Podcast: Transformation for Innovation with Deal Daly
Deal Daly
Field CTO at Hammerspace
Podcast – Episode 8:
Transformation for Innovation
(Technical leaders part in the Innovation Game)
As a tech leader, how do you transform your organization for innovation? And why you need to be involved in the first place?
Deal Daly, Field CTO at Hammerspace, joined us for an enlightening conversation on the subject. With many years in mergers and acquisitions, looking at technology from the outside-in. His journey gradually led him to lead infrastructure groups. For this reason, Deal has a very interesting perspective. He’s a business person with an acquired technology angle. Now looking from the inside-out, he shares his learning and insights.
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- Why must technology leaders become partners in enabling the entire business, not just in the capabilities of a product?
- How to tap into the inherent curiosity of technical people, thus driving team performance and innovation.
- Using the multiplier effort to drive and spread innovating behaviors.
TLDR: 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. Deal Daly's varied career from business world to tech.
3. Deal Daly's thoughts on transforming cultures in an organization for innovation.
4. It's easy to go shopping for new technologies; it's not so easy to align teams and get them on board [with new ways of working].
5. Breaking down siloes to raise the cross-boundary communications, and more fire up collaboration.
6. A cultural change by a process change.
7. All businesses are intertwined into the fabric of the digital world, and that's why tech leaders need to be steering them.
8. Businesses finding the need for new products in the market.
9. Understanding the product and the business model around it.
10. Using subject matter experts to help create technical architecture.
11. Finding the golden nuggets (people) in your organization.
12. The benefit of creating an organizational safe space to safely transparent.
13. Supporting internal people who are innovating and curious, while reinforcing the behaviors they are showing (for others to see).
14. The multiplier effect (to increase the number of innovators).
15. Persuading senior leadership to bleed their leadership (and innovation creation) into the organization.)
16. The reason digital transformation is hard… because it's hard!
17. Grounding areas for cultural change and political upheaval.
18. The theory of small success to get business people "on side" for innovation.
19. The technological world innovates much more slowly than marketing and sales.
20. Greenfield innovation can be successful and can be a path for innovation, but be cautious.
22. Organizations becoming more Agile (nimble and iterative based on market input?)
23. Creating converged organizational functions like a DevOps.
24. For new, more nimble, and adaptive processes, don't dismantle development or IT, create a demilitarized zone.
25. Business Agility and safe zone (demilitarized zones).
26. Organizational cross-functional departments not being told what to do, but inspired to create the solution.
27. How do you persuade senior leadership to create "Business Agility" cross deparmental ways of working.
28. Circuit breaking applications, so if one module goes down, the others can still continue.
29. Breaking down monolithic applications.
30. Monolith applications into independent services, microservices, data meshes or using low code or no code methodologies.
31. Dealing with engineers who don't want to break up the monolith into elemental services.
32. Technical people creating a PR (Public Relations) mindset.
33. Two-way communication encourages people to create feedback loops.
34. Technology leaders becoming good communicators (start your communication plan).
35. Iteration of business changes.
36. Where does the market input for the organization to innovate come from?
37. Innovating while avoiding burning cash.
38. Funding innovation that pops up out of the blue.
39. Deal Daly's framework for tech leaders who want to fire up innovation.
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Podcast: A CTOs Epic journey with Charles Griffith
Charles Griffith
CTO at MileZero (a Capstone company)
Podcast – Episode 7:
A CTOs Epic journey
Charles Griffith, CTO at MilesZero, and previous to that, Technology Vice President of Transportation at Amazon, shares his journey as a CTO. An incredibly experienced tech leader with an interesting voyage. One that went something like this:
- Gaming industry
- To working at Amazon in the formative years
- And then to a Startup … and Exit
Through Charles’s story, be inspired to find the path for your own journey and see how making it varied can lead to long term success, thus creating a well-rounded tech leader. One of the key takeaways from the Podcast is that Investing in your journey from a place of awareness is a powerful success trick. Leading you to places where you want to be, rather than where you just end up.
“Ultimately, every day, ask yourself, is this what I should be doing and what is it I really want to do. I think if you’re not asking yourself to basically accomplish something that’s historic; you’re setting your bar too low. Because we only go through life once. So, you should always be moving forward. And I think that’s another reason I moved out of games after a certain point, and out of various companies where I got comfortable. [This] is because I said to myself, “what am I doing” “I’m not improving myself,”; whether that’s by challenging myself or by what I’m delivering. And so I will say, in retrospect, maybe I’ve hurt the world two times. Games, in terms of what I’ve seen from my kids being so absorbed in games versus the rest of the world. And now, perhaps with Amazon in terms of what that’s done to other retailers. But you can’t hold yourself responsible for how your deliveries are used, but you should hold yourself responsible for continuously improving.”
Key Points from the Podcast are:
- Designing a varied journey builds a strong foundation for your career
- Experimentation and failure leads to new deep learning and one that can have surprisingly long term successes (look at Amazon)
- Do what you love, and continuously learn from it (avoid comfort)
- Building high performing teams around you is a leadership art based on people chemistry
TLDR: 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. Seeing the opportunity for automating the supply chain at Amazon
3. Making a conscious choice to move on from Gaming
4. It's an educated process and not just luck to get to where you want to be
5. The knowledge that Charles picked up from the gaming industry
6. Coaching and leadership
7. The makeup of teams (the passengers and the tech stars)
8. How you get the most from your people
9. On changing the culture
10. Dealing with interpersonal relationships
11. Amazon architecture, moving from monolithic to micro-services and pizza-teams
12. Roles and ownership
14. Are you solving a problem that needs to be solved?
15. Embracing failure for good intentions (Amazon)
16. Amazon never feared to go into an area that they didn't know?
17. How, as a tech leader, can you deal with teams experimenting and maybe failing?
18. Give the experts in your team the leeway
19. Everyday learn from the team
20. Ideas can come from anyone; listen and find the right way to funnel and focus them
21. Creating high performing teams
22. Engineers should have 2-3 jobs in their first 3-5 years
23. Fearful of losing an employee
24. Final wise words for tech leaders out there from Charles
Transform your technology organization with IT Labs teams.
Reach out to us.
Podcast: Transformation Leadership for CTOs
Episode 5: Transformation Leadership for CTOs
Guest: Jardena London – Enterprise Business Agility Strategist at Rosetta Technology Group
Once again, greetings, ladies and gentlemen. Jardena London joins me for a riveting discussion on Leading Transformations. On how exciting they are, and at the same time how painfully challenging they can be. In short, It’s not for the faint-hearted.
Some of you may recall Jardena from a previous IT Labs Webinar: “Creating Structural Agility with Living Systems.”, jointly presented with Sally Breyley Parker.
In this talk, we dig deeper into the role of CTOs in organizational transformations. We cover a number of angles including a few outlined here:
- The elements that create good transformation. What supports transformation and what does not.
- What Jardena has observed in her vast experience.
- And the importance of the CTO and tech people in enhancing transformations.
Something in our discussion resonated with me. On how we need to get more of the technology folk talking to the business and supporting them. Especially CTOs. It’s been something that I have been banging the drum about for a long time. Jardena’s view reinforced my belief that we need to break down boundaries with CTO’s leading aspects of a transformation from their wealth of intellect, ideas, and passion for trying new technological ideas.
I hope you come away with as many good takeaways as I did.
Our Guest: Jardena London
Jardena on Linkedin
Jardena on Twitter
Referenced Webinar in the Podcast: Creating Structural Agility with Living Systems (Guests: Јardena London & Sally Breyley Parker)
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Podcast: DonorTrends Success story
Episode 4: DonorTrends Success story (from Innovation to conception, and a lovely happy exit)
Guests: Ben Miller (CAO) & Caity Craver (CEO) from DonorTrends
Greetings again ladies and gentlemen, and variations thereupon. We have a special episode for you this time, the first in a series. We are calling them “Client confessions” where we invite current and previous clients of IT Labs to talk about their projects, businesses and where they are with them. The aim is to deliver insights and stories of success (and maybe even failures), this all being in in the spirit of providing value and shared learning. Anyway, back to this Client Confessions Podcast.
It was a delight to talk to Caity Craver & Ben Miller from DonorTrends about how they took an idea for helping non-profit organisations maximise donations to realisation. This was through a heady mix of sophisticated maths, big data analysis, a sprinkle of AI and inventive ways of presenting the information. A remarkable story of Innovation, conception to successful exit. And along their journey was IT Labs, turning a very manual time-consuming process into a product that was a win for everyone. This makes all of us at the office incredibly proud. We invite you to listen to their account. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did.
Our Guests: Ben Miller & Caity Craver
Ben on Linkedin
Caity on Linkedin
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Podcast: Automobile eCommerce industry amid Corona disruption
Eugene Kovshilovsky
Sr. Vice President of Software Engineering at CarParts.com
IT Labs CTO Confessions- Episode 3:
Automobile eCommerce industry amid Corona disruption
At the time of this podcast recording, the Coronavirus was in full swing (and maybe it still is). We hope you managed to keep safe.
Eugene Kovshilovsky (Евгений Ковшиловский), Senior Vice president of Engineering at US Auto parts, joined us for a discussion around how the automobile eCommerce industry was handling the Coronavirus storm. Eugene has vast experience across many sectors and carries a nice mix of technological wisdom, knowledge, and skill, with the leadership qualities that bring his teams together (the human element).
The turmoil has shaken all layers of the Automobile industry. In the podcast, we discuss how the auto parts eCommerce industry works. We enter the discussion with Eugene, curious as to see how things have impacted it from a technological perspective.
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Podcast: Principles for the foundation of technology-driven organisations
Episode 2: Principles for the foundation of technology-driven organisations
Herding the kittens in technology
Guest: Branislav Gjorcevski – CEO of IT Labs
Hello People. I hope you are managing to navigate yourself, your people and your organisation through these mind-boggling times. Our next CTO Confessions podcast is highly related to this subject of navigating an organisation in general, particularly in these times. That’s leading others and includes leading yourself.
Banne, CEO and co-founder of IT Labs is joining me in a warm discussion on the subject. We are going to get together with a hot beverage and talk about Principles (and values) that help drive what you as a leader are trying to achieve. How principles combined with your unique style of leadership support you in herding those kittens in your organisation that just seem to run off in a different direction than don’t serve you or the business very well. We will gravitate around a book that we both love (Principles by Ray Dalio). Principles are powerful. They help you make tough decisions; they allow people to align themselves around them. They can create a powerful flow of value delivery and productivity with minimal command and control (i.e. make your life easier). Come and have a listen and see how this can help your leadership and the dynamics in your workplace.
Banne on Linkedin
Banne on Twitter
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Podcast: Business Agility in the context of the Corona Virus challenge
Hello all, and welcome to “CTO Confessions” brought to you by IT Labs.
My name is TC, and I’m honored to be hosting the “CTO Confessions” podcast. In our podcast we tackle the subject of leadership, how to deal with hard issues facing your business and we try to get closer to the world of those fantastic women and men that hold it all together with different priorities that rarely get appreciated.
Join us in our biweekly podcast and have fun as we tackle the world of business and the CTO Life.
So let’s talk about our first episode (drum roll…) “Business Agility in the context of the Corona Virus challenge“. Snappy title right? As if the world was not complicated enough with businesses having to navigate fast, dramatic changes in the market place, and also internally to the organization. Along comes a devastating pandemic that has us all disrupted in so many ways. So as a business leader, what can you do to keep the business afloat?
How can you keep all your crew happy? How can you lead in a time of increased VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity)? Listen to our podcast to get some insights from our Chief Methodologist, Mr Manoj Khanna.
Manoj Khana on Linkedin
Manoj Khana on Twitter
Our Questionnaire regarding Business Agility, please click here
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