force is to ensure Minnesota Pork leads the nation in herd health improvement to support a nutritious, safe food supply, protect public health, and advance animal well-being.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dr. Mark Schwartz of NovaCare gives the 94 WIP Morning Show an Eagles injury update. Lane Johnson left the game with a stinger in his neck. Mike Evans, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' #1 receiver (who the Eagles face next week) went out yesterday with a hamstring injury. What's the outlook and how could it impact next week's game?

Waves of economic growth are often fueled by the development and diffusion of new general-purpose technologies. But other factors—industrial and corporate organization, legal frameworks, and, of course, geopolitics—can determine whether countries take full advantage of growth waves. At the same time, growth waves often reshape these factors, including the relative power of countries. In the third episode of Talking Policy's Technology and Global Security in the 21st Century miniseries, guest host Nicolas Wittstock speaks with Mark Schwartz, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, about whether current global conditions are right to catalyze a new tech-fueled growth wave, as new technologies like artificial intelligence and clean energy take root and great powers like China and the United States compete to set the global standards of the industries.This episode was recorded on May 30, 2025. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Highly Suspect over Zoom video! Never content to follow, Highly Suspect push rock music forward by trusting their instincts and raising a middle finger to everything else. The multi-GRAMMY® Award-nominated and gold-certified band - Johnny Stevens [vocals, guitar], Ryan Meyer [drums, vocals], Rich Meyer [bass, vocals], Matt Kofos [guitar] and Mark Schwartz [keyboards/guitars] - don't just talk about burning the rules and breaking the mold; they actually do so.The band's chemically imbalanced mix of gritty guitars, haunting piano, off-kilter synths, hip-hop production, cinematic vision, and beautifully possessed vocals transformed them into a phenomenon beloved by a diehard global fanbase known as “MCID” [My Crew Is Dope]. After grinding it out as an underground curiosity, they scraped a path to mainstream infamousness with their 2015 full-length debut, Mister Asylum. It earned a GRAMMY® Award nomination in the category of “Best Rock Album” as the single “Lydia” received a nomination for “Best Rock Song” was certified gold by the RIAA.The 2016 follow-up The Boy Who Died Wolf roared to life with the gold-selling “My Name Is Human,” which catapulted to #1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Chart and garnered a GRAMMY® Nomination for “Best Rock Song.” 2019's MCID affirmed them as the rare outfit who could collaborate with Young Thug and Gojira on the same album. Loudwire hailed the latter among the “50 Best Rock Albums of 2019.”  With hundreds of millions of streams and sold out shows on multiple continents, Highly Suspect charged ahead of the pack again on 2022's The Midnight Demon Club with no compromises and no apologies as they challenged rock to be dangerous and maybe even life-changing again. This past summer the band  shared their latest opus, As Above, So Below, is out now via Roadrunner/300/ElektraWe want to hear from you! Please email Hello@BringinitBackwards.comwww.BringinitBackwards.com#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #HighlySuspect #NewMusic #ZoomListen & Subscribe to BiBhttps://www.bringinitbackwards.com/followFollow our podcast on Instagram and Twitter! https://www.facebook.com/groups/bringinbackpodBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/bringin-it-backwards--4972373/support.

Podcast 273 - Local Event Raising $800k - Mark Schwartz - Crohn's & Colitis Foundation Torch Gala The Crohn's & Colitis Foundation's 34th annual Torch Gala, hosted by Dunwoody's Mark Schwartz, aims to raise $800K for groundbreaking research. With Mark and his daughter personally affected, this event is more than just a fundraiser. Join him on February 8th at the Intercontinental Hotel in Buckhead in supporting a cause that touches many lives. https://torchgala.org/

Nachum Segal interviews the new Mayor of Teaneck, NJ, the Honorable Mayor Mendy (Mark) Schwartz and he presents great Jewish music, the latest news from Israel and Morning Chizuk with Rabbi Dovid Goldwasser.

In Episode 393 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Herman Mark Schwartz, a professor in the Politics department of the University of Virginia and the author of three books on economic development, globalization, and the geopolitics of the subprime mortgage crisis. Demetri and Mark discuss an article that he recently co-authored in American Affairs about AI's potential to create a new growth wave of creative destruction that could rival or surpass those of previous innovation cycles, with enormous implications for business, society, and the role of government in the economy. They discuss what these so-called “Schumpeterian” growth waves typically look like, how they create complex interactions across all facets of the economy, and how they ultimately exhaust themselves, making room for the birth of a new innovation cycle. In the second hour, Mark and Demetri apply this framework to the growth wave that we have been living through for more or less the last 50 years and which now appears to be in the late stages of endogenous decay. They examine three scenarios for what might come next. The first is an extension of the current wave, the second is a new paradigm driven by AI as the key general-purpose technology, and the third is neither an extension of the current wave nor a transition to a new paradigm, but rather a series of crises characterized by commodity shortages, energy insecurity, political polarization, and global conflict. You can subscribe to our premium content and access our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode of Hidden Forces, you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 12/02/2024

Over the past year of war in Gaza, several diplomatic and humanitarian organisations, including the UN, have repeatedly accused Israel of breaching rules of military conduct. These breaches have provoked regular condemnation by governments and high-ranking officials worldwide. But amid all the words, what has been missing is concrete action against Israel. If any authority has the power to influence Israel's actions, it is the US – its strongest ally and main source of military aid. The death toll in Gaza has passed 42,400, with thousands more bodies thought to be buried under rubble and tens of thousands dying from indirect causes. In Lebanon, where densely populated neighbourhoods are being hit by air strikes, at least 2,300 have been killed and 1.2 million displaced. Earlier this year, the International Court of Justice determined that it was plausible that Israel may be committing genocide. Investigators and human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have warned the US that it may be complicit in war crimes because of Israel's unlawful use of American weapons. In a rare development this week, a leaked document revealed US officials warning the Israeli government that future weapons shipments could be affected if the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is not addressed within 30 days. But with little having changed in the past year, and as Israel appears to defy any limits imposed on it, the question remains: will the US truly enforce any red lines? On this episode of Beyond the Headlines, host Nada AlTaher speaks to Hala Rharrit, a former US diplomat who resigned in protest against Washington's handling of the war. She also speaks to Mark Schwartz, a defence researcher at the RAND Corporation, to examine the White House's support for Israel. And we hear from Alex Vatanka, the founding director of the Iran programme at the Middle East Institute, on the prospects of an Israeli retaliation against Tehran.

Kate Schwartz (formerly known as Mark Schwartz) is a central Illinois musician who has recorded over 40 albums under her own name and with bands End Times Trio, Forest Saints, Tin Ghost, Demons on Wheels, and collaborations like Petulant Clark. Kate shares how she recently transitoned and how she facillitates a trans support group at the Phoenix Center.

Dr. Mark Schwartz, M.D. is an orthopedic surgeon with Burlington County Orthopedic Specialist in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Dr. Schwartz specializes in sports medicine, arthroscopic surgery and is the Co-Director of Virtua Health Sports Medicine Program. For more information on Dr. Mark Schwartz, please go to burlingtoncountyortho.com.

Full show: Monday, September 30, 2024: The Morning team and callers debate if Jalen Hurts is a good NFL QB. Joe DeCamara has seen Jalen steadily decline over the past year and a half. Also, how much blame does Nick Sirianni deserve? Should Eagles consider firing him? NovaCare Injury Report with Dr. Mark Schwartz. Bad to the Bone Awards, Ray Didinger' s takeaways, and Seth Joyner joins us for the final hour of the show.

Hour 2: Rueben Amaro joins the Morning team talking pride in the Phillies fans for the London series. Dr. Mark Schwartz of NovaCare discusses Realmuto's injury. Joe Conklin delivers a hilarious depiction of the Jalen Hurts and Nick Sirianni relationship at the cafeteria.

Dr. Mark Schwartz, M.D. is an orthopedic surgeon with Burlington County Orthopedic Specialist in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Dr. Schwartz specializes in sports medicine, arthroscopic surgery and is the Co-Director of Virtua Health Sports Medicine Program.  For more information on Dr. Mark Schwartz, please go to burlingtoncountyortho.com

Guest Bio: Mark Schwartz joined AWS as an Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist in July 2017. In this role, Mark works with enterprise technology executives to share experiences and strategies for how the cloud can help them increase speed and agility while devoting more of their resources to their customers. Mark has extensive experience as an IT leader in the government, private sector, and the nonprofit world, and with organizations ranging from startup to large. Prior to joining AWS, he was CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (in the Department of Homeland Security), where he led a large digital transformation effort, moving the agency to the cloud, introducing and refining DevOps and Agile techniques, and adopting user-centric design approaches. From his work at USCIS, he developed a reputation for leading transformation in organizations that are resistant to change, obsessed with security, subject to considerable regulation and oversight, and deeply bureaucratic. Before USCIS, Mark was CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange, a leader in global youth exchange programs, and CEO of a software company. Mark is the author of The Art of Business Value , A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility, War, Peace and IT and The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy. Mark speaks at conferences internationally on such subjects as DevOps, Leading Change, Driving Innovation in IT, and Managing Agility in Bureaucratic Organizations. He has been recognized as a Computerworld Premier IT Leader and received awards for Leadership in Technology Innovation, the Federal 100 IT Leaders, and a CIO Magazine 100 award. Mark has both a BS and MA degree from Yale University, and an MBA from Wharton.   Social Media/ Website: Mark's LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/innovativecio Mark's AWS Executive Insights page with links to all his blogs posts and books https://aws.amazon.com/ar/executive-insights/enterprise-strategists/mark-schwartz/  Books/ Resources: The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor and the Sumo Wrestler by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/Delicate-Art-Bureaucracy-Transformation-Wrestler-ebook/dp/B086XM4WCK/ The Art of Business Value by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Business-Value-Mark-Schwartz/dp/1942788045 A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seat-Table-Leadership-Age-Agility/dp/1942788118/ War, Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Peace-Business-Leadership-Technology/dp/1942788711 Reaching Cloud Velocity: A Leader's Guide to Success in the AWS Cloud by Jonathan Allen et al https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reaching-Cloud-Velocity-Leaders-Success/dp/B086PTDP51 Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT by Stephen Orban https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ahead-Cloud-Practices-Navigating-Enterprise-ebook/dp/B07BYQTGJ7 Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy https://www.amazon.co.uk/Engineers-Victory-Problem-Solvers-Turned-ebook/dp/B00ADNPCC0 The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phoenix-Project-Devops-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290/ The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unicorn-Project-Disruption-Redshirts-Overthrowing/dp/1942788762   Interview Transcript Ula Ojiaku:  Mark, thank you so much for making the time for this conversation. Mark Schwartz: Thank you, my pleasure. Ula Ojiaku: Great. Now let's start with you know, the question I usually ask my guests: who's Mark? What makes him tick? Mark Schwartz:  And they can answer that question. It's not a hard one. where to start? Um, you know, I always enjoy my work. That's a thing about me. I like to think that people have fun working with me because I tend to laugh a lot. And even you know, when the work is boring, I find ways to make it interesting. I just enjoy doing things and accomplishing things. I think if we're going to talk about my books, and some of the things I've done later, an important thing to realize is that, I started out, you know, when I went, when I was in high school, when I went to college, I was pretty sure I wanted to study computer science and get involved with these computer things. But when I was actually studying, I realized there were all these other interesting areas, I'm just, you know, endlessly curious. And so, I wound up studying all kinds of other things, in addition. And the result was that when I finished college, I decided to go to graduate school in philosophy. And I spent a few years getting a master's degree in philosophy. And the fact that I'm curious about so many things and read so many different things, I think it enters into a lot of what I do. I like to pull analogies from non-IT related fields and, and, and I'll call upon all the things I've learned in all sorts of different areas, as I'm writing and speaking and working. Ula Ojiaku:  It shines through in your book, definitely. Mark Schwartz:  Yes, I think it does. That's partly an explanation for what you see in my books. I think, um, you know, I sometimes say that I have trouble reading business books generally. Because I kind of find them boring. They tend to make the same point over and over again, and to be very just so one directional, you know, just on the same subject, and it's a little bit odd because in every other subject, the books tend to refer to other books in other fields and there's this extra dimension and that helps you understand what the author is getting at. But in business books, they, you know, aside from having a quote now and then from a famous leader or something, they don't tend to do that, they don't, they don't sort of call upon the whole history of literature and writing. And so, I have a little bit of fun in writing my books in trying to see if I can add an extra dimension just by reference and by bringing in other things that are a little bit orthogonal to the subject matter. Ula Ojiaku:  And that kind of, you know, brings home the point that life isn't black and white. It's actually a complex or a complex kind of, you know, maze and of different disciplines, different ideologies and different viewpoints that make it what it is really. Mark Schwartz:  Yeah well, of course, that was part of the fun of my recent book on Bureaucracy. You know, because I know we all, we want to throw up when we encounter bureaucracy, you know, it disturbs us in so many ways. And one of the things I wanted to say in the book is, well, actually bureaucracy is all around you all the time in unexpected places and it usually doesn't drive you crazy, actually. Yeah... Ula Ojiaku:  Well, I have a lot of questions for you on your book, The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy, which is a catchy, catchy title on its own, very clever. But before we get to that, what do you do when you're not working? I know, you said you love work and you've also said that you're curious about so many things, which means that you read broadly - that's my interpretation. So, what do you do when you're not ‘working'? Mark Schwartz:  Yes, I read broadly, is one thing. In the past, I played the guitar a lot. And I don't quite as much lately. I don't know why, you know, I'll start doing it again. I'm sure at some point. But while I was living in San Francisco, I was actually playing in bars and coffee shops, I have a singer, who I performed with. Ula Ojiaku: Really? Wow! Mark Schwartz: And that was really fun. And then the other thing I do is travel, I've really traveled a lot. And, yeah, there was one period in my life where for about five years, I was bumming around the world with a backpack with you know, occasional returns to the States to work a little bit and make some money and then go traveling again. So, one of the joys of my current job is that, I get to do a lot of traveling to interesting places. Ula Ojiaku:  So, where would you say is your ideal getaway destination? Mark Schwartz:  Oh, let's see. I'm a big fan of Brazil. That, I have good friends there and it's really nice to see them and the atmosphere is always kind of fun there. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. Mark Schwartz: I don't know what I've discovered so many places around the world that I've really loved being. I lived in Japan for a year and that is a place that I love to go to, especially for the food. Yeah, I like good food. But I don't know I've found so many places that made me feel like I'd like to spend more time there. And of course, you can't really spend more time everywhere. Ula Ojiaku:  Interesting. So, let's, let's go to your book, “The Art of Delicate Bureaucracy”. What was the inspiration behind that book? Mark Schwartz:  Well, for all of my books, before I wrote, before I wrote them, I was thinking, ‘why hasn't anybody else written a book on this topic?' People don't write books on bureaucracy, at least not, you know, popular books, there are academic books on bureaucracy. And the same thing happened to me with my first book, “The Art of Business Value”, where I said to myself, we keep talking about business value in the IT world, like, is it obvious what it means? You know, what, why isn't anybody writing a book about what business value means? So, bureaucracy is one of those things. I have a lot of experience with it first of all, I was a CIO in a government agency. But it turns out, it's not just the government, whenever I tell people about my government experience, when I speak at a conference, people come up to me afterwards and say, ‘Oh, my company's just like that. I work for a financial services company; we have lots of bureaucracy'. And I work with a lot of people who are trying to pull off some sort of digital transformation, which is change on a big scale, that's changing traditional organizations on a big scale. And bureaucracy is always in their way because bureaucracy tends to resist change; it strongly tends to resist change. So, if you're doing a big change, then you're probably going to come up against it. So, I thought maybe with my experience as a bureaucrat, or at least experience in the big bureaucracy, I could give some pointers to people who are trying to cause big change, and yet are facing bureaucratic obstacles. And I can't imagine that there's any organization, at least any large organization that does not have bureaucratic obstacles to digital transformation. So, that got me started on it. And then as I started to think about bureaucracy and research it, I realized this is actually a really interesting topic. Ula Ojiaku:  You had an interesting introduction to the book. You said, “we are bureaucrats all.” Why that claim, you actually were saying, everyone is a bureaucrat, and I know you made a statement that's similar to that earlier on in this conversation - why? Mark Schwartz:  Well, of course, I have to define in the book, what I mean by bureaucracy and all that. And I follow the generally what's accepted as the academic definition. It mostly comes from the sociologist Max Vabre, who is writing around 1920. And, and he talks a lot about bureaucracy, and it's fairly complicated, but I simplify it in the book. Basically, what it comes down to is a bureaucracy is a way of organizing socially, that has rigid formal roles for people and rigid formal rules. And that's the essence of it. You know, bureaucracy, there are rules and they have to be applied uniformly to everybody. And there's a division of labor and you know, a hierarchy. So, it has rigid roles of people who have to sign off on things and approve things. So, with that is the definition. I think it, it connects with the very human tendency to try to structure things and constantly improve them and optimize them. So, if you find a good way of doing something, you tend to turn it into a rule, you know, this is the way it should be done from now on. Ula Ojiaku: Best practice! Mark Schwartz: It's the best practice. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also, we, in, social organization, we'd like people to be accountable or responsible for things. And we know that you can't hold somebody accountable unless they have authority to perform their role. So, when you put those things together, it's very natural for us to set up these organizational systems, where we assign roles to people, and give them authority, and we make rules that encapsulate the best way to do things. And, essentially, that's bureaucracy. So, bureaucracy, I find, is everywhere around us in one form or another. But it doesn't drive us crazy most of the time, so we don't notice it. Ula Ojiaku:  Maybe if it's serving us, then we wouldn't notice it. But… Mark Schwartz:  It does serve. And if you look at the cases where it does drive us crazy, they have certain things in common. And in the book, I say there are three characteristics that bureaucracies often take on which they don't need to, it's not part of the definition of bureaucracy, but they often take on these characteristics. And it's those three characteristics that are what drive us crazy. And so, the goal, ultimately is to eliminate those three characteristics or turn them into something else. Ula Ojiaku: I know that the listeners would be curious to know what the three characteristics of bureaucracy that drive us crazy are? Is that so or should I just tell them go buy the book? Mark Schwartz: Yeah, go buy the book! Well, let me tell you the three characteristics, and also their opposite, which is what we really want. So, the first characteristic that drives us crazy, I think, is that bureaucracies tend to be bloated instead of lean, that would be the opposite in my view. There's no reason why a bureaucracy has to be bloated and wasteful. It could be lean, but it's one of those things that bureaucracy tends to become. So that's the first one. The second one is that bureaucracies tend to petrify, as opposed to learning. So, when I say petrifies, I mean that the rules and the bureaucracy don't change, or don't change as often as they should, or don't change continuously, which is really what rules should do. Now, that's not necessarily a characteristic of bureaucracy, but the definition, the definition says the rules have to be applied rigorously. You know, once you have a rule, everybody has to follow it. But it doesn't say that the rules have to stay the same forever, they can change. The opposite of a petrified bureaucracy is a learning bureaucracy, where the rules are constantly adjusted, based on what the people in the organization learn. And there are plenty of good examples of learning bureaucracies out there. And your goal is to transform the one into the other, the petrified into the learning. The third is, bureaucracies tend to be coercive, rather than enabling. Coercive, meaning that they're there to control employee behavior, to force employees to behave in ways that otherwise they wouldn't want to. They tend to be ‘no' saying, they say ‘no', a lot. Your bureaucracy for your expense reporting policy in your company probably says, ‘no that expense is no good because X Y and Z.' There are plenty of examples of enabling bureaucracies, where the point is not to stop you from doing things or force you to do something you don't want to. But the bureaucracy provides a support structure, provide best practices, as you said, that help you do your job well. And there's no reason why bureaucracies can't do that. So, the three bad characteristics are bloat, coercion, and petrify. Ula Ojiaku: Okay, nice. So, it sounds like the way you've described bureaucracy, when you look at it from a positive slant, would it be the same thing as guardrails, putting guardrails in place, or giving people the right degree of freedom? Mark Schwartz: Yeah, that's exactly the idea. What I find is that guardrails and automation are ways of implementing bureaucracy, that lead to those three good characteristics rather than the bad ones. Let's say in software development, in DevOps, for example, it's a good idea to put guardrails, security guardrails, for example, around what people can do, and automated security tests and things like that. Because then the developers or the DevOps teams, they can go charging ahead full speed, knowing that they can't do anything wrong, you know, because the guardrails are there. And they get immediate feedback, if they do something that's going to put them outside the guardrails and they can just immediately fix it. So, it's very empowering for them, lets them move fast. And it also gets rid of that coercive element of you know, I write some code and then somebody comes in afterwards and says, ‘no, you can't deploy that'. That's annoying. Instead, I can run the security tests myself, as a developer, see if there's anything that's problematic, fix it right away if I want to, so it's all under my control. But the end result is still the same. The bureaucracy is still there. It's just automated and implemented as guardrails. Ula Ojiaku:  It's enabling, like you said before, instead of hindering. Mark Schwartz:  And it's lean, because it's very inefficient and wasteful, if you write some code, and then at the very end of the development process, somebody finds a security flaw. And now you have to remember what you were doing. And, you know, go back and relearn your code and make changes then, so that's wasteful, as opposed to lean. It's coercive, as opposed to enabling. And if you're good at doing these things, then you keep updating your guardrails and your security tests based on new security threats you learn about or new policies or whatever. So, you make a learning bureaucracy as well. Ula Ojiaku:  Interesting. In the book as well, you said you want us to be calm, chaos monkeys, knights of Ockham, lean sumo wrestlers, very interesting oxymoron there. And you know, black belt experts, could you tell us more about those terms? Why did you use those terms? Mark Schwartz:  Because they made me laugh of course. Ula Ojiaku: Well, they made me laugh too. Mark Schwartz: So, I thought about what I learned about coping with bureaucracy, especially in my government job, but also from reading and from talking to other people. And I realized I had about, you know, 30 techniques for coping with bureaucracy, I call them plays. And I just grabbed those 30 techniques, but I thought about it, and I realized they divided into three. And the three, I could sort of associate with a personality, almost. You know, that these 10 plays are associated with this personality, these 10 plays are associated with this one. And I came up with these three personalities that I thought describe those plays. And the three personalities are the monkey, and the razor, and the sumo wrestler. And, you know, I think, I could stop right there, because it's probably obvious why I associate those with these plays, but I will go a little further. Ula Ojiaku: Please… Mark Schwartz: So, I realized that some of the things we did, the ones that I call the plays of the monkey, the way of the monkey, those things had to do with provoking. You know, monkeys are mischievous, provocative, and sometimes annoying. And a bunch of the techniques had to do with trying to be provocative. And the razor and I'll give you some examples in a minute. The razor, to me is all about being lean. It's about trimming away waste. And it also refers to the philosophical principle of Ockham's razor. Ockham was a medieval philosopher, right, William of Ockham. And he's generally credited with an idea that something like if you have a choice between a simple explanation, and a complicated explanation, you should prefer the simple one. That's not really what he said. But that's, that's what most people associated with him. That's the principle of Ockham's razor. And, and so it's called a principle of ontological parsimony, meaning, you shouldn't presuppose the existence of more things than you need to, in order to explain something. So, you know, don't make up nymphs. And you know, I don't know, water dryads and whatever's to explain something that you can equally just explain through simple physical laws. Ula Ojiaku:  Just saying, 'keep it simple...' Mark Schwartz:  Yeah, keep it simple, in a way, right? So that's called the principle of ontological parsimony. And I said, there's a similar principle of bureaucratic parsimony, which says that if you're trying to implement a control, and you can do it in a simple way, or you could do it in a really complicated way, do it a simple way. And so, it's a principle of leanness because I find that bureaucracies, when they get bloated, they have these really complicated wasteful ways of doing something that they could they could accomplish exactly the same thing, but in a simpler way. So that's the razor. And then a sumo wrestler. Well, Sumo is the sport where, you know, two massive people sort of bang into each other, right? And the goal is you want to push your opponent out of the ring, or you want to make them fall and touch the ground with something other than their feet. And if you can do either of those things, you win. So, if you're a big massive person and you're trying to accomplish those things, you might think that the best thing to do is charge your opponent and push really hard. But if your opponent then just either dodges or just is soft and lets you push, well, you're probably going to go flying out of the ring, right? So, one of the principles in Sumo is you want to use your opponent's strength against them. And if they push hard, now, go ahead, give them a little pull. And, you know, let them push even harder. And I realized that some of these techniques for overcoming bureaucracy have to do with using bureaucracy actually, on your side, you know, the using the strength of bureaucracy against it. So that's why the sumo wrestler. So, I'll give you examples now on each one, now that I've described my three personalities. So, the monkey does what is sometimes referred to as provoking and inspecting or provoking and observing, in parallel with the Agile principle of inspect and adapt. So, provoke and observe, what the monkey does is try something that's probably outside the rules, or at least is, you know, a borderline and watches what happens. So, an example where we use this is that we have these rules in Homeland Security that essentially said, if you were going to do an IT project, you have to produce 87 documents. And each document had a template, and you have to fill in each section of the template. And these documents would run to hundreds of pages. And so, using the persona of the monkey, let's say, we started to turn in these documents. But in each section of the template, we just wrote a one sentence, one sentence answer, you know, we're very short answer instead of writing pages and pages. And we wanted to see what would happen if we did that, because there was no rule that said, it had to be a really long answer. And eventually, we started to provoke even more, we just left out sections that we thought didn't make any sense for what we were doing. And all of this was unprecedented, you know, it caused a lot of fear. It turned out, and this sometimes happens, that the enforcers of this policy, they were happy when they said, “We've never wanted anybody to write these really long answers to these things, we have to read them. And you know, the intention wasn't to slow people down. As long as you're giving us the right information. That's all we need.” So, in this case, provoking just it turned out that we could defeat a bunch of bureaucracy there, we could, we could make things a lot leaner because nobody objected. But sometimes people do object. And if they do, then you learn exactly what the resistance is, who it is, is resisting, and that gives you valuable information, when you're trying to figure out how to overcome it. So that's the monkey. You know, let's try something a little playful and mischievous, and see what happens. The razor, well, that one follows also on my 87 documents, because we then set up an alternative way of doing things that had only 15 documents. And where there had been 13 gate reviews required for each project. We reduced it to two. And so, all we did, you know, we just used our little razor to trim away all the excess stuff that was in the bureaucratic requirements. And then we showed people that those 15 documents and those two gate reviews accomplished exactly the same thing as the 87 documents and the 13 gate reviews. That's the principle of the razor, that's how the razor works. The sumo wrestler, also a favorite of mine. So, we were trying to convince the bureaucracy to let us do DevOps and to be agile, and it was resisting. And people kept pointing to a policy that said, you can't do these things. And so, we wrote our own policy. And it was a very good bureaucratic policy looked exactly like every bureaucratic document out there. But it essentially said you must use DevOps and you must be agile on it, you know, it set up a perfect bureaucracy around that it's set up ways of checking to make sure everybody was using DevOps. And the theory behind it was the auditors when they came to audit us and said we were being naughty because we were doing DevOps. Their argument was we looked at the policy and we looked at what you're doing, and they were different. And that's the way auditing works. That was the, you know, GAO, the Government Accountability Office, and the Inspector General and all that. So, we figured if we had a policy that said you must do DevOps, and they audited us, well, they would actually be enforcing the policy, you know, they'd be criticizing any part of the organization that was not using DevOps and I thought that's great. So, this is how you use the strength of the bureaucracy against the bureaucracy or not really, against even, you know, it's perfectly good, perfect… Ula Ojiaku:  To help the bureaucracy yeah, to help them to improve, improve the organization. But thinking about the monkey though, being provocative and mischievous, do you think that there has to be an element of you know, relationship and trust in place first, before… you can't just you know… you're new, and you've just gotten through the door and you start being a monkey… you probably will be taken back to wherever you came from! What do you think? Mark Schwartz:  Well, it helps if you're giggling while you do it. But you know, I think the goal here is to figure out the right levers that are going to move things. And sometimes you do have to push a little bit hard, you know, you do need to take people out of their comfort zone. Usually, you want to do these things in a way that takes into account people's feelings, and you know, is likely to move them in the right direction, rather than making them dig in their heels. But I'll give you a couple of examples of Monkey tactics that are less comfortable for people. One is simply, you know, there's a status quo bias. It's a known, well-known cognitive bias; people tend to prefer the status quo or look the other way about it's failings and stuff. So often, when you're trying to make a change, people say, we're fine the way we are, you know, everything's okay. So, one of the things the monkey tries to do is, is to make it clear that the status quo is not acceptable, you know, to show people that it actually if they think about it, it's no good. And so, for example, when we decided to move to the cloud, instead of working in our DHS data center, people said - of course at the time it was a big concern, ‘was the cloud secure enough?' And in the persona of the monkey, the right response is, ‘are we secure enough now?' You know, ‘don't you realize that we're not happy with our security posture today?' ‘It's not like, the cloud has proved itself. I mean, we have to compare our security in the cloud versus our security in the data center. And yes, I'm very sure it'll be better in the cloud and here's why…' But you can't start from the assumption that you are fine right now. In general, when we're talking about the cloud, that's the situation. Companies are using their own data centers. And it's like, you know, we have to teach them that they can do better in the cloud. But the truth is that they're not happy in their own data centers, if they think about it, right? There are security issues, there are performance issues, there are cost issues. And they're aware of those issues, right, they just look the other way. And because they're comfortable with the status quo, so the monkey has to sort of shake people up and say, ‘It's not okay, what you're doing now!' Another example, and this is really harsh, and I wouldn't use it in most cases. But let's say that this was in Homeland Security. Let's say that Homeland Security is enforcing a very bureaucratic process that results in IT projects, taking five years instead of six months. And let's say, you know, the process is there on paper, the rules say, ‘Do this', the people are interpreting the rules in a way that makes things take five years. Sometimes, the monkey has to go to somebody who's in their way and say, ‘We are in the Department of Homeland Security, this IT project is going to make people more secure in the homeland. Are you comfortable with the fact that you are preventing people from being more secure for the next four and a half years, when we could…' You know, it's a matter of personalizing it. And that sometimes is what's necessary to get people to start thinking creatively about how they can change the bureaucracy. You know, ‘I hate to say it, but you're a murderer', you know, essentially is the message. It's a monkey message. And like I said, you know, it's not the preferred way to go about doing things. But if you have to, I mean, the lives of people are at stake, and you've got to find a way to get there. Ula Ojiaku:  So how can leaders because your book, The Art of Business Value, in your book, you said that “leaders create the language of the organization, and they set up incentives and define value in a way that elicits desired outcomes.” So, in essence, I understand that statement to mean that leaders set the tone, and you know, kind of create the environment for things to happen. So, how can leaders implement or apply bureaucracy in a way that enables an organization where, before it was seen as a hindrance, how can they do this? Mark Schwartz:  My thought process was, if we all agree, we're gonna try to maximize business value? How do we know what we mean by it? And I realized, a lot of Agile people, you know, people in our Agile and DevOps community, were being a little bit lazy. You know, they were thinking, ‘Oh, business value, you know, it's returns on investment, or, you know, it's up to the business (to define) what's business value.' The tech people just, you know, do the work of providing a solution. And to me, that's too lazy. If you're going to be agile, be it you have to be more proactive about making sure you're delivering business value. So, you have to understand what it means. You have to actually do the work of, you know, figuring out what it means. And what it means is not at all obvious. And, you know, you might think it has something to do with return on investment or shareholder value or something like that. But when you really closely examine it, that is not the right way to define it, when it comes to deciding what its efforts to prioritize and all that that's, you know, the case that the book makes, and I explain why that's true. Instead, I say you have to think of business value within the context of the business's strategy and its objectives as a business. There's no like, abstract, this has more business value than this because we calculated an ROI or something like that, that doesn't work reprioritizing. It's always asked within the context of a particular business strategy. And the business strategy is a direction from leadership. There might be input from everybody else, but ultimately, you have leaders in the organization who are deciding what the strategic objectives are. So, for example, if you are a traditional bank, or traditional financial services company, and you look around you and you see there are all these new FinTech companies that are disrupting the industry, and you're worried, well there are a lot of different ways you can respond to those disruptive FinTechs. And how you're going to choose to respond depends on your preferences, it depends on the situation of your company, in the industry, the history of your company, all of those things. But of the many ways you can respond to that disruption, you're going to choose one as the leader of your enterprise. Well, what adds business value is whatever supports that direction you choose to go. You can't think of business value outside of that direction, you know. That's the case that I make. So, leaders don't just set the tone and the culture there, they're actually setting strategic direction that determines what has business value. And then the people who are executing the agile teams have to take it upon themselves to make sure that whatever they're doing is going to add business value in that sense.   So, the role of leadership then becomes direction setting and visioning for the future and communicating the vision to the people who are working and providing feedback, you know, on whether things are actually adding business value or not . And that's the key responsibility. Now, in order to do that, in order to motivate people to deliver according to that idea of business value, there are certain techniques as a leader that you have to keep in mind, there are ways that you get people, you get a big organization to sort of follow you. And one of the ones that's become most important to me to think about after talking to a lot of leaders about how they're running their organizations, and what's working, is using middle management as a lever for accomplishing those things. So often, I'll talk to leaders of a business, and they'll say, our problem is the frozen middle, middle management is, you know, they're just not changing the way we want, we want to, we want to cause a big transformation, but middle management is getting in the way. And I tell them, ‘that's pretty much a myth.' You know, ‘that's not actually what's happening, let's look more closely at your organization.' Almost always, middle management is still trying to do the best they can, given the situation that they're in. And the way that you get them to align themselves behind the change is, you change their incentives or their role definition, or how you tell them what you're expecting from them, you don't say “change”, you know, and start doing X and Y, you change what success looks like for their position. And then they adapt to it by becoming engaged and finding ways to get there. So, there's almost always a leadership problem when you have that frozen middle effect. And, and I've seen it work really well that, you know, all of a sudden, you get this big leverage, because you just do a little bit of tweaking of role definitions, and bring everybody into solving the problem. And actually, there's an example, I love to talk about a history book, like I said before, I like to bring in other things, right? It's called the Engineers of Victory. And it's about World War Two, the Allies realized that they had to solve a set of problems, I think there was six or so problems. One of them was how do you land troops on a beach that's heavily defended? They realize they were just not going to be able to win the war until they could do that. But nobody knew how to do it. Because, you know, obviously, the bad guys are there on the beach, they're dug in, they put barbed wire everywhere, and mines, and you know, all this stuff. And it's just going to be a slaughter if you try to land on the beach. So, this book, Engineers of Victory, makes the case that what really won the war, was figuring out those solutions. And who was responsible for figuring out those solutions? It was middle management, basically. It was the, you know, within the structure of the army, it was the people not at the top who had big authority, you know, the generals, and it was not the troops themselves, because they weren't in a position to figure out these things. It was middle management that could see across different parts of the organization that could try things and see whether they worked or not, that, you know, essentially could run their own mini skunkworks projects. And eventually, they came up with the solutions to these problems. So, I think that's very encouraging for the role of middle management, you know, that a lot of problems have to be solved at that layer in order to pull off a transformation. And it really can be done. And this is a beautiful example of it. Ula Ojiaku:  It reminds me of, you know, my experience in a few transformation initiatives. So, the middle, the people who are termed to be in the frozen middle, are, like you said, they want to do what's best for the company, and they show up wanting to do their best work, but it's really about finding out, ‘Where do I fit in, (with) all this change that's happening?' You know, ‘if my role is going away, if the teams are going to be more empowered, that means I'm not telling them what to do, but then what do I do now?' So, the clarity of what the ‘New World' means for them, and what's in it for them, would help, you know, make them more effective. Mark Schwartz: And the mistake that's often made is to say to them, ‘start doing DevOps' or, you know, ‘start doing agile or something.' Because if you don't change the definition of success, or you don't change the incentives that, you know, then it's just, make work and they're going to resist it. You know, if you say your incentive is to get really fast feedback or you know, one of the other goals of DevOps, because of the following reasons, it helps the business this way, so let's try to reduce cycle time as much as possible for producing software. Okay, that's a change in the incentive, or the, you know, the definition of success, rather than just telling somebody you have to do DevOps, you know, read a book and figure it out. Ula Ojiaku:  So, what other books because you mentioned the Engineers of Victory, are there any other books you would recommend for the listener to go check out if they wanted to learn more about what we've talked about today? Mark Schwartz:  Well, I think, you know, obviously, my books referred to War and Peace by Tolstoy, Moby Dick, another great one. You know, you probably need to read my books to figure out why those are the right books to read and Engineers of Victory. As I said, I think that one's a great one. Within the field, there are some DevOps books that that I like a lot, of course, Gene Kim's books, The Phoenix Project, and now The Unicorn Project, the sequel to that. Because those are books that give you a feel for the motivation behind all the things that we do. The Mechanics of Things, there are plenty of books out there that help you learn the mechanics of how to do continuous integration and continuous delivery. And then the cloud is I think it's really transformative. You know, it's the cloud itself is a tremendous enabler. I work at AWS, of course but I'm not saying this because I work at AWS, it's more than I work at AWS because I believe these things. And my teammates have written some good books on the cloud. Reaching Cloud Velocity, for example, by Jonathan Allen and Thomas Blood is a great one for reading up on how the cloud can be transformative. But my other teammates, Gregor Hope, has written a number of books that are really good, Stephen Orban did A Head in the Cloud. So, I think those are all… should be at the top of people's reading lists. And then, of course, I recommend my books, because they make me laugh, and they might make you laugh, too. Ula Ojiaku:  Definitely made me laugh, but they've also given me things to think about from a new perspective. So, I totally agree. And so, where can people find you if they want to reach out to you? Mark Schwartz:  Yeah, LinkedIn is a great place to find me. If you're with a company that is an AWS customer, feel free to talk to your account manager, the sales team from AWS and ask them to put you in touch with me, is another easy way. LinkedIn is kind of where I organize my world from so find me there. Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. Sounds great. And any final words for the audience or for the listeners. Mark Schwartz:  Um, I, I have found that these things that you want to do to take advantage of the digital world, and I think we're all sort of pointing ourselves in that direction, there are these amazing things you can do in the digital world. They're sometimes challenging to get there, but it's very possible to get there. And one thing I've learned a lot at Amazon is the idea of working backwards, you know, you get that picture in your head for where you want to be and then you say to yourself, ‘I can get there. Let me work backwards and figure out what I have to do in order to get there.' And you might be wrong, you know, you should test hypotheses, you start moving in the right direction, and of course, correct as you need to. But you can do it with confidence that others are doing it and you can too no matter what your organization is, no matter how much you think you're a snowflake and you know different from every other organization. You can still do it. And with just some good intention and good thinking you can figure out how to how to get there. Ula Ojiaku:  Thank you so much, Mark. That was a great close for this conversation and again, I really appreciate your making the time for this interview. Thank you. Mark Schwartz: Thanks for having me. Ula Ojiaku: You're welcome.  

“Bureaucracy in itself is neither good nor bad. However, it often gets in the way and prevents important things you need to do. A good bureaucracy is lean, learning, and enabling." Mark Schwartz is an Enterprise Strategist at AWS and the author of multiple books from IT Revolution. In this episode, we discuss his two latest books on the topics of bureaucracy and ethics. Mark begins by sharing his perspective on the impact of bureaucracy on digital transformation. He explains the definition of bureaucracy and why it tends to have a negative connotation. Mark describes the characteristics of a good bureaucracy and how leaders can play an important role in managing bureaucracy. Next, Mark shares his reasons for writing about ethics in his latest book, why it is becoming more relevant in the digital world, and how leaders can make better ethical decisions in the current fast-paced business world.   Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:01:22] State of Digital Transformation - [00:04:33] Bureaucracy - [00:08:31] Bureaucracy and Process Improvement - [00:13:14] IT as the Biggest Bureaucrats - [00:15:30] Bureaucracy Creates Business Value - [00:18:09] Characteristics of Good Bureaucracy - [00:20:40] Leaders' Roles Towards Bureaucracy - [00:26:05] Writing About Ethics - [00:34:10] How to Make Ethical Decisions - [00:41:12] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:54:21] _____ Mark Schwartz's BioMark Schwartz is an iconoclastic CIO and a playful crafter of ideas, an inveterate purveyor of lucubratory prose. He has been an IT leader in organizations small and large, public, private, and nonprofit. As an Enterprise Strategist for Amazon Web Services, he uses his CIO experience to bring strategies to enterprises or enterprises to strategies, and bring both to the cloud. As the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices. Mark speaks frequently on innovation, bureaucratic implications of DevOps, and using Agile processes in low-trust environments. With a BS in computer science from Yale, a master's in philosophy from Yale, and an MBA from Wharton, Mark is either an expert on the business value of IT or else he just thinks about it a lot. Follow Mark: LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/innovativecio _____ Our Sponsors Manning Publications is a premier publisher of technical books on computer and software development topics for both experienced developers and new learners alike. Manning prides itself on being independently owned and operated, and for paving the way for innovative initiatives, such as early access book content and protection-free PDF formats that are now industry standard.Get a 45% discount for Tech Lead Journal listeners by using the code techlead45 for all products in all formats. Like this episode? Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/171. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Buy me a coffee or become a patron.

Orthopedic Surgeon with Burlington County Orthopedic Specialists Dr. Mark Schwartz discusses Eagles injuries to DeVonta Smith and Avonte Maddox. Presented by NovaCare Rehabilitation. 

The Morning Crew discusses the abysmal Eagles defense, and bring in Dr. Mark Schwartz for The NovaCare Injury Report.

Dr. Mark Schwartz is an Orthopedic Surgeon with Burlington County Orthopedic Specialists located in Mt Laurel, NJ. Dr Schwartz is Co-Director of Virtua Health's Sports Medicine Program. He is also Chief of Orthopedics and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Virtua Memorial Hospital.

Eagles/Commanders reaction hour 2: The Morning team is joined by Dr. Mark Schwartz with the NovaCare injury report. The team continue to get reactions of the Eagles/Commanders game. AJ Brown's taunting penalty almost cost the Eagles the victory. Plus the Merrill Montage.

Join Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist, AWS, author of Adaptive Ethics for Digital Transformation, as he dives into discussing the book and how to navigate ethics and business in the digital age.

L.D. Salmanson is a repeat entrepreneur who has been through spinoffs, acquisitions, and is now building his biggest company yet. His new venture, Cherre, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Mark Schwartz, Glilot Capital Partners, Trustbridge Partners, and Navitas Capital.

Hello Interactors,I've been absent the last few weeks. First our kids were back for spring break and then I was off to the American Association of Geographers (AAG) national conference in Denver, Colorado. Both were fun, exhilarating, and inspiring and I'm bursting with things to write about!We're officially in spring here in the northern hemisphere. I now turn to cartography and the role mapmaking plays in shaping how we interact with people and place. There will be themes of cartography in this initial spring post, but first I'm offering my impressions of the conference.As interactors, you're special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You're also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let's go…BURRITO BOYS“It's got a nice kick to it”, he said, as I sat down to join him for breakfast. He introduced himself as Mark. He lifted his attendee badge that hung around his neck. It read, Mark Schwartz. We broke the awkwardness by talking men's basketball. The Kansas Jayhawks, my mom's beloved team, had recently been eliminated from the NCAA tournament. He informed me he got his PhD from Kansas in 1985 and is now teaching and researching at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in the geography department.Mark is a climatologist. More specifically, he's one of the foremost experts in phenoclimatology which looks at the effects of climate change on seasonal variability. We humans look to the calendar to tell us when spring arrives, but what if you're an ant or a plant? They already know, so phenologists look for the biological responses to seasonal changes. Phenology comes from two Greek words that roughly combine to mean ‘the study of bringing to light'.Mark co-founded the National Phenology Network (NPN). This is where the world turns to see when spring is officially arriving across the United States. Including journalists. Here's a story in the Washington Post on this spring's arrival and the NPN website. It features quotes from Mark.“‘What I like to tell folks is that you still need to be prepared for considerable variation from year to year. You won't simply be able to start planting your garden earlier each year…”Before long, another gray-haired man joined us. I observed older attendees at this conference naturally congregated. Gerontology...from geron and logia (the study of old men). Our new guest introduced himself as Ron. I could tell he was older than Mark and myself and I was right. When I was three years old, in 1968, Ron Abler was getting his PhD in Geography from the University of Minnesota. Soon after, in 1971, he was the lead author on an influential geography textbook on spatial organization. He went on to teach and conduct research at Pennsylvania State University and was the President of the AAG from 1985-86. There's an AAG award named after Ron, the Ronald F. Abler Distinguished Service Honors. Mark was a recipient in 2005.We were soon joined by another older gentleman, but closer to my age. He introduced himself as Joseph and I read his badge as Joseph Oppong. He was the recipient of the Abler award in 2021 and studies medical geography at North Texas State University. He received his masters in 1986 and PhD in 1992 from the University of Alberta in Canada and his bachelor's at the University of Ghana in 1982. Joseph was one of a few at the conference of African descent, but like the rest of America the geographic, cultural, and biological diversity of this academic community is increasing. This was apparent in my first session of the first day of the conference.JUST GEOGRAPHYThe morning before my breakfast with the burrito boys, I attended a panel consisting of four young academic women of Indigenous, Hispanic, Black, and mixed heritage. It included Fantasia Painter, an Assistant Professor of Global and International Studies at UC Irvine, Elyse Hatch-Rivera, a student seeking a law degree at Macalester in Minnesota, Gabriella Subia Smith, a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Colorado, and Dr. Danielle Purifoy, a geography professor at the University of North Carolina with a law degree from Harvard.Fantasia's paper: Our Lands, Your Lines: How Inter and Intra National Borders Try and Fail to Contain Indigenous Land. She argues “that inherent in the idea of “the desert” is the undoing of the settler colonial bordering project. This is not a desert. This is O'odham land.” Elyse's paper: The Right to Secure: The 100 Mile Border and the Making of a Carceral Geography. She “explores the emergence of the 100-mile border zone (HMBZ) in order to argue that the U.S. has expanded its borders inward and redefined notions of national security and our modern understanding of human rights.”Gabriella's paper: The Evolution of Colorado's Third District. She argues “Looking at the evolution of congressional districts can help us to better understand both the possibilities for equitable political representation and the limits of borders for fixing politics in place.”Danielle's paper: Setting [Futile] Boundaries: Black Municipalities in the White Settler State. She uses two case studies showing how decades work of “scholars of law, geography, and political science have taken up the social, political, and environmental impacts of this largely white municipal practice of geopolitical exclusion on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.”Here's a video of Fantasia introducing herself and her work at UC IrvineThe conference theme was Toward More Just Geographies and this session was a fitting kick-off. It was titled Futile Borders: Why Borders Fail and How Borders Function in the Incomplete Project of Settler Colonialism. These scholars, all of whom have a legal focus to their work, challenged the popular and simplified notion of borders as articulated in both popular culture and the legal text of the United States. They drew attention to the violence these words perpetuate through legal acts of interdiction, deterrence, and deportation.The panel description cites research pointing to “[s]ettler state violence and legal-spatial violence” that “permeate borders through border enforcement practices of surveillance and detention and also through attempts to map over Indigenous lands and nations by creating colonial certainty over jurisdiction and national membership.”While these laws exists to protect the rights of some “it is through law, legal decision-making, and formal processes, policies, and practices that legal-spatial border violence is enacted and sustained.” It is the law, as currently written, that “help to form, manage, and control borders and mobility [that] weaponize state violence and operate to assert settler legal authority.”During the discussion, one of the presenters positioned legal text as a form of fiction that feature fantasy borders on maps that ignore the non-fiction realities of plant and animal existence, persistence, and relationships – including with humans. These fictions provide the “legal reach of the state [to] extend externally and outwards in order to preserve imperial power while regulating and restricting immigration and mobility through racialized strategies.”This panel was a powerful introduction to the conference. It featured perspectives of bright, ambitious academic women of color who are bringing miles and piles of fresh knowledge to the academy and students. Many similar sessions were offered by women and BIPOC scholars who seek to challenge traditional institutional geographic histories, knowledge, and perspectives pervasive in the field of geography. I attended at least one a day for five days straight, but there were so many I couldn't attend them all.The field of geography, and cartography in particular, was invented in large part to discern and delineate the natural world for the purpose of dispossession and ownership of land and people for and by private and government actors. As one attendee told me, “Cartography barely has a just leg to stand on.” Consequently, these forums and platforms act as a mirror to the discipline of geography. They offer opportunities for scholars and practitioners to become more self-aware, reflective, and critical of geography's past and future. If sustained, this focus, attention, and prioritization of pluralized perspectives has the power to transform the discipline – to tilt the world toward more just geographies.It's a tilting earth that brings about seasonal change. Mark Shwartz and his team of geographers maintain a map that chronicles the bringing of light to the natural world. It offers no human bias, no imperial agenda, and reveals just how fictional borders really are. Phenoclimatology reveals human-induced climate change is causing spring's arrival to become increasingly meteorologically erratic and extreme.Many scholars at this conference pointed to how settler-state induced human and environmental violence have contributed to these climatic changes. They also showed how these forms of legal, economic, and spatial geographies are causing increasingly erratic and extreme societal injustices and imbalances. They're chronicling and remapping a discipline by bringing light to the world of geography. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Dr. Mark Schwartz, Chief of Orthopedics and Surgery joins the show to talk about Hurts' injury and a few updates another players including RT Lane Johnson

Hour 2 of today's show. We go through some week 18 NFL action. Eliot Shorr-Parks and Orthopedic Specialist Dr. Mark Schwartz join the show!

For this episode we talk to Herman Mark Schwartz on a wide range of issues - from biopolitics, industrial policy, and the New Cold War political economy to why "financialization" is a limited analytical frame for recent history. Mark argues that conflict between firms over profits is just as important - if not moreso - than conflict between capital and labor over the consumption share. The shift from midcentury "Fordism" to today's three-tiered economic structure happened as the result of a "Kalecki moment" in the late-1960s and early-1970s: workers, women, and the third world wanted more, and corporate strategy transformed to meet, and rebuff, their challenges.*** LINKS ***You can find his faculty profile here: https://politics.virginia.edu/people/profile/schwartzAnd the articles we discussed today here: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/author/herman-mark-schwartz/and here: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/manufacturing-stagnation/

We are just back from The Value Flywheel Effect book launch at DevOps Enterprise Summit organised by IT Revolution with Gene Kim and crew. We had a great week doing our book launch. It was great to see the buzz and the content. But getting handed the first copy of The Value Flywheel Effect book made it very real! There was a shelf full of IT Revolution books in chronological order. Like DevOps, Enterprise Handbook, Accelerate, Team Topologies and all the Mark Schwartz and Dominica DeGrandis books. And The Unicorn Project and The Phoenix Project. It was unbelievable to see our book sitting alongside all of those books. Learning Sprint The first thing I did was a learning sprint. I did an hour on creating a cloud strategy with Wardley mapping, which I thought was interesting. I used Ben Mosior's Wardley map canvas from LearnWardleyMapping.com. And it was great taking people through that. Once people start connecting the elements of the value chain, they can start to ask why is that over there and not over here? Then you're into a nice conversation. Once they get beyond the terminology, notation and syntax, they are asking interesting, challenging questions. The canvas is a great way to get people thinking quickly. They start gaining insights and seeing what they may not have before using the canvas or map. And you can give them tips. People deliberate over who is the exact customer. Or the actual customer and their needs. People can get very micro at the start. And you say just pick one and keep moving. Just keep pushing through, because you can always add more later. You are getting people to move quickly. And you are giving people a couple of steers. But the first 20 minutes is complete confusion. What are we doing here? And then once you draw the map out, people go 'Ah right!'. And then when you start to plot movement and inertia, that's when people get really excited. And it becomes crystal clear. Creating the Value Flywheel Effect Talk I deliberated on what to do for my talk because I wanted to do something different. So I decided on 'Creating the Value Flywheel Effect' looking at how came up with this stuff. So I did an intro to the book. And then I told the story through maps, similar to our Map Camp talk. I started with one of the drawings we had done five or six years ago. Which was a scribbled messy drawing of a map. And I contrasted with the map in the book to show the evolution of the map. So it was a nice mechanism to tell the story. Some people think that maps come out fully formed. But they never do. There is lots of variation and challenge. We always challenge each other. And we revisit, rub stuff out and draw it again. When we validate certain things we always go back to the map. It's not the map. It's the communication! And the interactions. The maps are always wrong at the start. People try to go out of their way to create the perfect map. But that's not the point of the exercise. The Value Flywheel Effect Book Signing I did the book signing in the main theatre. There were 4 different book signings. So you hope to see people queue up because you don't want to end up standing on your own. But there was a huge queue and I was there for two hours signing 200 books. People were really nice and they were really excited. And lots of other speakers queued up as well. Propelo sponsored our book signing and they were great. So now the book is in the wild with 200 plus people! So we're starting to get feedback from people who weren't in the early previews. It was fantastic to see Dominica DeGrandis' comments on LinkedIn. She wrote the book: 'Making Work Visible'. It is a brilliant book about visualising flow. She has a couple of posts about our book: 'The Value Flywheel Effect'. And she popped up a maps from her LinkedIn called 'Mapping Psychological Safety'. It was the name of the post on her blog: DDeGrandis.com. And she said that it had never occurred to her to map psychological safety. I thought that was insightful. We would map stuff like that all the time. There's no boundaries to what we map. Psychological safety is usually the base or foundation of the map. Mapping, safety or challenge are things that are quite hard to see. But they are the most important thing for everything that comes above it. The thing at the very top, which is the need, is usually the least important because it is the end product. It's built into the flywheel. You need an environment where it's safe to challenge. And having safety to challenge requires psychological safety. It's cool that it's resonating with people and they're starting to zero in on those sorts of things. DevOps Enterprise Summit was a great event. Look up the slides on GitHub. All the videos are on videos.itrevolution.com. Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect  Follow us on Twitter @ServerlessEdge

Dr. Mark Schwartz joins us to go over some of the injuries from week 1.

One 97 Communications, one of India's biggest digital payments companies, which operates under the brand name Paytm, has appointed GS Sundararajan, former group director of Shriram group as an independent director on its board, the company told the stock exchanges on Aug.27. Byju's, after 17-month delay is set to report FY21 financials on Sep. 6. And some details may have emerged about Apple's long-rumoured mixed reality headset. Notes: One 97 Communications, one of India's biggest digital payments companies, which operates under the brand name Paytm, has appointed GS Sundararajan, former group director of Shriram group as an independent director on its board, the company told the stock exchanges on Aug.27. The company also announced the retirement of independent director Mark Schwartz, upon completion of his tenure. Previously, Schwartz had served as chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia Pacific. Paytm is “confident that with continued revenue growth, an increasing mix of higher margin businesses such as loan distribution, and better operating leverage, it is firmly on track to achieve operating EBITDA profitability by the quarter ending September 2023,” the company said in its filing. Byju's, India's biggest ed-tech company and its most valued startup, has informed its debt investors that it is likely to finalise its audited financial results for FY21, approved by auditor Deloitte, by September 6, Economic Times reports, citing people briefed on the matter. India's Ministry of Corporate Affairs has asked Byju's parent Think & Learn to explain the 17-month delay in filing its audited accounts, Bloomberg reported on Aug. 25. Byju's investors include Sequoia Capital, Bond, Tiger Global, BlacRrock, Silver Lake, Naspers, and Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. It is privately valued at $22 billion, according to the Bloomberg report, which cites market researcher CB Insights. Flipkart will invest more than Rs. 3,600 crores in the next three years to set up three new giant automated fulfilment centres, Economic Times reports. This includes one in Manesar which is under construction and two new ones, which would come up in South and West Bengal respectively, Flipkart Group's senior vice president and head of supply chain Hemant Badri, told ET. Some details may have emerged about Apple's rumoured virtual reality headsets, in trademark filings spotted by Bloomberg, The Verge reports, citing a Bloomberg report that is behind a paywall. The filings suggest Apple might incorporate “Reality” in the name and branding of its long-rumoured mixed reality headset. Three separate filings show trademarks for “Reality One,” “Reality Pro,” and “Reality Processor,” matching the realityOS name that shows up in Apple's code and a trademark application that potentially refers to the headset's operating system, according to The Verge. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

In this episode, Herman Mark Schwartz of the University of Virginia discusses why the US Dollar has remained the central world currency despite the fact that the US is persistently running current account deficits

In this episode, we are joined by Mark Schwartz, a Shoe Designer and Artist who began his design career in the early 1980s in his early twenties with a 7-year-long run with a shoe design master - Roger Vivier. Vivier also introduced him to Andy Warhol. Warhol mentored Schwartz for about four years before his death and taught Schwartz to make actual paintings of his shoe designs. Schwartz has designed shoes for the likes of Oprah, Madonna, Katie Couric, Angelica Huston, Sharon Stone, Wendy Williams, Lady Gaga, Ralph Lauren, Balenciaga, Gucci, Jean Claude Jitrois, Calvin Klein, Richard Tyler, Mark Eisen, Balenciaga, Gucci, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Chanel, Hermes as well as being a ghost designer for more than several of the most famous footwear designers in our time. Tune in to learn more!

You can listen to the radio show every morning on WLS AM 890, and I hope you do! Here are a few of the highlights from this week.Illinois Congressman Mike Quigley is back from Ukraine with details on the war and meeting with President Zelensky. Highly decorated Gen. Mark Schwartz and SOTF CEO, Lt. Tommy Stoner, talked about guiding our best to their post military lives. Then my son Ross Cochran explained how, and why, we need to help fix foster care in Illinois and everywhere SHOW NOTESSupport Let it Be Us however you can, and check out their new podcast!Listen to me on the radio weekday mornings from 5:30-9:00 on WLS AM 890, online, on your smart speaker, or on the TuneIn Radio App! Subscribe to Live From My Office on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.Follow Steve on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.Win an ABT gift card by emailing me three of your friends emails who you think would like the show, and include your mailing address in the email. Check out the details here.Email the show with any questions, comments, or plugs for your favorite charity.

 Read on for today's agenda below prepared by David (thank you very much). - Retired US Diplomat to 5 different nations  David Hunter shares his knowledge, passion, interest, and experience. 1)Ukraine Missiles Strike Russian City of Belgorad 25 miles from Ukraine's Border: After months of being attacked by Russian missiles and artillery, including strikes on schoolhouses, hospitals, shopping malls and residential buildings, Ukraine seems to have struck back inside Russian territory. Russians seem shocked by such Ukrainian 'ruthless brutality'. Is this justified for what Russia has done?2)Russia Starting 'Show Trial' of US Basketball Star Brittney Griner: Ms. Griner was arrested while arriving back in Russia to play on a Russian women's basketball team. She allegedly carried vape cartridges which had cannibus or hash-oil residue in them. If convicted, she may face 10 yrs in Russian prison. However, a 'prisoner swap' also seems likely. What's going on here--is Ms. Griner being 'framed'?3)Why Does Putin Lie about Who Were His Parents?: The question of Putin's parents is vague. He claims he was raised in Leningrad by a Soviet hero of WWII. But he may have been born the illegitimate son of a Georgian woman, Anna Putina, and later adopted by distant relatives. If so, could this explain his warped, cold, insensitive personality? What do you think?4)US Security Coordinator at US Embassy in Jerusalem Concluded Israeli Army Did Not 'Intentionally' Target American- Palestinian Journalist in Killing: Just released 'investigation' results by Lt. Gen. Mark Schwartz---- who is in charge of the USSC, part of the State Department reporting directly to Secretary of State Blinkin, and was given access to the bullet that killed Shareen,---- concluded the bullet was too badly damaged to determine from what type weapon it was fired, but that the shot likely came from Israeli Army's location. What do you think, is Biden Administration engaged in 'whitewashing' the killing of an American citizen?

Karim Anani, EY Americas Financial Accounting and Advisory Services Transactions Leader, and Mark Schwartz, Head of IPO and SPAC Capital Markets Advisory, join Winna Brown to explore why SPACs remain highly relevant despite market volatility and regulatory headwinds. Contact Karim: karim.anani@ey.com  Contact Mark: mark.schwartz1@ey.com  In 2021, more than 40% of new public companies listed through mergers with SPACs. While SPACs have been around for decades, the boom of the last few years has dominated its narrative in the marketplace. Today, there are hundreds of SPACs seeking “transactable” targets that face potential liquidation in the next year or so if deals aren't made.  Against this backdrop, SPAC sponsors are operating in an extremely choppy market environment for SPACs and other new issues, and recently proposed SEC regulation has increased uncertainty in an already uneasy deal-making environment. Today's episode explores why SPACs remain highly relevant in EY dialogue with operating companies and their backers despite the market and regulatory headwinds. What is in store for SPACs over the next one to two years and beyond? Recent innovation and complexity in SPAC mergers Evolving negotiation dynamics in recent dealmaking processes Ongoing evolution of what makes an attractive operating company for a SPAC merger Transforming and adapting of SPACs in the face of the current challenges

In this episode, Prof. Mark Schwartz of UVA discusses the cause of reductions in US economic growth since 1970, arguing that industrial organization plays a key role.

Continuing our series on managing for ecosystem transformation, we sit down with Dr. Mark Schwartz, a plant ecologist at UC Davis, and Aviv Karasov-Olson, a PhD candidate at UC Davis, to discuss a new tool for assessing the biotic risks associated with a managed relocation project (also referred to as assisted migration). Managed relocation is the act of deliberately relocating, or translocating, a species outside of its historic range to meet conservation goals, especially in response to climate change. Image credit: USFWS Midwest Region.Relevant links:National Park Service: Managed Relocation (Includes links to both the report and the worksheet described in this episode)Karasov‐Olson, Aviv, et al. "Co‐development of a risk assessment strategy for managed relocation." Ecological Solutions and Evidence 2.3 (2021): e12092.If you're enjoying this podcast, please consider rating us and/or leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts, Podcast Addict, or Podchaser Thanks!Follow us on Twitter @RainShinePodNever miss an episode! Sign up to get an email alert whenever a new episode publishes (http://eepurl.com/hRuJ5H)Have a suggestion for a future episode? Please tell us!Come Rain or Shine affiliate links:DOI Southwest CASC: https://www.swcasc.arizona.edu/USDA Southwest Climate Hub: https://www.climatehubs.usda.gov/hubs/southwestSustainable Southwest Beef Project: https://southwestbeef.org/

Dr. Mark Schwartz helps walk us through the Joel Embiid injury.

In this special Thematic Investing Series episode, we go beyond buzzwords in the media with my guests, Mark Schwartz and Nick Cucci. Mark advises early-stage startups and co-founded PDT, a Chicago-based product development firm. Nick leads business development at PDT and helps clients identify new opportunities for innovation. Mark and Nick were perfect guests to follow up my Thematic Investing Series, diving deeper into common buzzwords like “innovation” or “disruption” and the confusion I see around them lately. Each day, Mark and Nick help companies navigate the complex process from concept to commercialization. They give us a look under the hood of innovation, help us understand what these buzzwords mean, and how innovation actually happens. Mark and Nick will talk about R&D and why it's important for businesses to spend money or risk falling behind competitors. We also discuss emerging technologies such as LiFi, an alternative to WiFi, to securely transmit data at ultra-fast speeds using the light spectrum. Enjoy! --- For more information: - Ryan Hitchcock: www.rhitch.com - PDT, an Astronics Company: www.pdt.com - Nick Cucci: www.cucci.xyz - Mark Schwartz: https://www.markschwartz.rocks    Ryan Hitchcock Financial Planner High Point Capital Group Direct: 414-253-4611 rhitch@hpcg.com   Investing involves risk including the potential loss of principal. No investment strategy can guarantee a profit or protect against loss in periods of declining values. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.  Securities and investment advisory services offered through SagePoint Financial, Inc. (SPF), member FINRA/SIPC. SPF is separately owned and other entities and/or marketing names, products or services referenced here are independent of SPF.  1200 N. Mayfair Rd., Suite 300, Milwaukee, WI 53226. Phone: 414-253-4600.  

Guest Bio: Mark Schwartz joined AWS as an Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist in July 2017. In this role, Mark works with enterprise technology executives to share experiences and strategies for how the cloud can help them increase speed and agility while devoting more of their resources to their customers. Mark has extensive experience as an IT leader in the government, private sector, and the nonprofit world, and with organizations ranging from startup to large. Prior to joining AWS, he was CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (in the Department of Homeland Security), where he led a large digital transformation effort, moving the agency to the cloud, introducing and refining DevOps and Agile techniques, and adopting user-centric design approaches. From his work at USCIS, he developed a reputation for leading transformation in organizations that are resistant to change, obsessed with security, subject to considerable regulation and oversight, and deeply bureaucratic. Before USCIS, Mark was CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange, a leader in global youth exchange programs, and CEO of a software company. Mark is the author of The Art of Business Value , A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility, War, Peace and IT and The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy. Mark speaks at conferences internationally on such subjects as DevOps, Leading Change, Driving Innovation in IT, and Managing Agility in Bureaucratic Organizations. He has been recognized as a Computerworld Premier IT Leader and received awards for Leadership in Technology Innovation, the Federal 100 IT Leaders, and a CIO Magazine 100 award. Mark has both a BS and MA degree from Yale University, and an MBA from Wharton.   Social Media/ Website: Mark's LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/innovativecio Mark's AWS Executive Insights page with links to all his blogs posts and books https://aws.amazon.com/ar/executive-insights/enterprise-strategists/mark-schwartz/  Books/ Resources: The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor and the Sumo Wrestler by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/Delicate-Art-Bureaucracy-Transformation-Wrestler-ebook/dp/B086XM4WCK/ The Art of Business Value by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Business-Value-Mark-Schwartz/dp/1942788045 A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seat-Table-Leadership-Age-Agility/dp/1942788118/ War, Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Peace-Business-Leadership-Technology/dp/1942788711 Reaching Cloud Velocity: A Leader's Guide to Success in the AWS Cloud by Jonathan Allen et al https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reaching-Cloud-Velocity-Leaders-Success/dp/B086PTDP51 Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT by Stephen Orban https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ahead-Cloud-Practices-Navigating-Enterprise-ebook/dp/B07BYQTGJ7 Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy https://www.amazon.co.uk/Engineers-Victory-Problem-Solvers-Turned-ebook/dp/B00ADNPCC0 The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phoenix-Project-Devops-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290/ The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unicorn-Project-Disruption-Redshirts-Overthrowing/dp/1942788762   Interview Transcript Ula Ojiaku:  Mark, thank you so much for making the time for this conversation. Mark Schwartz: Thank you, my pleasure. Ula Ojiaku: Great. Now let's start with you know, the question I usually ask my guests: who's Mark? What makes him tick? Mark Schwartz:  And they can answer that question. It's not a hard one. where to start? Um, you know, I always enjoy my work. That's a thing about me. I like to think that people have fun working with me because I tend to laugh a lot. And even you know, when the work is boring, I find ways to make it interesting. I just enjoy doing things and accomplishing things. I think if we're going to talk about my books, and some of the things I've done later, an important thing to realize is that, I started out, you know, when I went, when I was in high school, when I went to college, I was pretty sure I wanted to study computer science and get involved with these computer things. But when I was actually studying, I realized there were all these other interesting areas, I'm just, you know, endlessly curious. And so, I wound up studying all kinds of other things, in addition. And the result was that when I finished college, I decided to go to graduate school in philosophy. And I spent a few years getting a master's degree in philosophy. And the fact that I'm curious about so many things and read so many different things, I think it enters into a lot of what I do. I like to pull analogies from non-IT related fields and, and, and I'll call upon all the things I've learned in all sorts of different areas, as I'm writing and speaking and working. Ula Ojiaku:  It shines through in your book, definitely. Mark Schwartz:  Yes, I think it does. That's partly an explanation for what you see in my books. I think, um, you know, I sometimes say that I have trouble reading business books generally. Because I kind of find them boring. They tend to make the same point over and over again, and to be very just so one directional, you know, just on the same subject, and it's a little bit odd because in every other subject, the books tend to refer to other books in other fields and there's this extra dimension and that helps you understand what the author is getting at. But in business books, they, you know, aside from having a quote now and then from a famous leader or something, they don't tend to do that, they don't, they don't sort of call upon the whole history of literature and writing. And so, I have a little bit of fun in writing my books in trying to see if I can add an extra dimension just by reference and by bringing in other things that are a little bit orthogonal to the subject matter. Ula Ojiaku:  And that kind of, you know, brings home the point that life isn't black and white. It's actually a complex or a complex kind of, you know, maze and of different disciplines, different ideologies and different viewpoints that make it what it is really. Mark Schwartz:  Yeah well, of course, that was part of the fun of my recent book on Bureaucracy. You know, because I know we all, we want to throw up when we encounter bureaucracy, you know, it disturbs us in so many ways. And one of the things I wanted to say in the book is, well, actually bureaucracy is all around you all the time in unexpected places and it usually doesn't drive you crazy, actually. Yeah... Ula Ojiaku:  Well, I have a lot of questions for you on your book, The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy, which is a catchy, catchy title on its own, very clever. But before we get to that, what do you do when you're not working? I know, you said you love work and you've also said that you're curious about so many things, which means that you read broadly - that's my interpretation. So, what do you do when you're not ‘working'? Mark Schwartz:  Yes, I read broadly, is one thing. In the past, I played the guitar a lot. And I don't quite as much lately. I don't know why, you know, I'll start doing it again. I'm sure at some point. But while I was living in San Francisco, I was actually playing in bars and coffee shops, I have a singer, who I performed with. Ula Ojiaku: Really? Wow! Mark Schwartz: And that was really fun. And then the other thing I do is travel, I've really traveled a lot. And, yeah, there was one period in my life where for about five years, I was bumming around the world with a backpack with you know, occasional returns to the States to work a little bit and make some money and then go traveling again. So, one of the joys of my current job is that, I get to do a lot of traveling to interesting places. Ula Ojiaku:  So, where would you say is your ideal getaway destination? Mark Schwartz:  Oh, let's see. I'm a big fan of Brazil. That, I have good friends there and it's really nice to see them and the atmosphere is always kind of fun there. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. Mark Schwartz: I don't know what I've discovered so many places around the world that I've really loved being. I lived in Japan for a year and that is a place that I love to go to, especially for the food. Yeah, I like good food. But I don't know I've found so many places that made me feel like I'd like to spend more time there. And of course, you can't really spend more time everywhere. Ula Ojiaku:  Interesting. So, let's, let's go to your book, “The Art of Delicate Bureaucracy”. What was the inspiration behind that book? Mark Schwartz:  Well, for all of my books, before I wrote, before I wrote them, I was thinking, ‘why hasn't anybody else written a book on this topic?' People don't write books on bureaucracy, at least not, you know, popular books, there are academic books on bureaucracy. And the same thing happened to me with my first book, “The Art of Business Value”, where I said to myself, we keep talking about business value in the IT world, like, is it obvious what it means? You know, what, why isn't anybody writing a book about what business value means? So, bureaucracy is one of those things. I have a lot of experience with it first of all, I was a CIO in a government agency. But it turns out, it's not just the government, whenever I tell people about my government experience, when I speak at a conference, people come up to me afterwards and say, ‘Oh, my company's just like that. I work for a financial services company; we have lots of bureaucracy'. And I work with a lot of people who are trying to pull off some sort of digital transformation, which is change on a big scale, that's changing traditional organizations on a big scale. And bureaucracy is always in their way because bureaucracy tends to resist change; it strongly tends to resist change. So, if you're doing a big change, then you're probably going to come up against it. So, I thought maybe with my experience as a bureaucrat, or at least experience in the big bureaucracy, I could give some pointers to people who are trying to cause big change, and yet are facing bureaucratic obstacles. And I can't imagine that there's any organization, at least any large organization that does not have bureaucratic obstacles to digital transformation. So, that got me started on it. And then as I started to think about bureaucracy and research it, I realized this is actually a really interesting topic. Ula Ojiaku:  You had an interesting introduction to the book. You said, “we are bureaucrats all.” Why that claim, you actually were saying, everyone is a bureaucrat, and I know you made a statement that's similar to that earlier on in this conversation - why? Mark Schwartz:  Well, of course, I have to define in the book, what I mean by bureaucracy and all that. And I follow the generally what's accepted as the academic definition. It mostly comes from the sociologist Max Vabre, who is writing around 1920. And, and he talks a lot about bureaucracy, and it's fairly complicated, but I simplify it in the book. Basically, what it comes down to is a bureaucracy is a way of organizing socially, that has rigid formal roles for people and rigid formal rules. And that's the essence of it. You know, bureaucracy, there are rules and they have to be applied uniformly to everybody. And there's a division of labor and you know, a hierarchy. So, it has rigid roles of people who have to sign off on things and approve things. So, with that is the definition. I think it, it connects with the very human tendency to try to structure things and constantly improve them and optimize them. So, if you find a good way of doing something, you tend to turn it into a rule, you know, this is the way it should be done from now on. Ula Ojiaku: Best practice! Mark Schwartz: It's the best practice. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also, we, in, social organization, we'd like people to be accountable or responsible for things. And we know that you can't hold somebody accountable unless they have authority to perform their role. So, when you put those things together, it's very natural for us to set up these organizational systems, where we assign roles to people, and give them authority, and we make rules that encapsulate the best way to do things. And, essentially, that's bureaucracy. So, bureaucracy, I find, is everywhere around us in one form or another. But it doesn't drive us crazy most of the time, so we don't notice it. Ula Ojiaku:  Maybe if it's serving us, then we wouldn't notice it. But… Mark Schwartz:  It does serve. And if you look at the cases where it does drive us crazy, they have certain things in common. And in the book, I say there are three characteristics that bureaucracies often take on which they don't need to, it's not part of the definition of bureaucracy, but they often take on these characteristics. And it's those three characteristics that are what drive us crazy. And so, the goal, ultimately is to eliminate those three characteristics or turn them into something else. Ula Ojiaku: I know that the listeners would be curious to know what the three characteristics of bureaucracy that drive us crazy are? Is that so or should I just tell them go buy the book? Mark Schwartz: Yeah, go buy the book! Well, let me tell you the three characteristics, and also their opposite, which is what we really want. So, the first characteristic that drives us crazy, I think, is that bureaucracies tend to be bloated instead of lean, that would be the opposite in my view. There's no reason why a bureaucracy has to be bloated and wasteful. It could be lean, but it's one of those things that bureaucracy tends to become. So that's the first one. The second one is that bureaucracies tend to petrify, as opposed to learning. So, when I say petrifies, I mean that the rules and the bureaucracy don't change, or don't change as often as they should, or don't change continuously, which is really what rules should do. Now, that's not necessarily a characteristic of bureaucracy, but the definition, the definition says the rules have to be applied rigorously. You know, once you have a rule, everybody has to follow it. But it doesn't say that the rules have to stay the same forever, they can change. The opposite of a petrified bureaucracy is a learning bureaucracy, where the rules are constantly adjusted, based on what the people in the organization learn. And there are plenty of good examples of learning bureaucracies out there. And your goal is to transform the one into the other, the petrified into the learning. The third is, bureaucracies tend to be coercive, rather than enabling. Coercive, meaning that they're there to control employee behavior, to force employees to behave in ways that otherwise they wouldn't want to. They tend to be ‘no' saying, they say ‘no', a lot. Your bureaucracy for your expense reporting policy in your company probably says, ‘no that expense is no good because X Y and Z.' There are plenty of examples of enabling bureaucracies, where the point is not to stop you from doing things or force you to do something you don't want to. But the bureaucracy provides a support structure, provide best practices, as you said, that help you do your job well. And there's no reason why bureaucracies can't do that. So, the three bad characteristics are bloat, coercion, and petrify. Ula Ojiaku: Okay, nice. So, it sounds like the way you've described bureaucracy, when you look at it from a positive slant, would it be the same thing as guardrails, putting guardrails in place, or giving people the right degree of freedom? Mark Schwartz: Yeah, that's exactly the idea. What I find is that guardrails and automation are ways of implementing bureaucracy, that lead to those three good characteristics rather than the bad ones. Let's say in software development, in DevOps, for example, it's a good idea to put guardrails, security guardrails, for example, around what people can do, and automated security tests and things like that. Because then the developers or the DevOps teams, they can go charging ahead full speed, knowing that they can't do anything wrong, you know, because the guardrails are there. And they get immediate feedback, if they do something that's going to put them outside the guardrails and they can just immediately fix it. So, it's very empowering for them, lets them move fast. And it also gets rid of that coercive element of you know, I write some code and then somebody comes in afterwards and says, ‘no, you can't deploy that'. That's annoying. Instead, I can run the security tests myself, as a developer, see if there's anything that's problematic, fix it right away if I want to, so it's all under my control. But the end result is still the same. The bureaucracy is still there. It's just automated and implemented as guardrails. Ula Ojiaku:  It's enabling, like you said before, instead of hindering. Mark Schwartz:  And it's lean, because it's very inefficient and wasteful, if you write some code, and then at the very end of the development process, somebody finds a security flaw. And now you have to remember what you were doing. And, you know, go back and relearn your code and make changes then, so that's wasteful, as opposed to lean. It's coercive, as opposed to enabling. And if you're good at doing these things, then you keep updating your guardrails and your security tests based on new security threats you learn about or new policies or whatever. So, you make a learning bureaucracy as well. Ula Ojiaku:  Interesting. In the book as well, you said you want us to be calm, chaos monkeys, knights of Ockham, lean sumo wrestlers, very interesting oxymoron there. And you know, black belt experts, could you tell us more about those terms? Why did you use those terms? Mark Schwartz:  Because they made me laugh of course. Ula Ojiaku: Well, they made me laugh too. Mark Schwartz: So, I thought about what I learned about coping with bureaucracy, especially in my government job, but also from reading and from talking to other people. And I realized I had about, you know, 30 techniques for coping with bureaucracy, I call them plays. And I just grabbed those 30 techniques, but I thought about it, and I realized they divided into three. And the three, I could sort of associate with a personality, almost. You know, that these 10 plays are associated with this personality, these 10 plays are associated with this one. And I came up with these three personalities that I thought describe those plays. And the three personalities are the monkey, and the razor, and the sumo wrestler. And, you know, I think, I could stop right there, because it's probably obvious why I associate those with these plays, but I will go a little further. Ula Ojiaku: Please… Mark Schwartz: So, I realized that some of the things we did, the ones that I call the plays of the monkey, the way of the monkey, those things had to do with provoking. You know, monkeys are mischievous, provocative, and sometimes annoying. And a bunch of the techniques had to do with trying to be provocative. And the razor and I'll give you some examples in a minute. The razor, to me is all about being lean. It's about trimming away waste. And it also refers to the philosophical principle of Ockham's razor. Ockham was a medieval philosopher, right, William of Ockham. And he's generally credited with an idea that something like if you have a choice between a simple explanation, and a complicated explanation, you should prefer the simple one. That's not really what he said. But that's, that's what most people associated with him. That's the principle of Ockham's razor. And, and so it's called a principle of ontological parsimony, meaning, you shouldn't presuppose the existence of more things than you need to, in order to explain something. So, you know, don't make up nymphs. And you know, I don't know, water dryads and whatever's to explain something that you can equally just explain through simple physical laws. Ula Ojiaku:  Just saying, 'keep it simple...' Mark Schwartz:  Yeah, keep it simple, in a way, right? So that's called the principle of ontological parsimony. And I said, there's a similar principle of bureaucratic parsimony, which says that if you're trying to implement a control, and you can do it in a simple way, or you could do it in a really complicated way, do it a simple way. And so, it's a principle of leanness because I find that bureaucracies, when they get bloated, they have these really complicated wasteful ways of doing something that they could they could accomplish exactly the same thing, but in a simpler way. So that's the razor. And then a sumo wrestler. Well, Sumo is the sport where, you know, two massive people sort of bang into each other, right? And the goal is you want to push your opponent out of the ring, or you want to make them fall and touch the ground with something other than their feet. And if you can do either of those things, you win. So, if you're a big massive person and you're trying to accomplish those things, you might think that the best thing to do is charge your opponent and push really hard. But if your opponent then just either dodges or just is soft and lets you push, well, you're probably going to go flying out of the ring, right? So, one of the principles in Sumo is you want to use your opponent's strength against them. And if they push hard, now, go ahead, give them a little pull. And, you know, let them push even harder. And I realized that some of these techniques for overcoming bureaucracy have to do with using bureaucracy actually, on your side, you know, the using the strength of bureaucracy against it. So that's why the sumo wrestler. So, I'll give you examples now on each one, now that I've described my three personalities. So, the monkey does what is sometimes referred to as provoking and inspecting or provoking and observing, in parallel with the Agile principle of inspect and adapt. So, provoke and observe, what the monkey does is try something that's probably outside the rules, or at least is, you know, a borderline and watches what happens. So, an example where we use this is that we have these rules in Homeland Security that essentially said, if you were going to do an IT project, you have to produce 87 documents. And each document had a template, and you have to fill in each section of the template. And these documents would run to hundreds of pages. And so, using the persona of the monkey, let's say, we started to turn in these documents. But in each section of the template, we just wrote a one sentence, one sentence answer, you know, we're very short answer instead of writing pages and pages. And we wanted to see what would happen if we did that, because there was no rule that said, it had to be a really long answer. And eventually, we started to provoke even more, we just left out sections that we thought didn't make any sense for what we were doing. And all of this was unprecedented, you know, it caused a lot of fear. It turned out, and this sometimes happens, that the enforcers of this policy, they were happy when they said, “We've never wanted anybody to write these really long answers to these things, we have to read them. And you know, the intention wasn't to slow people down. As long as you're giving us the right information. That's all we need.” So, in this case, provoking just it turned out that we could defeat a bunch of bureaucracy there, we could, we could make things a lot leaner because nobody objected. But sometimes people do object. And if they do, then you learn exactly what the resistance is, who it is, is resisting, and that gives you valuable information, when you're trying to figure out how to overcome it. So that's the monkey. You know, let's try something a little playful and mischievous, and see what happens. The razor, well, that one follows also on my 87 documents, because we then set up an alternative way of doing things that had only 15 documents. And where there had been 13 gate reviews required for each project. We reduced it to two. And so, all we did, you know, we just used our little razor to trim away all the excess stuff that was in the bureaucratic requirements. And then we showed people that those 15 documents and those two gate reviews accomplished exactly the same thing as the 87 documents and the 13 gate reviews. That's the principle of the razor, that's how the razor works. The sumo wrestler, also a favorite of mine. So, we were trying to convince the bureaucracy to let us do DevOps and to be agile, and it was resisting. And people kept pointing to a policy that said, you can't do these things. And so, we wrote our own policy. And it was a very good bureaucratic policy looked exactly like every bureaucratic document out there. But it essentially said you must use DevOps and you must be agile on it, you know, it set up a perfect bureaucracy around that it's set up ways of checking to make sure everybody was using DevOps. And the theory behind it was the auditors when they came to audit us and said we were being naughty because we were doing DevOps. Their argument was we looked at the policy and we looked at what you're doing, and they were different. And that's the way auditing works. That was the, you know, GAO, the Government Accountability Office, and the Inspector General and all that. So, we figured if we had a policy that said you must do DevOps, and they audited us, well, they would actually be enforcing the policy, you know, they'd be criticizing any part of the organization that was not using DevOps and I thought that's great. So, this is how you use the strength of the bureaucracy against the bureaucracy or not really, against even, you know, it's perfectly good, perfect… Ula Ojiaku:  To help the bureaucracy yeah, to help them to improve, improve the organization. But thinking about the monkey though, being provocative and mischievous, do you think that there has to be an element of you know, relationship and trust in place first, before… you can't just you know… you're new, and you've just gotten through the door and you start being a monkey… you probably will be taken back to wherever you came from! What do you think? Mark Schwartz:  Well, it helps if you're giggling while you do it. But you know, I think the goal here is to figure out the right levers that are going to move things. And sometimes you do have to push a little bit hard, you know, you do need to take people out of their comfort zone. Usually, you want to do these things in a way that takes into account people's feelings, and you know, is likely to move them in the right direction, rather than making them dig in their heels. But I'll give you a couple of examples of Monkey tactics that are less comfortable for people. One is simply, you know, there's a status quo bias. It's a known, well-known cognitive bias; people tend to prefer the status quo or look the other way about it's failings and stuff. So often, when you're trying to make a change, people say, we're fine the way we are, you know, everything's okay. So, one of the things the monkey tries to do is, is to make it clear that the status quo is not acceptable, you know, to show people that it actually if they think about it, it's no good. And so, for example, when we decided to move to the cloud, instead of working in our DHS data center, people said - of course at the time it was a big concern, ‘was the cloud secure enough?' And in the persona of the monkey, the right response is, ‘are we secure enough now?' You know, ‘don't you realize that we're not happy with our security posture today?' ‘It's not like, the cloud has proved itself. I mean, we have to compare our security in the cloud versus our security in the data center. And yes, I'm very sure it'll be better in the cloud and here's why…' But you can't start from the assumption that you are fine right now. In general, when we're talking about the cloud, that's the situation. Companies are using their own data centers. And it's like, you know, we have to teach them that they can do better in the cloud. But the truth is that they're not happy in their own data centers, if they think about it, right? There are security issues, there are performance issues, there are cost issues. And they're aware of those issues, right, they just look the other way. And because they're comfortable with the status quo, so the monkey has to sort of shake people up and say, ‘It's not okay, what you're doing now!' Another example, and this is really harsh, and I wouldn't use it in most cases. But let's say that this was in Homeland Security. Let's say that Homeland Security is enforcing a very bureaucratic process that results in IT projects, taking five years instead of six months. And let's say, you know, the process is there on paper, the rules say, ‘Do this', the people are interpreting the rules in a way that makes things take five years. Sometimes, the monkey has to go to somebody who's in their way and say, ‘We are in the Department of Homeland Security, this IT project is going to make people more secure in the homeland. Are you comfortable with the fact that you are preventing people from being more secure for the next four and a half years, when we could…' You know, it's a matter of personalizing it. And that sometimes is what's necessary to get people to start thinking creatively about how they can change the bureaucracy. You know, ‘I hate to say it, but you're a murderer', you know, essentially is the message. It's a monkey message. And like I said, you know, it's not the preferred way to go about doing things. But if you have to, I mean, the lives of people are at stake, and you've got to find a way to get there. Ula Ojiaku:  So how can leaders because your book, The Art of Business Value, in your book, you said that “leaders create the language of the organization, and they set up incentives and define value in a way that elicits desired outcomes.” So, in essence, I understand that statement to mean that leaders set the tone, and you know, kind of create the environment for things to happen. So, how can leaders implement or apply bureaucracy in a way that enables an organization where, before it was seen as a hindrance, how can they do this? Mark Schwartz:  My thought process was, if we all agree, we're gonna try to maximize business value? How do we know what we mean by it? And I realized, a lot of Agile people, you know, people in our Agile and DevOps community, were being a little bit lazy. You know, they were thinking, ‘Oh, business value, you know, it's returns on investment, or, you know, it's up to the business (to define) what's business value.' The tech people just, you know, do the work of providing a solution. And to me, that's too lazy. If you're going to be agile, be it you have to be more proactive about making sure you're delivering business value. So, you have to understand what it means. You have to actually do the work of, you know, figuring out what it means. And what it means is not at all obvious. And, you know, you might think it has something to do with return on investment or shareholder value or something like that. But when you really closely examine it, that is not the right way to define it, when it comes to deciding what its efforts to prioritize and all that that's, you know, the case that the book makes, and I explain why that's true. Instead, I say you have to think of business value within the context of the business's strategy and its objectives as a business. There's no like, abstract, this has more business value than this because we calculated an ROI or something like that, that doesn't work reprioritizing. It's always asked within the context of a particular business strategy. And the business strategy is a direction from leadership. There might be input from everybody else, but ultimately, you have leaders in the organization who are deciding what the strategic objectives are. So, for example, if you are a traditional bank, or traditional financial services company, and you look around you and you see there are all these new FinTech companies that are disrupting the industry, and you're worried, well there are a lot of different ways you can respond to those disruptive FinTechs. And how you're going to choose to respond depends on your preferences, it depends on the situation of your company, in the industry, the history of your company, all of those things. But of the many ways you can respond to that disruption, you're going to choose one as the leader of your enterprise. Well, what adds business value is whatever supports that direction you choose to go. You can't think of business value outside of that direction, you know. That's the case that I make. So, leaders don't just set the tone and the culture there, they're actually setting strategic direction that determines what has business value. And then the people who are executing the agile teams have to take it upon themselves to make sure that whatever they're doing is going to add business value in that sense.   So, the role of leadership then becomes direction setting and visioning for the future and communicating the vision to the people who are working and providing feedback, you know, on whether things are actually adding business value or not . And that's the key responsibility. Now, in order to do that, in order to motivate people to deliver according to that idea of business value, there are certain techniques as a leader that you have to keep in mind, there are ways that you get people, you get a big organization to sort of follow you. And one of the ones that's become most important to me to think about after talking to a lot of leaders about how they're running their organizations, and what's working, is using middle management as a lever for accomplishing those things. So often, I'll talk to leaders of a business, and they'll say, our problem is the frozen middle, middle management is, you know, they're just not changing the way we want, we want to, we want to cause a big transformation, but middle management is getting in the way. And I tell them, ‘that's pretty much a myth.' You know, ‘that's not actually what's happening, let's look more closely at your organization.' Almost always, middle management is still trying to do the best they can, given the situation that they're in. And the way that you get them to align themselves behind the change is, you change their incentives or their role definition, or how you tell them what you're expecting from them, you don't say “change”, you know, and start doing X and Y, you change what success looks like for their position. And then they adapt to it by becoming engaged and finding ways to get there. So, there's almost always a leadership problem when you have that frozen middle effect. And, and I've seen it work really well that, you know, all of a sudden, you get this big leverage, because you just do a little bit of tweaking of role definitions, and bring everybody into solving the problem. And actually, there's an example, I love to talk about a history book, like I said before, I like to bring in other things, right? It's called the Engineers of Victory. And it's about World War Two, the Allies realized that they had to solve a set of problems, I think there was six or so problems. One of them was how do you land troops on a beach that's heavily defended? They realize they were just not going to be able to win the war until they could do that. But nobody knew how to do it. Because, you know, obviously, the bad guys are there on the beach, they're dug in, they put barbed wire everywhere, and mines, and you know, all this stuff. And it's just going to be a slaughter if you try to land on the beach. So, this book, Engineers of Victory, makes the case that what really won the war, was figuring out those solutions. And who was responsible for figuring out those solutions? It was middle management, basically. It was the, you know, within the structure of the army, it was the people not at the top who had big authority, you know, the generals, and it was not the troops themselves, because they weren't in a position to figure out these things. It was middle management that could see across different parts of the organization that could try things and see whether they worked or not, that, you know, essentially could run their own mini skunkworks projects. And eventually, they came up with the solutions to these problems. So, I think that's very encouraging for the role of middle management, you know, that a lot of problems have to be solved at that layer in order to pull off a transformation. And it really can be done. And this is a beautiful example of it. Ula Ojiaku:  It reminds me of, you know, my experience in a few transformation initiatives. So, the middle, the people who are termed to be in the frozen middle, are, like you said, they want to do what's best for the company, and they show up wanting to do their best work, but it's really about finding out, ‘Where do I fit in, (with) all this change that's happening?' You know, ‘if my role is going away, if the teams are going to be more empowered, that means I'm not telling them what to do, but then what do I do now?' So, the clarity of what the ‘New World' means for them, and what's in it for them, would help, you know, make them more effective. Mark Schwartz: And the mistake that's often made is to say to them, ‘start doing DevOps' or, you know, ‘start doing agile or something.' Because if you don't change the definition of success, or you don't change the incentives that, you know, then it's just, make work and they're going to resist it. You know, if you say your incentive is to get really fast feedback or you know, one of the other goals of DevOps, because of the following reasons, it helps the business this way, so let's try to reduce cycle time as much as possible for producing software. Okay, that's a change in the incentive, or the, you know, the definition of success, rather than just telling somebody you have to do DevOps, you know, read a book and figure it out. Ula Ojiaku:  So, what other books because you mentioned the Engineers of Victory, are there any other books you would recommend for the listener to go check out if they wanted to learn more about what we've talked about today? Mark Schwartz:  Well, I think, you know, obviously, my books referred to War and Peace by Tolstoy, Moby Dick, another great one. You know, you probably need to read my books to figure out why those are the right books to read and Engineers of Victory. As I said, I think that one's a great one. Within the field, there are some DevOps books that that I like a lot, of course, Gene Kim's books, The Phoenix Project, and now The Unicorn Project, the sequel to that. Because those are books that give you a feel for the motivation behind all the things that we do. The Mechanics of Things, there are plenty of books out there that help you learn the mechanics of how to do continuous integration and continuous delivery. And then the cloud is I think it's really transformative. You know, it's the cloud itself is a tremendous enabler. I work at AWS, of course but I'm not saying this because I work at AWS, it's more than I work at AWS because I believe these things. And my teammates have written some good books on the cloud. Reaching Cloud Velocity, for example, by Jonathan Allen and Thomas Blood is a great one for reading up on how the cloud can be transformative. But my other teammates, Gregor Hope, has written a number of books that are really good, Stephen Orban did A Head in the Cloud. So, I think those are all… should be at the top of people's reading lists. And then, of course, I recommend my books, because they make me laugh, and they might make you laugh, too. Ula Ojiaku:  Definitely made me laugh, but they've also given me things to think about from a new perspective. So, I totally agree. And so, where can people find you if they want to reach out to you? Mark Schwartz:  Yeah, LinkedIn is a great place to find me. If you're with a company that is an AWS customer, feel free to talk to your account manager, the sales team from AWS and ask them to put you in touch with me, is another easy way. LinkedIn is kind of where I organize my world from so find me there. Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. Sounds great. And any final words for the audience or for the listeners. Mark Schwartz:  Um, I, I have found that these things that you want to do to take advantage of the digital world, and I think we're all sort of pointing ourselves in that direction, there are these amazing things you can do in the digital world. They're sometimes challenging to get there, but it's very possible to get there. And one thing I've learned a lot at Amazon is the idea of working backwards, you know, you get that picture in your head for where you want to be and then you say to yourself, ‘I can get there. Let me work backwards and figure out what I have to do in order to get there.' And you might be wrong, you know, you should test hypotheses, you start moving in the right direction, and of course, correct as you need to. But you can do it with confidence that others are doing it and you can too no matter what your organization is, no matter how much you think you're a snowflake and you know different from every other organization. You can still do it. And with just some good intention and good thinking you can figure out how to how to get there. Ula Ojiaku:  Thank you so much, Mark. That was a great close for this conversation and again, I really appreciate your making the time for this interview. Thank you. Mark Schwartz: Thanks for having me. Ula Ojiaku: You're welcome.

Dr. Mark Schwartz from NovaCare joins the show to discuss the latest in Eagles injuries. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In today's 7:00 hour, Angelo is joined by NovaCare's Dr. Mark Schwartz, Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni, and continues to take day-after Eagles victory reaction. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark Schwartz, CEO of Blue Ridge Orthopaedic & Spine Center, joined the podcast to talk about how policy changes affect ASCs and outlook for future growth.

Mark Schwartz, CEO of Blue Ridge Orthopaedic & Spine Center, joined the podcast to talk about how policy changes affect ASCs and outlook for future growth.

Everyone hates bureaucracy. What can we do to use its benefits and fight its demons? We talk to Mark Schwartz, CIO and Enterprise Strategist at Amazon Web Services about tackling bureaucracy.Author page: https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/enterprise-strategists/mark-schwartz/Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1950508153/The Wicked Podcast:Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thewickedpodcastThe Wicked Podcast website: http://www.thewickedcompany.com/podcast/'The Wicked Company' book on Amazon.co.uk: https://www.amazon.co.uk/WICKED-COMPANY-When-Growth-Enough-ebook/dp/B07Y8VTFGY/The Wicked Company website: https:www.thewickedcompany.comMusic:'Inspired' by Kevin MacLeodSong: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3918-inspiredLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this episode of Texthelp Talks, our host Mark Schwartz  sits down to chat to some leading experts on the art of writing. Amy Mayer, founder and CEO of friEdTechnology, is a nationally known speaker and trainer as well as a veteran public school educator. Chris Bugaj  is a founding member of the assistive technology team for Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia. Chris co-hosts the Talking with Tech podcast featuring interviews and conversations about augmentative and alternative communication, and has hosted award-winning podcast featuring strategies to design educational experiences. They explore effective writing strategies for students, and share some tips for inspiring students to write more. 

President Reagan's purpose. Defining the "Southern Democrat." Guests Gil Bindelglas and Mark Schwartz on cryptocurrency. Arizona Democrats are experiencing buyers' remorse regarding David Garcia. Callers check in on their way to the President Trump event in Mesa. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

President Reagan's purpose. Defining the "Southern Democrat." Guests Gil Bindelglas and Mark Schwartz on cryptocurrency. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The new Magnum P.I. series is replacing a key male figure with a woman. Mark Schwartz calls in to discuss this with Seth. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alejandro Rojas with the latest in UFO news, then Mark Schwartz speaks about his project, Truth Funders, Jonas Petchonka joins the show to talk about his book on truthfunders.com called, OMG, UFOs! geared toward the younger audience in the second hour of the full show, hour two Rick Friar joins us, author of The Keepers.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/podcast-ufo--5922140/support.