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435- Dirty Data Makes AI Worse w/Stephen Hightower · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: In every business you have your critical business systems, right? You've got your engineering system, you've got your ERP system, you've got your CRM solution, etc. And then when you look at all those coming together, if you don't have a master data approach, then you're going to have that problem with duplicate data, incorrect data, and now with AI, the quality of your data is what really matters. Because you're not going to be able to make good decisions with your enterprise data if it's not accurate.
• 0:42
  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 you've been heard.
• 1:36
  Speaker C: Welcome to the youe've Been Heard platform for IT Leaders podcast. Today I am talking with Steven Hightower, the Chief Technology Officer at Harbaugh. So welcome Stephen, thanks for joining us.
• 1:50
  Speaker A: Thank you very much Douglas. Appreciate you having me.
• 1:52
  Speaker C: So Stephen, can you tell us a little bit about your background here? I do a little bit of pre research. I checked out profile on LinkedIn. Really long history of a lot of different roles in a wide range. And you spent a long time in the private equity space and you go all the way back to big defense here. So tell us a little bit about that.
• 2:14
  Speaker A: Yeah, I've been in the space getting exposed to a lot of different things. I started my career early in the defense related business and then went to Lockheed Martin, which was GE Aerospace, Martin Marietta, then Lockheed Martin. And I was there for a little over 26 years.
• 2:36
  Speaker C: Wow.
• 2:36
  Speaker A: And I took an early retirement and I was the Chief Information officer at the global training and logistics business. It's about a four and a half billion dollar a year based in Orlando. But prior to that I got exposure in manufacturing, quality engineering, business development, et cetera. So I got to Rotate around and see a lot of different parts of the business. And I moved around a good bit in the company. So I think one of the benefits of doing that is you get exposure to different businesses, different cultures, and of course, everybody does things a little bit differently. And so it was a great opportunity to understand the business. And then after that I started consulting in the private equity space. And my first client was Yeti Coolers, which was heck of a fun ride and had a great time there. Great products, great people. And then I've been consulting for private equity up until last year when I took this role at Harmar. And actually Harmar has been a client since 2014. So I knew a good bit about the business and knew a good bit about their products. And the CEO and I have worked together since 2016 and he needed some help in some areas and asked me to come on. So I agreed to.
• 4:02
  Speaker C: You were the guy. Nice. So tell us a little bit about Harmar and what does Harmar do?
• 4:08
  Speaker A: We help people stay in their homes. So we build mobility equipment. So we built stairlifts. We have vehicle lifts, we do elevators, we do vertical platform lifts. So everything as people age, they want to stay in their homes. They want to be in an environment that they're comfortable with. And when they start having physical problems, we have solutions for them to be able to help them stay in their homes.
• 4:37
  Speaker C: Thanks for sharing. So I'm going to go back here to your days and some for me, there's a connection here. So 26 years inside of aerospace and defense in Lockheed, when you took the retirement package to go out of there, like what, what were your most transferable skills from in there to the outside? Because, like being in aerospace and defense has its own like world, if you will.
• 4:59
  Speaker A: Sure. So program management's a core skill at Lockheed Martin. Right. Because we managed large, complex programs. So you had to have a real good skill set in program management. And that's transferable everywhere.
• 5:12
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 5:12
  Speaker A: Then systems engineering. Right. Being able to look at everything from beginning to end and understand the components in between. A transferable skill. Lean Six Sigma black belt. Lockheed got on the train and we trained a lot of people and certified them in that discipline. And then of course, I'm a certified information systems and security professional because I led one of the first information security enterprise programs at Lockheed Martin. So those were the four items that really transferred well. And the other piece that transferred well is because I was in so many different businesses and different jobs, I. I get a real good sense in terms of how well a Company is run by just looking under the covers and looking at a couple of different metrics. And if they're keeping metrics or they have KPIs that really reflect actionable plans, then it's really easy to understand that. So when, when you work in the private equity space you're, you're working at companies that are much smaller but are still providing the same set of services. So it's pretty easy when you have a lot of scar tissue. Like I've had to be able to walk into a place and quickly understand where the pain points are.
• 6:33
  Speaker C: Yeah. So yeah like I'm a mid market specialist CIO. That's where 10 year in government service swapples 10 years as municipal CIO and then in the nonprofit space as well. But generally like large nonprofits, 50 million and up hundreds of employees type of space. So as I'm thinking about the different skills that you mentioned a toolkit that you have and you said there's like the handful of four or five things that you could walk in, you look under the hood, you pull up this cover and you look and you can tell is it good, is it bad, is this thing place running okay? What are they?
• 7:11
  Speaker B: Your CFO doesn't want 47 Internet bills. We help IT teams consolidate multi location Internet into parent child billing with coterminous contracts while still buying wholesale from the best providers. It gets control, finance gets clarity. No disruption, no sales pitch. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save.
• 7:34
  Speaker A: Well, there's only three metrics that really matter, right? Cycle time, the quality of the service and the unit cost that you're providing. And you can map those to anything that you're doing. So if you're not tracking that in your business then I have a good understanding of, of what's important to you. And those are the ones that are actionable. They're the ones that make a difference. And I developed on an appreciation for those because I worked in manufacturing, I worked in quality and engineering and business development. So I saw a variety of different functional organizations and over that time developed my own playbook in terms of how I would approach things and what I would do.
• 8:22
  Speaker C: And so you transitioned to private equity. You really built yourself a specialization in helping the title. If we put this time, this podcast under the title of exit risk to exit multiple. And I think if you go look at your LinkedIn profile, you've got your narrative at the top where you discuss that your go to market for like superpower Is the ability to take risk out of things and to make. Build confidence essentially in the business of what's going there. Like, how have you executed that through different entities? You mentioned Yeti Cooler was your first place you went through, but you had a variety of. Variety of different businesses. So which ones were more interesting, which ones were more challenging? What were some of the biggest ones you faced?
• 9:03
  Speaker A: Well, you always follow, or at least in my perspective, you follow what drives revenue, because revenue is what drives the business, is what enables the business to operate and to fund different initiatives. And so you need to look at that in terms of that process flow. Order to cash. Right. Is one that you need to understand because that is really what drives the business and the cycle time that it takes in order to convert orders to cash. That would be the first thing. And the second thing is really, how's your service level? Are you providing the right level of service? Do the trains run on time? Are you enabling the business and being able to have technology be a multiplier versus being a cost center? Because I believe where technology is today, that every business should really be a digital transformation.
• 10:01
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 10:01
  Speaker C: I mean, if you're an IT space, you're pretty much always being asked to do some form of digital transformation, no matter where you're going. And every business in some way a technology business nowadays too?
• 10:12
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 10:13
  Speaker C: I mean, even the asphalt paving company probably has some technology in there somewhere that they need to manage and maintain.
• 10:19
  Speaker A: They do. Everybody does.
• 10:23
  Speaker C: So you mentioned you got your CISP there, and I noticed that you've had it for a really long time. So you really got that right at almost the beginning there of the CISP coming out, huh?
• 10:36
  Speaker A: Well, I was asked to lead the first information security enterprise program across lock Lockheed Martin. And so we had five different business areas and five different CIOs and five different ways of doing things and five different sets of tools. And I was asked to come in and have a single process and a single tool. And so it's sort of like I was from corporate, I was here to help.
• 11:04
  Speaker C: Famous last words.
• 11:06
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I had a lot of security engineers on the program and they were talking about taking the CISSP exam. And I said, well, I'll take it with you. So I studied and I went in and I took the test and passed the test. I can't say all my security engineers passed the test, but I passed the test and have been involved with that throughout my career.
• 11:31
  Speaker C: Yeah, I picked up mine. Oh, what about four, four years ago now? I think I just renewed my first cycle for mine. And it's a challenge even then nowadays especially, I think back then you would have been doing that probably even on a paper test. Huh. Now it's all adaptive computer testing and stuff like that, which depending on how you like to take tasks, it could be easier or harder.
• 11:50
  Speaker A: Yeah, ours was like, we met at a hotel and everybody was pencils down and taking the tests. And it was generally like a four hour test.
• 12:03
  Speaker C: Wow, that's wild. So this is one of the questions that I ask when we have guests on the show. We talk about your career, we talk about your background and what makes you tick and things like that. But I, I love to ask some personal questions. Humorous, fun, background personal questions. You've been in the business a long time. So if we go way back to how did you get into technology, like, we'll do the, like, what was your first computer experience or technology experience?
• 12:27
  Speaker A: Yeah, see and well, it was Commodore 64.
• 12:32
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 12:33
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I started writing code early and found that I had an aptitude for it and it was a fun way to problem solve with different issues and be able to do things that other people weren't doing. So that's how the bug bit me.
• 12:51
  Speaker C: So was that like when you were in like high school and stuff or.
• 12:54
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, I was probably out of high school.
• 12:57
  Speaker C: Okay. College, post college. All right, that's fair enough. But thinking about that, you didn't start your career in technology then.
• 13:04
  Speaker A: No, I did. I did start my.
• 13:06
  Speaker C: Okay, sorry. So once you kind of got bit by the bug, you were like, oh, this is for me, I love this stuff. And you were immediately routed into technology.
• 13:14
  Speaker A: Yeah, I, I just found I had an aptitude to write code and like, I guess I was wired in that way. So I got the opportunity to do a lot of different projects when I work, because I work for a variety of different companies and even worked for a startup that was taking the first IBM PC when they came out and building a retail information system that would be used for retailers that were under $20 million. And that was a startup venture capital funded company and I went to work for them and so I got exposure really quickly to the first IBM PCs that came out. So writing code in 64k stack and data stack was 64k. You didn't have a lot of memory or things to work with, so you had to be able to do a little bit of assembly language and lower level coding to be able to get it to work.
• 14:09
  Speaker C: Yeah. So I'm gonna shift back into talking about leadership in particular here you've been in the space a long time and you've been in a lot of different roles. So we talk about your Lockheed days and that's aerospace and defense. It's very, I don't call it regimented, but that's a lot of structure behind it. Now you're in the private equity space. I'm sure there's a certain structure. It's different than it was in the other space, but there's different goals, there's different focuses and things like that. What were the qualities or what are the qualities that you feel that leaders need? So like this is, I think the ask of if you were talking to other people who are not leaders or coming up into leadership, what would you share with them about both those spaces? Like what does it take to do to be successful in that. Up in like a Lockheed Martin type of space? Whether it's that or some other space. And, and what does it take to be successful at the places you're at now in these, like private equity? High growth in, in these companies.
• 15:02
  Speaker A: Sure. So they're totally opposite. Right. Because my experience in Lockheed is that it was slow. A lot of people wanted to be in the decision process. It was tough to get things done quickly.
• 15:17
  Speaker C: Right.
• 15:18
  Speaker A: You could have the best idea in the world, but you had to go through so many different meetings and reviews before you would get approval. That speed was an issue. Right. Didn't move quickly enough. And so if you go into that type of environment, you have to have a really good problem solving skill set in order to be creative on how you can get your value proposition clearly outlined and get it across to people to get them invested in terms of what you want to be able to accomplish. So that's a skill set that can be learned, but it requires deep work in terms of investigation and learning how to describe a value proposition. Of course, with AI now doing a lot of that work is so much simpler than it was when I was at Lockheed Martin. But then you transition into the private equity space and a lot of times you have single resources, you have people who have worked at the company for 10 or 15 years. So there's a lot of tribal knowledge, not to say that there's not in the larger companies, it's less bureaucratic. And the real competitive advantage in private equity is speed, doing things faster, doing things quickly, not being afraid of say, or being able to fail fast, fail early and adjust. Right. So it's a little bit of tuck and roll because you're going to experience a lot of different things. And so you need to be able to adjust and problem solve and really make those changes quickly because private equity is about speed because that's what creates value. Because the sooner you're able to do it, the more value you can create for the company. And that is really what you're doing in private equity. And there's a standard playbook for private equity, right? You buy a platform company, you invest in it, you find appropriate acquisitions in terms of being able to bolt on and then you have a five year hold period and hopefully at the end of that time you've been able to create the value through the scaling of the different companies that you've purchased to add on to the platform company and then you go to market to be able to see what your multiple is.
• 17:39
  Speaker C: So in that space, the private equity space. So I think one of I have a couple of thoughts here. Maybe I'll see if I can get each of them out first and foremost. At times there's a negative connotation to the private equity space in terms of, because of that. Like some of the things you described, the let's go fast and let's just focus on the dollars and those types of things. And so when I think about that from the perspective of an IT leader. So our listeners on this podcast who might think, what's it going to be like being inside that company or that entity? Some of us crave stability, but you don't always get. Well, you get but in a different way in private equity because there's an exit coming at some point where you will be either rolled up to somewhere else and you won't be needed anymore, or there's something along those lines. So how would you give advice to somebody to navigate those waters successfully?
• 18:31
  Speaker A: Well, in the private equity space, if you're in technology, you have to be able to scale up and down the stack, right? You've got to be able to work a low level technical issue, problem, solve it, but you've got to also be strategic and be able to chart a path forward. And so what my experience has been in that space is when you do that and you continue to create value, you can't continue to create a problem solving environment where you're solving problems for the business, you're improving the cycle time for revenue generation, right? You're being able to invoice, you're being able to close your books. I've been in some private equity businesses that had like an 18 day monthly closing process. So the only thing that they did was close the books for 18 months versus well run companies, you close the books in a day or two.
• 19:28
  Speaker C: Yep. In the nonprofit space, I've definitely felt that, like, what does it take to actually get a set of books closed? And it could be 10, 14 days of the month just for closing and that's considered acceptable. It's just par for the course or how business has to be done, if you will, or at least it's accepted as such.
• 19:48
  Speaker A: It shouldn't be accepted because when, when you have a process like that, right. If you're a lean Six Sigma practitioner, you're just looking at a lot of waste that's being created because there's manual processes, there's corrections, things that are being done that should have the right master data approach so that you don't have those issues. Because in every business you have your, your critical business systems, right. You've got your engineering system, you've got your ERP system, you've got your CRM solution, et cetera. And then when you look at all those coming together, if you don't have a master data approach, then you're going to have that problem with duplicate data, incorrect data, and now with AI, the quality of your data is what really matters because you're not going to be able to make good decisions with your enterprise data if it's not accurate. And unfortunately many people have never taken that seriously. They've always given lip service to it. But now I think that with AI, it's starting to drive a different focus in terms of data quality.
• 20:57
  Speaker C: Yeah, I can feel that, like at the place where I'm at currently, we're moving from a siloed system approach and some of what you described, which is the different disparate system, there's an ERP system sort of free stance, finance maintains it, there's an HR system sort of free stands, the HR team maintains the payroll, same thing. And I just completed almost a two year project to get a lot of this done. But moving on to Oracle's NetSuite in particular in this case, and consolidating onto a single database system and the efficiency and the discipline that gets driven by forcing everything into one set of data, one data library essentially has been eye opening for some of the teams because they used to be able to kind of like fudge it, for lack of a better way to put it. They could be like, we maintain an employee list here in the ERP system, but it can be slightly different than the employee list is maintained in the HR system because they have. Because all we have to do is move data back and forth. They don't have to share a common database and all of a sudden they go live on NetSuite and they're like, oh, if we terminate an employee in hr, it carries all the way through immediately to the ERP side. But how are we going to invoice the last week or two weeks of invoicing for this individual's time or whatever it is they need to be billed for? So yeah, it's like driving that lower cycle time and stuff like that. I'm seeing that even where I'm at today. And then I think your point is well made about the AI side of it, where it's always been true to say like garbage in, garbage out when it comes to data analytics work. But the AI tools turbocharged that because it can take such vast amounts of data and if you've got it can just eat in in one swoop all your systems and then try to synthesize them and if they're not synchronized, it's not going to work, right?
• 22:44
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, people are always able to fudge it. Any ERP migration that I ever did in past was always driven by the quality of the data, right? You're moving from one system to another, the edits are different, the field sizes are different, etc. That was always the biggest issue. And people would just let their data become dirty over the years, just like cleaning out your attic. They never ever focused on doing it because they were able to do workarounds, they were able to keep spreadsheets offline, they were able to do all these different things, things that allowed that behavior to continue. But now I don't see that continuing anymore because with the AI tools that are available now and what you're getting from them is pretty amazing. And the quality of your data is what drives the quality of the decisions.
• 23:41
  Speaker C: So you mentioned you spent time at Lockheed and so in the defense business and stuff. So now do you find that when you're looking for like opportunities and other stuff like that, is there a concentration or an area of the country that they're like more concentrated in than not for what? Maybe it's specific to the things you look for. I mean, sometimes businesses, if you're in
• 24:01
  Speaker A: the technology space, the i4 corridor is probably where the highest concentration of that is, because you've got a huge simulation, a huge gaming industry that's in Florida and that drives a lot of the technical skills. And if you're out outside of those spaces, it's sort of hit or miss.
• 24:24
  Speaker C: I see, yeah. So like up here in upstate New York, like, we have our technology border that stretches usually across, like the Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse area. A lot of university driven, in our case, places like RIT and stuff like that. Yeah. So, all right, getting back to some conversations on leadership and the qualities of leadership and stuff like that. A good portion of our listeners are people who are coming up in their careers and they're looking for either their first roles or their first paces to go. What advice would you have for them to break into the space? And when I say the space, I mean even like I want to be like a deputy CIO or assistant director of IT or those types of things. Do they get up in that space and get themselves that first seat? What advice would you have for them?
• 25:10
  Speaker A: Well, there's really three things I think that you have to do. One, you have to understand the business and you have to know what their business problems are. You can't just look at it from a technical perspective. Right. I remember a time early in my career where technologists would want to just put technology in because it was the latest and coolest technology. And I was in a meeting and I was like, well, what business problem is solving? And I was getting a lot of heat for asking the question. But when you look at it, you've got to really understand the business to understand what problems need to be solved. What are their pain points, how do they do it? The second thing that you have to do is you have to develop relationships within the business. If you're in there or if you're trying to get a job in a business, you've got to make phone calls, you've got to do things other than, hey, I sent 50 resumes out or I sent X number of emails. It's still a personal touch. Right. There's still a social aspect of it that people need to keep in mind. And then the third piece of it is really your problem solving skills and collaboration and being able to be able to work with other people to collaborate together and solve problems in a way that can be done quickly and efficiently. Right. So a lot of people work remotely. So know how whiteboarding works. Whether it's Miro or Figma or whatever the tool is, be able to show people how to solve those problems using those tools, whether they're in the office or not, because you can create that type of environment in a virtual way. And I guess the last thing that I would add, I said three. But I'm going to make a change, say, to one of the skills that I think has been most beneficial to me is having Lean Six Sigma as a background. That is really a good framework for people to understand. Right. Because that's all about business processes. It's about driving waste out of the businesses and becoming more efficient. So if you have those four things, I think that will give you a leg up. But you have, you have to look outside. You can't just be narrowly focused in one particular area. You have to look at those four different areas. Areas
• 27:44
  Speaker C: moving to today's CIOs, the people sitting in the chair now, like myself, what are some of the biggest challenges that you see that we're facing as CIOs operating inside of these businesses?
• 27:59
  Speaker A: Well, it's got a couple of different challenges, right? One, one is your business environment, right? How's your revenue, how's your growth, where are you positioned in the market? And so how can you lean in to be able to help the business grow in those different ways? And I focus on revenue, I focus on how do I add value. I don't want to be known as a cost center. I don't want to be known as, oh, well, you need to take another 20% out of your budget. I want to be able to turn it around, to be able to say, this is the business case that we can use to be able to drive value in the business versus it's a cost reduction exercise. And with the tools and the technologies that are available today, it's really about how are you viewed as being a value added partner and how do you demonstrate that in really meaningful ways as well as consistently, not just. I did one project that was successful. I mean, in my current role, there were some stability issues. And one of the first things that I did is I put in a monitoring tool that would help me be proactive so that we run a manufacturing business. I wanted to know anytime there was an issue before the first shift came in. And as we went through that and got the level of insight that we needed to find out where the waste, where the problems were, we were proactively going in to solve that. And I did a survey when I first came in and to get a baseline in terms of what people thought. And then I just recently did a second survey and just that piece of being proactive and demonstrating that and driving that accountability and that speed in terms of our responsiveness showed up actually in the survey. So that's the piece that you want to be able to do, is you want to create value. You don't want to just be known as a cost center. You want to show how investment can really drive the business forward.
• 30:11
  Speaker C: Yeah. Another thing that I always focus on, I think you touched on this was like your monitoring tools and those types of things. I love the no surprises mantra in it. I don't like to be surprised by anything. Like I want to know before anybody else knows if something's not working right or something's not functional. I feel like one of the worst things you can end up, the position you end up in it is when you're getting a call from some end user that's like, hey, why aren't these things working? And they haven't been working for the last like 30 minutes or something like that.
• 30:37
  Speaker A: That's right, Yep. That's what creates value. That's what creates trust in the business that you're going to be able to, to spend the money or the investments in a responsible way that drives value for the business. And if you're proactive in solving problems before they actually occur and you're being able to demonstrate that in a regular, meaningful way. But you also have to have transparency. For instance, the monitoring tool that I used, I have dashboards that are out on the factory floor that show the performance of the systems and how things are working. And they're red, yellow, green. If there's a problem, it shows up as red, it's green, everything's good. But it's out on the floor for everybody to see. So you've got to have a level of transparency. It can't just be a black box that nobody knows what you're doing.
• 31:30
  Speaker C: Oh, for sure. Yeah. I love the radical transparency ideas. The more honest and straightforward we are, usually the better you get. Buy in and trust and support. It doesn't always work out perfectly. Sometimes it can be weaponized against you if you will. But broadly speaking, that's a good deal. A good way to go is that people feel, if they feel like they're informed, they generally will start trusting that you're doing the right thing.
• 31:52
  Speaker A: That's right. And it's about building that trust and demonstrating that over and over again reliably and in a high quality manner.
• 32:03
  Speaker C: So we didn't talk much about AI tools. So venture over there for a little bit here. We talked a little bit about how they're changing the nature of how we're incorporating or analyzing our data. Where are you seeing some of that future going? You're working into the manufacturing space. How are these tools starting to impact your businesses and whether it's staff or manufacturing or whatever the case may be?
• 32:28
  Speaker A: Well, it's Affecting efficiency in terms of what we do.
• 32:32
  Speaker C: Right.
• 32:33
  Speaker A: We've deployed a digital worker. So we have a digital worker that can answer the phone, can answer technical questions, can provide answers to people that previously we had sales reps or other people doing it. And by deploying that particular technology, we allow the sales reps to move up the value chain to be able to drive more revenue, be able to service the customer better, to be able to increase csap because they're not getting a lot of what I would say would be nuisance calls that can be handled with technology. That's just one example of some of the items that we've taken as well as agents. I'm a Claude fan, I use anthropic as my go to, and the analysis of what it's capable of doing is pretty amazing. I mean, the new models that are coming out are just getting better and better, faster and faster. You still have to have a human in the loop in terms of their capability. And then of course we have some of our large CRM vendor, we use their product and we use their AI capabilities, which are actually pretty good. And we're doing things like being able to, to have our installers upload their invoices automatically without having to email them in. We take them, we process them, we're able to do things that make it easier to do business with. And the easier we are to do business with through technology, the more satisfied our dealer network will be and the better off we'll be in terms of our CSAT and our overall customer satisfaction by leveraging technology in those ways. And then personally for me, it's just boosted my productivity to a different level in terms of what I'm able to get in terms of answers, analysis just very quickly. And then we have a ERP solution that is being built out in terms of some AI capabilities to be able to automate and provide agents that will solve problems that required a human to go in and take the time to do it. And now we're deploying agents that can automate that and be able to improve the productivity so that as, as we look at our people and their experience, right, they're the core of the business and we need to be able to focus on allowing them to play to the strengths, to be able to focus on the customer and really to drive the value. And then take all the, what I would say, the nuisance work, the administrative type of things, let's take that and let's apply technology to it because that, that's what drives real value for the Business.
• 35:39
  Speaker C: All right, so we're coming up on the end of our episode here, and as we get into the last segment or time here, I want to return to leadership and qualities of leadership. You've seen a lot of companies, you've worked a lot of bosses. What are some of the best qualities that you've interfaced with in terms of other leaders that you find they're the most valuable to use,
• 36:06
  Speaker A: but they embrace inclusion. Right. They look to be able to include different perspectives. You, you can think of it like a red team review, right. If, if you have an environment where you're always looking for the best answer, where you're being challenged to be able to do more than you did the day before. And, and they do it in a way that's embracing and inclusive and respectful. That, I think is one of the best things. And it's having the right attitude. It's a can do attitude. It's doing the right thing each and every time. And then being a team player and making sure that you support your teammates so that when they're having issues, that you're there to be able to help them and support them so that they can be successful. It's just not about an individual's success. It's about the success of the company.
• 37:00
  Speaker C: Thanks. All right, well, Stephen, I'd like to thank you for investing your time with us on you've Been Heard today.
• 37:07
  Speaker A: Well, thanks very much, Douglas. I appreciate it. Yeah.
• 37:10
  Speaker C: So. All right. So everyone, that is a wrap on today's episode of you've Been heard, the platform for IT Leaders. I would like to thank Steven Hightower for joining us today. My name is Doug Kabeen, your co host today, and we will look forward to seeing you odd the next episode.