45. Culture may eat strategy for breakfast, but technology eats the world!

Jane Chwick, the former Co-Chief Operating Officer of Goldman's technology division, and a seasoned board member, talks about the critical impact of having a technologist on a board. Thanks for listening! We love our listeners! Drop us a line or give us guest suggestions here. Quotes Getting my first board seat. The simplest way to say this, I followed the advice I had given to more junior people in my organization for years. I let people know what I wanted, I told everybody who asked me what I wanted to do or where I was going, that I wanted to sit on boards, and somehow it made its way through the grapevine Importance of a technologist on the board. If you have even one technologist in the board room pushing back, and if it's the right technologist, they're pushing back in English to the right point, and it will inform the entire board. Big Ideas/Thoughts Extraordinary Women on Boards (EWOB). One of the things that Lisa Shalett has created that's unbelievable about EWOB is on a monthly basis there's a list of board seats that she puts out. She's not a recruiting firm; recruiting firms, will talk to you about the one possible position that might be appropriate for you. Lisa sends out the email of all of the possible board seats, and it's up to you to decide what you're interested in and what you might want to view yourself as a fit for that you can apply to. That's a very different model in the job search world or the board search world, and that's been very valuable Preparing for an IPO.  the IPO process was very interesting because the other boards I had joined were already public, and so this was bringing this company to an IPO and being part of it as a board member was very interesting. The board met with all the big name investment bankers that you could possibly think of and interviewed them all and then we had board sessions around ranking them and deciding which ones would work the best for us and would meet our needs. There were a lot of meetings along the way in terms of creating the right governance structure; we didn't have a compensation committee, a nomination and governance committee, an audit committee and we had to make sure we had the right people on the board for those committees. Don't lose the secret sauce.  Sir Ian Davis was the managing director of McKinsey and is a very impressive person. With all of his background at McKinsey that's helpful in learning how to scale, but he is very conscious to not break what ThoughtWorks is.  Raza.  I love to tell everybody famous Agile seminal joke of the Pig and the Chicken. A pig and a chicken get together and the chicken asks the pig, "Hey, should we open a restaurant?" And the pig says, "Hey, what are we going to call it?" And the chicken responds by saying "ham and eggs."  The pig thinks for a little bit, and then says, "No, thank you. You'll only be involved, but I'll be committed." This is the principle of committed versus involved in a stand-up meeting where people that are merely involved are not allowed to speak in a stand-up meeting. As one of the really important original works for Agile development that Martin Fowler and others did, I may not know ThoughtWorks, but as a recovering technologist I know Martin Fowler. Voya Culture. We announced the new CEO of Voya in the summer and her name is Heather Lavallee and it's very exciting because when I joined the board of Voya another woman and I were the first two women on the board. There were hardly any women in the senior, senior leadership team, and roll the clock forward, not only are there women in the senior leadership team, but the new CEO is a woman.  I think 50% or more of the board are female. It's an amazing story