Podcast: A technology leader's needs from a city with James Cummings
James Cummings
Vice President of Business Development at London & Partners
Podcast – Episode 20:
A technology leader’s needs from a city
Driving innovation and growth…The London story
Culture can make a huge difference to an organization’s energy around Agility, innovation, creativity, and synergy with other seemingly unrelated industries. So we often talk about the environment and culture on a micro and macro level (teams and organizations). These always seem to be under the microscope, and for good valid reasons. What if, for a moment, we looked through a telescope at the bigger picture. What about the environment and culture of an entire city?
In this episode, we get to meet and talk to James Cummings, Vice President of Business Development at London & Partners. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he promotes London to organizations, including tech companies, to locate themselves in the UK’s capital city. With all the trappings of success, through a huge pool of creative talent, hotbed of innovation, and strong governmental governance and support, many companies are making a move to London to grow and take advantage of the fertile entrepreneurial soil of London.
“How can cities like London help you take advantage of that global opportunity? How do you find the talent? The customer base? The places that can help connect you to the world? How do you find the cities that constantly reinvent? Those cities of creative energy? Those cities of opportunity? I really think London is one of those cities!”
The key takeaways from the podcast are:
- Who are London & Partners, and how they can help tech companies and their tech leadership.
- What are tech leaders looking for in a city?
- How cities can drive growth through talent, R&D, incentives, and simplicity of doing business.
- Examples of companies that have located in London and the success they made of it.
- Examples of relationships between cities and how these can help each other by playing to each other’s strengths.
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing James Cummings
3. What does "London & Partners" do?
4. Is "London & Partners" just about London or the UK in general?
5. London! A truly international city
6. Creating a network in a city so that companies can serve and support each other
7. What do tech companies need? (The needs of tech companies from the city)
8. Is London all about the services industry? Or is there much R&D happening there?
10. Helping companies set up and understand the opportunity for all concerned
11. Examples of juicy companies that have in-roaded to London from the States
12. Celebrating a company moving to London (Landing a deal)
13. How can we get better at creating relationships across the globe?
14. Speaking of the two elephants in the room (BREXIT and COVID)
15. Coping with COVID (The elephant in all countries)
16. Key takeaways for tech leaders by James Cummings
17. TC Gill's takeaways from the podcast
Transform your technology organization with IT Labs teams.
Reach out to us.
Podcast: Philosophy of enlightened leadership in the tech space with Alain Briancon
Alain Briancon
CTO at Cerebri AI
Podcast – Episode 20:
Philosophy of enlightened leadership in the tech space
Startup number 5 and leading stronger
Technology leaders sit in an incredibly important organizational seat in this day and age. Their role is to deliver technology and give businesses the capability to compete, innovate, and stay relevant. Our guest Alain Briancon, CTO at Cerebri AI, speaks to this subject on this podcast, in particular, how leadership plays a huge role in how people think and go about their tasks.
“Learn to think about the way you think.”
The key takeaways from the podcast are:
- The fundamental role of tech leaders and why it’s not just about delivering technology.
- The part that documentation can play in supporting the work you do, and some inspiration around avoiding documentation debt. As we know, any debt, be it technical or other, always comes back to bite us on the backside if we don’t address it.
- Thinking about your thinking when solving problems.
There are many more takeaways embedded in the podcast. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did hosting it.
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Working as a team (creating a clan)
3. Direct communications; Honest in service of the team
4. Getting the fundamentals of leadership right pays dividends over and over
5. Radical Transparency vs Written Transparency
6. Finding the balance of documentation with the Agile values
7. Using common language to eliminate the ambiguity of communication
8. Holding to the documentation value when under pressure (Definition of Done)
10. Creating synergy through documentation
11. How did Alain come about a deeper perspective of leading, creating, and innovating?
12. Thinking about your thinking!
13. Question your truths… is it true?
14. Question of beliefs and the way we do it
15. A deeper form of experimenting
16. Alain's key takeaways for tech leaders
17. TC's key takeaways from the podcast
Transform your technology organization with IT Labs teams.
Reach out to us.
Podcast: Taking Agile and working to big it up with Sung Choi
Sung Choi
Senior Director Of Engineering at Warby Parker
Podcast – Episode 20:
Taking Agile and working to big it up
Creating Agile autonomy org-wide
Warby Parker is a big name in the spectacle industry, so it was exciting to have Sung Choi, their Senior Director of engineering, come onto the show and share his wisdom. Sung is a true Agilist and seated in a company that seems to create the perfect environment for the values and principles of Agile to thrive.
The key takeaways from the podcast are:
- The power of leading with integrity.
- Aligning around values and principles to deliver customer-centric business value from the technology space.
- Using the “commander’s intent” to inspire a solution mindset in the teams and allowing autonomy to flourish.
On Mitigating risk: “Communication! That’s one of the most important tools in any tech leader’s toolbox. It’s frequent and methodical communication with all the people involved. Maybe even over-indexing when necessary, because while it’s definitely cumbersome to have to listen to the same pitch, or the same update three or four different times over the course of a week, it’s a lot less painful to have to clean up messes caused by lack of communication.”
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing Charles White (the journey to becoming a CTO)
3. What does a tech leader do at Warby Parker
4. The journey to being a tech leader
5. Leading with integrity
6. Bringing integrity and value to life
7. Is Warby Parker Agile
8. The challenges of having autonomy in the teams
9. Success stories of giving autonomy to teams
10. Autonomy going curly at the edges (going wrong)
12. Outcomes (commander's intent)
13. Measuring and metrics
14. If you could measure anything, what would you measure?
15. Leading through the COVID storm
16. Leading lots of initiatives that touch and influence each other
17. Mitigating the risk of change
18. Sung's key takeaway for the tech leadership community
19. TC's takeways from the podcast
Transform your technology organization with IT Labs teams.
Reach out to us.
Podcast: Lessons from the Front Lines With Charles White
Charles White
CTO at Fornetix
Podcast – Episode 19:
Leading In The Military To Leading In Tech
A Military Man Turns Tech Leader
IT Labs takes pride in finding and speaking to CTOs with fascinating tech journeys. Well, here’s another interesting one that started in the military and ended up at the helm of an organization’s tech function.
Charles White, CTO at Fornetix, shares his journey and insights into areas that he is passionate about, from leadership to security and novel architectures. It would be safe to say Charles covers much wisdom-filled ground in this podcast.
“When building teams, I always found that the ‘WHY!’ let you gravitate around it. It drives! It helps create inclusiveness in organizations. When the ‘why’ is not explained, it creates barriers.”
One particularly striking aspect of Charles’s voyage is how an injury changed his life path and in what manner he built on it, an inspiring lesson for all of us.
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- Becoming a CTO (the journey from military to CTO).
- Leadership tips on creating high performing teams and holding the vision for your people.
- The responsibility of leading and coordinating security and technology, with a share of next-generation advances.
- What attribute-driven architectures are and how they can be something to consider.
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing Charles White (the journey to becoming a CTO)
3. Transitioning from military to civilian life (how an injury change the journey)
4. Military leadership to CTO leadership
5. Participatory and delegatory leadership
6. Creating a vision for high performing teams
7. Presenting the vision so that we can align
8. Leading in the scary space of security
9. Testing for Security (How the hell do you do that effectively?)
10. Do customers get involved in the testing?
11. Does regulation in the security industry help?
13. Security and Performance hit of security systems
14. Security integrated into the silicon
15. Attribute driven design and architecture
16. AI and ML in security
17. Is AI still a future tech? And always will be?
18. Keeping customers "Happy as Larry."
19. COVID challenge (conference call Bingo)
20. Collaborative work during the remote working; Is it possible without a whiteboard?
21. Changing the world one idea at a time
22. Charles's key takeaway for the tech leadership tech community
23. TC's key takeaways from the podcast
Transform your technology organization with IT Labs teams.
Reach out to us.
Podcast: Getting clear on AI & ML with Felix Hovsepian
Felix Hovsepian
CTO at Blue Manifold & Professor
Podcast – Episode 18:
Getting clear on AI & ML
Musings on AI, ML, and leading tech R&D
There is much talk about AI and ML (Machine learning). The terms are misused, and the hype around them creates much confusion. So what can they offer in real terms, if anything?
Well, Felix Hovsepian joins us on CTO confessions to clear up the subject and explore some interesting use cases. Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- Why ML and AI are not the same things.
- Examples of AI and ML.
- Generative design
- AI at the Edge
- Being a tech leader in R&D
Felix is a colorful character with interesting ideas in several fields. After listening, share your thoughts on AI/ML. Are these fields starting to emerge from the hype cycle?
“The thing is the two weeks is not long enough to do research, to try and see what the nature of this problem is. And at what point do you pull the plug? Once you start looking at those types of projects, then the teams tend to be small. My specialty is looking after teams that are typically between three and seven people (five plus or minus two). Within a team like that, it really does take on some of that “spirit of Agility” because there are no seniors and managers. Everybody is in it at the same time. It’s a self-organizing team. You need to have people who think differently. I think that is the real key. I think that’s the real key for technology as well as education. It’s the key for the 21st Century. We need to start literately thinking about our thinking.”
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing the guest Felix Hovsepian
3. Machine reasoning
4. Using reasoning as a tech leader
5. The difference between ML and AI
6. What does ML/AI really mean to the tech industry and tech leaders
7. AI assisting in augmenting rather than replacing human decision making
8. Natural languages are not that great
9. Natural language processing
10. What are the rockstar industries that are really making a difference with AI
11. Generative design (an AI use case)
12. Leading like Agile, but suited to the challenge
13. AI or ML as Emerging of technologies
15. AI delivering on the hype… how long will it be?
16. AI Ethics
17. Felixes key takeaways
18. Getting the best out of teams
19. Leading in the the spirit of Agility
20. ROWE (Results Orientated Work Environment)
21. Don't become a CTO if your only focus is tech
22. Sometimes its fixing about the business process rather than creating another tech solition (Fix the actual problem)
23. Distinguishing between invention from innovation
24. AI at the edge
25. Felix's final takeaways
26. TC Gill's Podcast Reflections
Transform your technology organization with IT Labs teams.
Reach out to us.
Podcast: The Lessons of Amazon with David Glick
David Glick
CTO at FLEXE
Podcast – Episode 17:
The Lessons of Amazon
Tech Leadership Tips from an Insider
It’s always interesting when you meet people who’ve made dramatic shifts from one field into another — in this episode, we speak with a scientist who made a spectacular, successful and exciting leap into the tech world. You may have heard of the company where guest David Glick ended up: a little startup they call Amazon! David Glick shares the inside scoop on how immersing himself in the “Amazonian” culture molded his tech leadership. Now CTO at FLEXE (a flexible on-demand warehousing and fulfillment company), David Glick has much hard-won leadership wisdom to share.
“… don’t know what you call it, a macho thing, kind of a firefighter theme, which is, “Oh, we’re so good at putting out fires.” After about 10 years of that, even about one year of that became not as much fun for me. I said, let’s do fire prevention!”
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- The layer cake of leadership (how to enhance and advance your tech career).
- Lessons from leading in Amazon.
- The truth about AI/ML.
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing David Glick
3. How being a Physicist has helped enhance Davids Role as a CTO
4. A long career in Logistics
5. Managing Risk
6. Physicist to Engineering world
7. Amazon Leadership Principles
8. Drilling the Values and principles into the culture
9. The values and FLEXE
10. Do people abuse trust?
11. Layer cake Leadership
12. Choosing the right people for your teams
14. Diversity of thinking
15. Diversity in work (Women in work)
16. Getting curious around sexism
17. Single-threaded leaders
18. The success of Amazon of having Single-threaded leaders
19. The temptation to load people up… how to avoid it
20. Mechanisms to support intentions, not just intentions on their own
21. Thoughts on Agile
22. AI
23. Key takeaways from David Glick
24. TC Gill's Podcast Reflections
Transform your technology organization with IT Labs teams.
Reach out to us.
Podcast: SME tech leader tips, from a successful serial startup CTO with Steve Books
Steve Books
CTO at Slingshot Technology
Podcast – Episode 16:
SME tech leader tips, from a successful serial startup CTO
Creating a startup culture in SME organizations for hyper-growth, innovation, and business survival
One of the consistent things we see here at IT Labs through our ‘Teams as a Service’ (TaaS) and Business Agility consulting is companies’ need to have a startup mindset. Especially if they are in a phase of innovation to get one step ahead of competitors. Some of you may be thinking when wouldn’t this be the case 🙂 Well, many SMEs know the lessons but have forgotten them through their journey of growth. It’s almost like growth creates some form of ‘wisdom amnesia.’
Though IT Labs target audience is not startup’s, but because we are learners, we actively seek out these nimble little organizations’ voices to see what they are innovating and how they work. We desire to pick out their gems of advice and understanding through the lessons of success and beautiful moments of failure, to garner revived thinking for our community of technology leaders.
“[Smart businesses intentionally] try to cannibalize themselves, because they know that’s how they win in the end.” (e.g., Apple iPad)”
Well, Steve Books, CTO at Slingshot Technologies, joined us for an enlightening discussion on his serial startup journey. He’s what we like to call a starter-upper. I know not a real word, but it’s what we call someone who consistently gets involved in startups and nurtures them to exit. So here’s your opportunity to get a look under the covers of someone with a startup mindset and see things in a little bit more detail.
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- Lessons from a series of startups and exits.
- Tips on getting the most out of teams.
- How to make remote working work for you as a tech leader.
- Why business cannibalism is bizarrely good for your organization.
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing the guest Steve Books
3. A brief history of Steven Books on his journey to CTO
4. Being a serial "starter-upper" (What's attractive about working in startups)
5. Seeing startups like a challenging fun game
6. Contrasting working with corporates and startups
7. The subject of equity: Advice on structuring investment into a startup
8. Getting the best of your tech teams (it's not about the rate of output)
9. Getting your teams to feel for the product and create customer-centric thinking
10. Creating the right balance of using sexy new technology and keeping developers engaged
12. The art of creating inter-team relationship building with remote teams (Baking in BS meetings)
13. The question of productivity (measuring and metrics)
14. Perspective on Agile/Scrum (Getting back to the roots)
15. Creating authentic Agile and reaping the potential rewards
16. Technical debt balloon (Avoiding the unpleasant pop)
17. How wide do you go with testing at the beginning (new product development)
18. Stopping innovation from petering out post-acquisition (going cooperate).
19. Innovators dilemma
20. Intentional cannibalism
21. Resisting the hype of sexy new technology
22. Steve Books key takeaways for tech leaders
23. TC Gill's Reflections
Transform your technology organization with IT Labs teams.
Reach out to us.
Podcast: Leading technology with a toothbrush with Brian Hough
Brian Hough
CTO at Beam Dental
Podcast – Episode 15:
Leading technology with a toothbrush
How to create customer-centric innovation and market disruption
Tech leaders sit at the heart of an organization. They are the enablers of the businesses in this digital world we live in. Decisions they make, impact the present, and mold the future.
In this episode of CTO Confessions, we speak to the tech leader of a very niche business. They have taken the simple toothbrush and added an impressive dimension to it. Marrying the world of personal preventative dental health care with that of dental insurance, through a technology-enabled toothbrush. What you might call “smart dental care.”
“You have to view yourself as the connector. One of the responsibilities we have as CTOs is that our world touches everybody else’s world, and vice versa. That very rarely happens for other parts of the organization. And so, once you recognize this, you start to realize that you need to have a relationship with those folks. You need to have signals that you’re pulling in, and you need to share the responsibility for the KPIs those people have.”
Brian Hough, Dental Beams CTO, joins us to talk about his tech challenges and wisdom around creating a truly customer-centric product. He describes how, through organizational and tech leadership, Beam Dental creates a strong feedback loop between the development teams and the needs of the end customer. Forming tight awareness and close feedback loops to get the product offering absolutely right.
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- Why it’s important to invest in development that sets the groundwork for future innovation and product agility.
- Creating high performing engineering teams that fully own their work.
- What is ‘Sentiment Analysis’?
- How to improve the success of a product by having more eyes on the customer’s needs.
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing the guest: Brian Hough
3. Tech leaders working with Sales and Marketing
4. Disrupting and re-inventing a market (How the hell do you re-invent a toothbrush)
5. A tech solution for dental insurance that supports the end-customer saving money
6. Being receptive to the challenges of Sales and Marketing from a tech leadership perspective
7. Communications: Tech people being introverted
8. Keeping up to date with the latest technology as a CTO
9. Continuous learning: The need for it to be in balance
10. Making sure your teams remain relevant and talented in a fast-changing world
11. Funding continuous learning (being ready to ramp up on new up-and-coming technology)
12. Tech leaders being Time Lords
14. Creating great customer outcomes (not outputs)
15. Having field trips for engineers (understanding the 'what', the 'why' and creating the 'Arrrr I see')
16. Using AI and Machine Learning (data to guide the business roadmap)
17. Creating, communicating, and delivering the vision
18. Coffee chat with a CEO turning into a 'Thing"
19. Creating MVPs (Lean startup)
20. Moving away from a Legacy system and selling the investment in time and money to the business
21. The tough conversation about selling removal of technical debt
22. Being responsible for the code developed end to end (unit/integration/end-user experience testing)
23. Continuous integration testing (you have to get there to turbocharge the business)
24. Outro and TC Gill reflection
Transform your technology organization with IT Labs teams.
Reach out to us.
Podcast: Humanizing AI with Swathi Young
Swathi Young
CTO at Integrity Management Services
Podcast – Episode 14:
Humanizing AI
The future is not all AI dystopia & terminator (creating technology ethics, transparency, and fairness)
You hear a lot about AI. It’s a bit of a buzz word, right?! Often misused and misreported. One area that is starting to get a lot of debate space is the ethics around this mystifying and still futuristic technology. It’s an important subject that is starting to have an impact on our everyday lives. As we all know, the world we live in is full of data, and it’s creating more and more consistently and relentlessly. With big data comes opportunities to be one step ahead, to help, to enhance human life, and on the dark side, oppress and control. So the subject of ethics around this subject is an important one. One that we should all take heed of. Especially us tech leaders out there.
“I believe that the [AI] future is imminent and we all think about the future in multiple ways… Some of us think about the utopian future. Some of them think about a dystopian future … ”
Swathi Young shares her expertise in this Podcast, her hopes, and her vision for AI. Especially around the ethics and impact it has on us humans now, and in the future. Swathi is an expert in the field of ethics and AI. In fact, at the time of the recording of this Podcast, she was currently working with the US Government creating an ethics framework for this emergent technology.
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- What is Humanizing data?
- How can we start considering the ethics of AI?
- What is ‘Sentiment Analysis’?
- Tips for tech leaders on where to start when considering AI in their products and organizations
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing the guest: Swathi Young
3. What is Humanizing AI
4. Talking about the AI Terminator (elephant) in the room
5. The skills of the future with AI in the space (do we know what they will be)
6. Everything gets disrupted! Embrace it! (the disruption of AI)
7. We will always need the human touch
8. Are leaders and end customers embracing the change now that AI has passed the AI hype cycle
9. Use cases for AI (not everyone is aware of the practical ones)
10. How can data be humanized and what does it mean to me as a person or individual? OK, so we about humanizing the data
11. Humanizing data is not a linear path
13. As a tech leader, where do you start to humanize the data for AI/ML
14. Ethics in AI is not just a technology problem
15. How can you make AI development easy (and not so costly)
16. The ethics of AI (Ethical AI framework Swathi is working on for the US Government)
17. Will we be able to rate a AI implenetation on ethic (fairness, transparency)
18. How do we avoid going down AI rabbit holes
19. An example of going down a huge rabbit hole
20. Swathi's hope for the future
21. Swathi's key takeaway for the tech leaders out there
22. Outro and TC Gill reflection
Want to turn data science into business value to your customers?
Use our FREE 1-on-1 workshop
Podcast: A new shiny large-scale simulation tool for the SME toolbox
David Freed
CTO at OnScale
Podcast – Episode 13:
A new shiny large-scale simulation tool for the SME toolbox
(Democratizing supercomputing power that’s easy to use, low cost, and on tap)
Whenever one reflects on huge steps in innovation, we usually see some disruptive democratizing of capabilities. Where the tools of the elite, and those with deep pockets, become available to the masses. Well, that’s what this Podcast is about! It’s about democratizing this ability to have large supercomputer platforms’ capabilities, brought to the toolbox of SME businesses.
“ … it’s just so difficult to go after the big prize right away. You want to set up an achievable development path that gets you some milestones and some wins along the way.”
In the context of this disruptive story is an interesting and passionate tech leader, David Freed. CTO of OnScale, a company leading the way in achieving the democratization of high-level computing for large scale simulation. David is a self-confessed computer engineering geek with a background in Physics, chemical engineering, and a Ph.D. in fluid dynamics (in the context of Nuclear waste disposal). A heady mix of subjects all converging on a passion for bringing disruption to a niche market, thus gifting groundbreaking capabilities to the SME market.
David shares his desires and vision for OnScales platform, his leadership style to achieve this, and what he wishes for tech leaders out there.
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- How novel solutions can bring historically expensive, out of reach capabilities to the masses by being bold, creative, and establishing cost-reducing ideas.
- How businesses can accelerate innovation through affordable large scale simulations (removing complexity and need for deep expertise)
- How to be a leader in a disruptive business and getting the best out of your teams
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing David Freed
3. David Freed's science background (Nuclear waste disposal)
4. OnScale the startup (the vision and funding)
5. The history of large scale simulations (the now and the future)
6. In the Cloud and Cloud-agnostic
7. The benefits of abstracting out the underlying Cloud provider
8. The target market for the solution OnScale is providing
9. The technology solution is all about reducing the cost for the customer (infrastructure and software)
10. Democratizing high-end simulations and making it easy
11. Designers and engineers able to focus on the problem and not needing to work on the simulation tool setup
13. Test, improve and iterate (Beta testing)
14. Truly listening to the customer
15. Leading engineers to be customer-centric
16. Making sure everyone is aligning to the vision and customer experience
17. Team setup and leadership style
18. Everyone on the team should care about everyone's feature success (Team culture)
19. Davids favorite part of his role (Cultures taking hold)
20. David Freed's key takeaways for the tech leaders out there
21. TC Gill's reflections and key takeaways
