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438-Stop Waiting to Be Invited w/Bill Garcia · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: I think for the IT industry as a whole, the credibility gap. I think many IT leaders speak technology fluently but business poorly and IT cost them the seat at the table. For me right now, I would say it's the talent and skills gap, the first one related to communications and how you convey and communicate and translate the needs of the business into technology and your solutions into the impact that the business will get out of it. Other big challenges, catching up with cybersecurity channel is an AI opportunities that opportunity scenarios on its own and especially when you have to do it while sustaining the operation, keeping the lights on and evolving the landscape. If your organization doesn't have the right talent, everything else stalls.
• 1:01
  Speaker B: After talking with IT leaders, I've come to discover one thing. And it's the same thing, you know, it's the same thing everyone else knows, whether they want to admit it out loud or not. Nothing gets done in any company without it touching it. Nothing. But here's the thing. When everything's on fire, when nothing's working, when the ransomware hits, when the whole business grinds to a halt, it is completely indispensable. You're the most valuable asset in the company. But when everything's running like a well oiled Tesla, you're a line item, a cost center on a spreadsheet. You've done the work, you've built the career, you've earned your seat at the executive roundtable. But having a seat at the table is one thing. How much nicer would it be to actually be heard? This is yous've Been Heard.
• 1:55
  Speaker C: Welcome back to today's episode of the youe've Been Heard IT Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Doug Kameen, and today I am talking with Bill Garcia, the Vice President of Information Technology for TMIC Corporation Americas. Welcome to the show, Bill.
• 2:14
  Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.
• 2:17
  Speaker C: All right, so Bill, tell us a little bit about what TMIKE does to start and we'll get into talking about you and your history and stuff because this is a leadership podcast we want to talk about. We want to talk about you, but we always kind of want to know like who we're talking to and what they're doing right now.
• 2:32
  Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. So tMike, it's an industrial services and products company. So we provide services to several industries including mining or minerals and many others, and most recently moved manufacturing into the US and we're manufacturing inverters or solar farms and we're manufacturing UPS for large data centers. So it started happening probably three years ago. So imagine the growth and the activity that has been going on these years with all the changes that the world is experiencing. So it's been a good transition for the company and we're in a growth mode and very aggressively reinventing ourselves.
• 3:21
  Speaker C: Nice. So you've been here for almost two years and so tell us a little bit about what have you brought in? So I know when you're a leader coming into a new role, there's frequently the big ask, hey, we need something or like the person who's been here for years before and it's not necessarily a bad thing, but they're like, like they had this philosophy. What's your philosophy? What are you doing? What are you bringing forward? What are you carrying out? So like, what things did you bring in when you started here at TMike?
• 3:46
  Speaker A: Yeah, so I think in a word it's change and adaptability and updating from the organization to our processes to governance to systems. So we have been a successful company from the start, but with a reasonable rate of growth. But lately the growth exploded. So the company needed someone who came and transformed the IT organization to be aligned with the new reality of the business. And that includes upskilling, reskilling our people, training them, changing the governance that we were using for many, many years to adapt to the new world, adapting to a new corporate commercials, and the new challenges of a company that duplicated in revenue in the last very few years and is on its path to do the same again in the next few. So we needed to become a new IT organization as the company is doing itself in every front. So we needed to adapt quickly to prepare for the new world, to catch up on cybersecurity, cyber protection, information security, for the most part, catch up on our ERP environments, the 20 year old environment that needed to refresh into the new era and most importantly take advantage of AI, catch up on the new technologies, being able from every perspective, from data to protection to regulation to people skills, etc, to be up to speed with the new challenges. Now we're an industrial services company and we provide technology to our customers. So we also need not only to refresh our internal technology, but continue incorporating technology into our products and services. So that was a very comprehensive a challenge. That was practically my mandate from day one.
• 5:56
  Speaker C: Yeah, so I'm the CITO at a mental health nonprofit and I'm leading here because you mentioned about ERP and I was looking you deployed an Oracle, I think Oracle Fusion mentioned. So I'm working with a different Oracle product which is Netsuite and so we just finished a NetSuite deployment and it took a while because we did an everything deployment. So we did you erp, CRM, the workforce management, timekeeping solution, the payroll. We did it all all at once and man, it was a lift. Like, I mean an ERP project is always a lift. So I don't want to like dismiss an ERP project. But like we took on like six different tasks all at once and it took us, it took us a good 18 to 24 months to get from conceptualization to finish and we're still in the process of like I call it the settling phase. You've gone live but now you're kind of like tweaking it to make it what you want. It's been a real challenge. How did you like tell us a little about your experience like in the implementation side of that?
• 6:50
  Speaker A: Yeah, it is a very impactful activity and project because in our case it was not only to move into a new environment, cloud based or fusion, but also implementing Oracle in the manufacturing operations which was full of Excel and paper and. NET applications here and there and a bunch of things interacting. And we needed to move forward into something that for some users is more complex because it asks for more information and it disrupts in the beginning their daily operation. It's only down the road that they realize that the amount of information that they were capturing is now useful and usable. So the change management that goes in it, the effort, the training is massive. In addition, I said we're bringing manufacturing to the us so last year we launched a new plant in Katy, Texas and this year we're launching a second plant that is double the previous one in size. And it's not only the ERP front is the business transformation that is happening across the board and aligning all the participants in the project, which are mostly people from the business, even though we have a big team from our IT organization, coaching and helping and doing everything, the testing, the design, the participation needs to come from the business people that are very busy producing stuff and also migrating to a new productive environment on its own. So it's being a very hectic a couple of years and likely to continue like that because we're finishing phase one with the scope of manufacturing and phase two will complete the ERP migration for that division and phase three will take it to the rest of the company. So we're doing it in aggressive time frames while everything else is getting transformed as well.
• 8:55
  Speaker C: That's awesome. So let's talk a little about your professional history. So Leadership podcast. Our listeners love to know the backgrounds of the people that are coming up. So we have both your peers and people who are listening here that are in the space and thinking about what's their first leadership role and stuff like that. Tell us about your history, the things you've done and how you moved through that to one role to the next and how you developed your portfolio of experience to get you to where you are today.
• 9:28
  Speaker B: If your Internet goes down and you're calling carriers yourself, that's not strategic. IT we help teams centralize monitoring, proactive tickets and escalation across every location without capex. Less noise, more uptime, make it boring again. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save.
• 9:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, so I think a very significant experience was in the beginning. I started my career as a consultant. I started with Accenture Anderson Consulting at the time and later Andersen Business Consulting and started doing business process re engineering. So even though I studied information systems engineering, I started doing process work, understanding processes, re engineering the processes before I got into the implementation of SAP and other ERPs. So I had the chance to not only understand the businesses but also see what was wrong with them, what needed fixing and improving. So that went on for eight years. I grew up in Colombia and this was in Colombia. I I had projects in Colombia with the oil and gas companies in Argentina, Mexico and some in the US at the time. It was eight years of very intense consulting work during this kind of activity. So that was really a forming experience and something that opened my mind to process improvement and the why of the system. What are the systems doing? And are we just paving roads, all roads or really building super highways as it was described at the time. So that's where it started. And then I moved to the US in 1999 work with General Motors. This was Delphi Corporation, a spin off of General Motors. They were going through the spin offs. I needed to separate it out from the GM operations. A lot of learning went on that one as well because we needed to duplicate and recreate a lot of systems processes, understand what was going on. And with them I was a leader of the business applications and the ERP implementation for that division. And after that I being in several industries, consumer products with Johnson Danar Incorporated again Automotive AES Corporation with Electric company a holding of electric distribution generation companies. So it's been a varied environment, several different experiences and tools and companies and challenges. But for the most part in it. But in two occasions I was a coo of startup companies. One in New York for a financial real estate company for a couple of years and prior to that also doing a major transformation at a family owned company that was in trouble at the time because the Chinese imports started coming to the country. This was Colombia and really impacted the business model. So that's when I really understood what the business leaders deal with beyond IT and processes.
• 13:12
  Speaker C: So I want to dive in a little bit on. You mentioned you were a COO for a little while and it was a bit of a startup business. What different skills did you need to do that role as opposed to being the IT leader role?
• 13:24
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I think in my experience the CEO is the master of all trades and they need to know a little bit of everything. In the beginning of my career I was involved with process reengineering and this was process across the board for vats, oil and gas industries, insurance companies. So I don't see a lot of what goes on behind the back office and the mural office and the front office and the relationship of that and the flows of documents and processes, et cetera. So the CEO in a way the CIO is also like that, but probably more. The CEO more broad, in a more broad sense is an orchestra director. It's looking for that talent that will take care of the specific needs. Think playing different instruments. The people and the director of the orchestra make sure that things are playing well together and they have the right individuals at the right level and playing the right instruments. So it was more putting it simple, the orchestrator of what goes on in terms of operations and what happens in a company beyond marketing and sales, which is the parts that the CEO in my case didn't manage.
• 14:51
  Speaker C: So it's funny you mentioned about CEO has to be the person who knows all trades. And I think one of the common jokes I was making in our ERP implementation at my job as I'm sitting on a meeting with one of my project managers in the PMO office and we're working through a payroll file to get the payroll project done. And we're doing more than like project management. We have pushed down into the work because there wasn't capacity on some of the teams. So we're helping them out by drawing in like two payroll files from the old system and the new system and working on the tie outs to get the import ready for the like the year to date data loads and stuff like that. And I made the joke to my folks about how it is always like the thing that it inevitably has to learn a system somewhere Like I think the really classic joke was if it plugged into the wall, it's a problem. But I think about how much in the business process space it ends up having. If you want like successful it, you have to know more than just like orchestrating it. And it's not uncommon, depending on the size and scale of your organization, to have to push in. I mean, I work mostly in the mid market. You've worked in large enterprise, but in the mid market it's not uncommon to have to push down and into the space to do a lot of the work at times.
• 16:07
  Speaker A: Absolutely. You need, you need to know how to play the instruments as well, and most of them, but you need to enough to be able to select the right people to play in those roles, guide them and help them. I always tell my teams, I work for you guys. You are the experts in your trade, in your front, in your area. I'm here to remove the roadblocks, to make sure that everything plays together. So I tell them, I'm not want to say come to me with the problem and a solution. I tell them, if you have a problem, come with the problem. I'll help you figure out the solution. Because sometimes working together, that works better. And I by all means prefer to know what is going on early rather than when. We need to get into troubleshooting. So definitely need to be involved, be in the details, but it's impossible to be in the details of everything. So sometimes your job focuses more on where the problems are and other times where the opportunities are to provide guidance. And I also joke with my team that the guys that never did me problem get forgotten. So I make a conscious decision to move with them as well. Those areas that are working like a clockwork because they also need attention. And sometimes there are opportunities to improve what is going on there. And definitely as the person on top of everything that is going on and accountable for everything that is happening, I need to see the big picture, the full picture, but also what goes in every area at a decent level of detail.
• 17:48
  Speaker C: Yeah, and I'm glad you're, you're kind of steering into where I was going to go next, which is leadership philosophy. You mentioned about the reaching out to the teams, even the ones that are that are humming along. You got to be careful because if these people are drawing your attention, you don't ignore the other pieces and the people that are there. And I think that's a really critical leadership quality that gets missed a lot. And people forget about that because they're, they get especially if it's super busy, you get really focused on problem solving and that it's hard to take that step back and go up to the next level and say, hey, like, don't forget you have this role that operates at the higher plane above everyone else. And so you have to stop and think about what's going on there too.
• 18:29
  Speaker A: Absolutely, definitely.
• 18:31
  Speaker C: So what is some of the key differences that you've seen between how business it slash the engagement works from where you were from to the United States? Like, what did you have to learn that was different? What made you scratch your head and be like, what are you people doing here? Type of thing and stuff like that?
• 18:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's an important question. And start early. Working in an international company, Accenture, with people from the US and many other countries. I participated in a project in Argentina that had 250 consultants from all over the world. And that's a, an incredible cultural experience. But then most recently when I started here, this Japanese company, I, I was very curious. I had worked with Asian companies before, but not as closely as this time. And I, I took a training on culture and I was very surprised to see how the different cultures influence the way you, you behave and all. I, I had seen it by experience, but it was very good to see it in, in the paper and in a survey and in an assessment. And I realized that the Colombian culture, the, the Japanese culture is in one side of the spectrum in terms of respect and hierarchies and collaboration and individuality and everything. The US is at the other end of the spectrum.
• 19:57
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 19:58
  Speaker A: And I realized that if one is in every of those aspects, the US is five, let's say Colombia is two all across. So I realized that the culture I grew up in was closer to Japan. So I said, okay, this is going to be easier for me than for the usual American, I thought. Then I started thinking my challenges when I was starting and understanding the culture in the U.S. definitely something to pay attention to. Definitely something that trainings, awareness, trainings help with because there are completely different ways of thinking about accountability, about the directness, the communication and add to the language barriers. And it's had completely different roles. So it keeps you on your toes. You need to be paying attention. When I remember years ago when I started, it was not that you would throw a badly written email to a ChatGPT and get it wrote. Well, I had to write my emails several times with Google and dictionaries because I wanted to make it right and make sure that the communication was right. The advantage I think I had is my way of thinking and my way of acting, even for Columbia Standards, was very similar to what the American culture is. I'm more individualistic in a way, more competitive and direct in my speech and things like that. So that helped. But it based on X and for everyone is different. But my advice to anyone moving to a different culture is pay attention to those classes and theories because they teach you, they really show you and open your eyes. Communication is the most important skill that you can have in any role. And we're seeing it now with AI now, it's not communication between people, it's communication with machines. And that plays an ability very important roles. You say things, but also how you understand them, how you challenge. You need critical thinking even to talk to an AI, because you need to question it and don't believe everything that it tells you. I think the cultural aspects of life augmented and more impactful. So pay attention to the communication and that works across the board for any discipline and enroll.
• 22:36
  Speaker C: Yeah, I'm actually really glad that you shared that insight. I've probably interviewed. I mean, we have over 400 episodes on the podcast and I've probably done maybe, you know, 40 of them myself. And whenever I've talked to somebody, whether they're based in a foreign country or they've immigrated or another common one is folks who spent like multiple years abroad and then they came back and I hear about one of the things that you're the first person who's really drawn a very clear distinction to say that the culture, like the culture of Colombia was actually more aligned with the culture of Japan, which made you more comfortable. Like, you had this, like, intrinsic understanding of how to navigate their differences in culture, which made you surprisingly comfortable. That's super insightful. So I just wanted to, like, really surface that. It was awesome. So shifting a little bit into personal side here, could you share something not technical that about you that, like, people may not know?
• 23:32
  Speaker A: Well, I think something that could sound interesting. I. I was born in the us, grew up in Colombia. I just stayed here the first year. My dad was a university professor. That's why I was born here. But I grew up in Colombia. Then I moved to Buenos Aires for projects. Bogota, which was not my hometown. I had projects in Mexico and in the us but then when I moved to the us, I really experienced change. And what change was, I started my career in El Paso, Texas, at the Delphi operation there. I used to commute to the Mexico operation every day. But then after that, I mean, in 2020, plus years I've lived in 10 different cities in the United States because of work and that has given me a unique experience knowing cultures, because within the US you also find absolutely different cultures and way of thinking. I lived in Texas, moved to Michida, Detroit, then Atlanta, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Milwaukee, and most recently in Houston, Texas, which I love. After coming from Milwaukee. The heat here in Houston is refreshing for me.
• 25:01
  Speaker C: That's wild. So that's a great segue into some other topics of conversation, which is about AI. We never really escape in it, a discussion about the state of things without talking a little bit, at least about where AI is. So where are you seeing that intersect with your business and where, like how are you starting to leverage it?
• 25:20
  Speaker A: Yeah, so that was a big mandate for me when I started. We needed to catch up internally, but also externally. We're a technology services company as well and we are working on improving our offering both in services and products with ar. So we have, and we had a lot of catch up to do, but we needed to start from the beginning, from cleaning the data, making sure that the data was right, but even more importantly, or equally importantly, the governance aspects of it. We wanted control. I usually equate these to the guardrails or the train tracks. And I always say that governance are those train tracks that allow you to move fast. And that's what we have been doing, is making sure that we can run, that we can move very fast without derailing and without making big mistakes. So we're protecting first the company, the data, what we do, our processes, and then implementing AI. So we're big on that. I think in these last two years we have matured significantly. I could say for what my discussions with other companies and friends and colleagues that we have moved fast and we are ahead of the curve, but we will never stay ahead if we don't continue moving fast. And I'm not comparing to others, I'm comparing to ourselves. We are constantly moving, improving and getting ready for what is next. We have started projects that had to redirect in a different direction because we realized one year after into a project that the conditions of the world have changed and the tools available have changed. Nothing to do with making the wrong decision in the beginning, but having to do with the fact that now you can start something, but you constantly need to question if your direction is still right or if you need to redirect your efforts in other direction. And that's what we have been doing, I think so far successfully. But there's a Lot more to do. And there's always a catch up in terms of skills and available resources and there's no lack of ideas, but how do you execute them? And it's not only a matter of throwing money at the problem, it's having the right resources to lead the right projects, to align with the business, to prioritize what you're doing versus what they believe in their day to day. So it's a challenge, but it's a very exciting challenge, I believe so.
• 28:07
  Speaker C: Like in my organization, we work in the mental health space and a lot of not quite clinical service delivery. So it's not like clinics on the corner you go to. But we work with a lot of different entities like school kids and those types of stuff and providing support services. So what we found was I did like a collaborative learning project in which we did a pilot. We found, pulled together staff. We're largely, we don't manufacture things, we're a deliverer of services. Try to identify the places where that stuff could really be helpful for us as best as possible. In terms of like these types of support staff can. So I think there's almost two levels or maybe three right now of AI deployments. You've got the support style, types of AI. So things like what we're using here on this call right now, like Zoom's AI tools that'll summarize and do things. So it's productivity enhancement tools for individuals and their basis. Can I Show it to ChatGPT and summarize the emails and look at my inbox and do the thing and then we've got like agents and other stuff like that that are working to help us achieve tasks, but do it autonomously so that whether that's like low code, no code or vibe coding types of stuff and things like that, those are the spaces that like we were starting to see much more in the first one than the second one because hard to build an agent to talk to children. But I had a team that was actually a part of our research team that's building, they're trying to build what amounts to a chatbot for mental health discussion or like mental health evaluation and stuff like that. So in your organization, where are you like have you pushed in like manufacturing and stuff like AI to help with the manufacturing process and things like that?
• 29:44
  Speaker A: Yeah, you mentioned a few examples that are typical and we all saw it went through that we created a chatbot first and then later we realized that we created a chatbot that would speak to a certain folder or body of knowledge if you will. And then if we wanted to create another to replicate that solution, we'll need to replicate the whole thing. So we realized, okay, now we need to think multi tenant and how do we avoid the spillover of information from one category to the next. And so a lot of work on the chatbots, the assistance and we went through that process and are now in that second generation that is something more robust and more transferable and reusable. We also work with for our products, we're working on predictive analytics and we have very good products on that front. We're advancing fast on those fronts. We have a few solutions to show and that are becoming part of our offering. And now we are entering that next stage which we're seeing that, okay, we move very fast in silos, kind of in silos. The chatbot wants one solution and maybe other three chatbots where their own solutions, the predictive analytics side of things, the agents that we started experimenting with and some activity on the accounts payable side and things like that. Now we're realizing that we need to create that baseline, that body of knowledge that AI will feed from that is different than the usual databases. So traditionally we talked about databases structured and unstructured and later came the PDFs and the document management systems with a lot of proposals, RFPs, responses to RFPs, contracts and everything you can think of, resumes and information that is in documents that AI can now in many ways read. But we want something that is accessible, but not only that, but something that is better and that is cleaned and that is appropriate and available. So and that's another front. Then you have several tools like ticketing tools, ServiceNow and Moxzilla and all kinds of tools that store incidents and problem management and root cause analysis, trouble solving, tickets, and that's another full body of knowledge. Then you have the emails and meetings and meeting notes. So AI is giving us access way beyond the structured and non structured data that you had in databases before. But the most important one is people. It's the individuals that have been in the company 20, 25, 30 years and they are about to retire. They're doing the company with their knowledge. And we realized, okay, it's about time that we start collecting that knowledge, putting it somewhere. So we're working on that framework and body of knowledge that will represent everything that the company does and has done and wants to do. So we have a reliable source of information to run the agents, I guess, but also your assistance and to enable automation in a way, always under a premise. And I insist on this. Every time I talk about AI, I talk about intelligent augmentation rather than artificial intelligence. And I want to make the distinction because I believe the human in the loop is a critical factor of success. I would avoid for the longest I can to let agents run on their own without that type of monitoring, because I think AI should augment our intelligence and not replace it.
• 34:10
  Speaker C: So you sparked some thoughts for me there about building agents, especially when people are leaving. And I was thinking about documentation. And how often do you go to somebody who's been there for 10, 15, 20 years and you say, hey, I need you to spend the last six months you're here, like writing down what you do, putting it all in some sort of repository. And how often does that information just sit inaccessible, functionally inaccessible, because it's so deep and dense nobody can get into it to truly understand it. They're like, oh, they left all these notes, but they left like, I know it's not a binder of stuff, but let's just say it's like a wiki through SharePoint and it's got 50 pages of information in it. How do you know which one to go find in the moment that you need? And that's where I think some of these agents and these chatbots and all this other stuff are really going to start shining to help you can build the foundational data to feed into it. It's going to really help you be able to do something with it.
• 35:05
  Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. There are unlimited possibilities there because now you can have, in addition to the information that is structured, the information that the person with leave will prepare for you, etc, you can have that person sit down with a chatbot and say, Okay, I have 500 questions here. Before you retire, answer to this and every 50 you get an incentive or a bonus. And you can gamify why incentives? Because otherwise some people will say, okay, I'm leaving, I'm tired, I'm ready to go. But if you give them a sense, a game to play and a way of also making a difference for your company and for yourself, that might also work. And it can be made fun. And it could be an interaction with an agent that knows what to ask, where, how to organize the information at all.
• 35:57
  Speaker C: Awesome, thanks. All right, so I'm going to shift to. I started calling this the lightning round. So if you could fix one big challenge in IT leadership tomorrow, what would it be?
• 36:07
  Speaker A: I think for the IT industry as a whole, the credibility gap. I think many IT leaders speak technology fluently, but business poorly. And IT Cost them the seat at the table. For me right now, I would say it's the talent and skills gap, the first one related to communications and how you convey and communicate and translate the needs of the business into technology and your solutions into the impact that the business will get out of it. Other big challenges. Catching up with cybersecurity channel is an AI opportunities. That opportunity is enormous on its own, and especially when you have to do it while sustaining the operation, keeping the lights on and evolving your landscape. It almost becomes a hero's journey to those extra things that are the most important one. Cybersecurity and AI talent. If your organization doesn't have the right talent, everything else stalls. So strategy, governance, AI, all of it depends on the people who can execute.
• 37:15
  Speaker C: That's a lot of challenges. So I really think this is salient for you because you've occupied not just the CIO role. I think if I'm describing it right, an IT, PMO role, COO roles. What do most CIOs get wrong that you think is obvious?
• 37:32
  Speaker A: I believe it's the communication part. I think it's not speaking the business language. I think something everyone needs to understand is the IT leader needs to stop waiting to be invited and the CEOs must stop treating it as a service desk with a budget. But you need to be up to the challenge. You need to be able to have the conversations sit down and explain, not in techno lingo, in business words, what you're doing, what you're trying to achieve, what you see the future entails and what you need to do to really support growth. The sustained part of the business, the ongoing support, keep the likes on. That's a given. That's not a differentiator. It only shows when there is a problem. Cybersecurity infrastructure, it's only seen when it breaks. The real differentiator is how you want, what you contribute to the business on the top line, the bottom line, the growth and the productivity improvements.
• 38:42
  Speaker C: Awesome. All right, so Bill, we're coming up to the end of the podcast and can you share a little bit about. I. I'll give you two questions, two parts to answer here. One, can you share about your leadership philosophy? I know we touched on that a little bit earlier, but if we could maybe repackage that and. And share it, and then also what advice would you have to give to other IT leaders from what your lessons are and what you've learned?
• 39:06
  Speaker A: Yeah, so my philosophy is, I believe a cio, it's a facilitator, is. Is the Director of the orchestra. As you said before, it needs to know how to play the instruments. But you're here to help your team. You need a team that knows how to and what they need to do. You're here to provide the vision, the path, help them redirect on that and help and remove obstacles for them. I think that's my philosophy. It has worked well. It's not always understood, I guess, but it's my philosophy otherwise you would be very really distracted with the day to day and not paying attention to the most important customer of yours is and those are your CEO, your cfo, your business leaders. You need to be the translator of the business needs to the IT solutions and vice versa. So that's my philosophy and I think in terms of advice, I always think of a challenge and I mentioned briefly about change and I think the continuous small successes over a long period of time and one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you and your company because you may get complacent and you may not challenge your current ways. And with AI and the world we live in right now, you need to be a challenger. You need to become a challenger. You cannot be comfortable with sustaining a business. We still need to do it, but you need to be at the front of the conversation looking for what is changing the business is needing and you need to be leading that transformation for your company.
• 40:59
  Speaker C: Thank you. So what advice would you have for emerging or up and coming leaders that they should. You've been in this business for 20, 30 years and leader of it for at least 20. If somebody's coming up in the ranks here, what advice do you have for them?
• 41:15
  Speaker A: Your IT skills are the basis, are the foundation and you need them and you need to refresh them. But the most important skills are the soft skills are the communication, understanding of the culture, making sure that the message is going across and being understood is not only communicating and saying things, is also making sure that is understood and making sure that you understand what the business needs. So communication soft skills are the skills of the new world and generation and any career. And that's what will make every career survive. The hard skills are extremely important, but some of them are commodity. You can outsource them, you can leverage them, you can delegate them to an AI in many cases. But the soft skills will always be there, will be important even to interact with technology. So pay attention to that. Don't forget the culture, making sure the message goes across and going back to basics and embrace it.
• 42:23
  Speaker C: Awesome. Well, Bill, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.
• 42:28
  Speaker A: Of course. Thank you, Douglas. It was great.
• 42:31
  Speaker C: So that's a wrap on today's episode of youf've Been Heard, the platform for IT Leaders. I'm Doug Kameen, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.