 From Phoenix, Arizona, the Cube at Catalyst Conference. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. There's a lot of Catalyst Conference, but there's only one Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. It's our fourth year, about 400 people. They're going to be back in San Francisco next year. We wanted to come down and see what's going on. And we're really excited with our next guest. I actually, part of my prep, I went and watched our last interview and we knocked it out of the park. I have to say, Jennifer Tahada, former president and CEO keynote, welcome back. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to see you again. Absolutely. So just to set the record straight, because there's little bits in the internet, you're no longer the CEO of keynote. I am no longer the CEO of keynote. Keynote was acquired by a company called CompiWare. It was merged with a business within CompiWare called Dynatrace. Following that integration last year, I stepped out of the business and have been spending my time making some investments, pursuing the growth arena in tech and also spending a lot of time on boards and helping other women establish themselves in the community of boards in the technology industry. Okay, so if they weren't ringing off the hook already, now your phones will begin to ring off the hook. You couldn't get a better CEO than Jennifer. So, but let's jump in. So you've been spending your time too, helping at conferences like this. So you had a session here. Yeah, I'm speaking today about operations. And my presentation's called OpsChops. It's a subject that's very dear to my heart because of the pragmatism of operations and how underrepresented I think it is at conferences like this. We've seen many inspiring speakers in the last two days talking about their paths to success and to leadership and giving the women in the room a lot of great advice on how to manage everything from your career development to work-life balance to conflict, to challenges, how to really navigate the tech industry, which someone could send me the book on that. That would be great. But no one's really talking about, I think, where the rubber meets the road, which is operations. I believe operations is the bridge between strategy and the execution of great results. And there's a lot of math in operations. And in the tech industry right now, we're hearing a lot of storytelling and narratives about great new companies and new products and the vision for how we're gonna change the world, et cetera. But at the end of the day, if you wanna be successful, you have to set goals that are healthfully aspirational but realistic. And then you've gotta nail your delivery because if you miss a beat, you don't have a lot of time to make up for that miss. And you've got investors, you've got shareholders, you have employees that expect you to deliver. And so operations I think is a great mix between art and science, the math of really measuring your business, the rigor of measuring your progress, really understanding the underlying financial drivers in your business and then orienting your culture and your people around the best possible execution that gives your strategy the most potential to be successful. Right. It often kinda gets a bad rap all the time. We almost talk about strategy and strategy and we're all about strategy. At the end of the day, strategy and no execution, it's just a nice PowerPoint slide, right? But it's not much beyond that. Exactly, exactly. And I think I've been around for a little while. I've seen the market cycles in the technology industry and we're certainly seeing a connection now and a lot of businesses that marked themselves and measured themselves on how much money they've raised or how much money they've spent are now trying to figure out how to generate cash flow and how to survive over a longer period of time if the market does soften. So I have a lot of respect for people who know how to generate cash flow and deliver results and deliver revenue and measure their business on the basis of growth, customers that vote with their dollars, right? And so yeah, I think operations, it's the unsung hero when it comes to business outcomes. And so we're gonna spend some time today talking about what I think is the quiet achiever in leadership. The other thing that's kind of interesting because we've got all these big data shows, right? Big data cloud, probably two of the biggest topics right now, internet of things, of course, being right there. But this kind of nirvana picture that gets painted where there's gonna be all this automation and I'm just gonna throw it in a big Hadoop cluster and voila, everything happens. Boom, I'll have the answer. It doesn't really work that way. Not yet. I do think that machine learning and artificial intelligence is progressing rapidly and I think we're moving away from the automation of process to the automation of getting to the answer. I think analytics without action though leaves you kind of empty handed. Like so great, I have a lot of information, I have all this big data, I need the small data, I need data in the context of problems that I'm trying to solve, whether I'm thinking about it from consumer perspective or a business perspective. So I see a real convergence between analytics and applications coming. You know, I think LifeLock has a funny commercial where they talk about alerting and you know, don't just point to the fire. Like help me put the fire out. Help me figure out how the thing caught fire. And I think that's where machine learning and artificial intelligence can be super helpful. I also think that we're a long way away from really being able to leverage the true power of all this data. If you think about digital health for example and all the proprietary data stacks that are being built through your Fitbit or your iPhone, the way we're censoring our personal health and fitness. But where's all that data going? Is it really contributing to research to solve health epidemics? No, because those stacks are all proprietary. No one wants to share them. So we need to get to a universal language or a universal technology platform that enables the researchers of the world to get a hold of that data and do something super meaningful with it. So I think with progress, you also create open-ended questions. And I think it's all positive, but I think we still have a long way to go to see that big data environment really deliver great results. So let's shift gears a little bit to leadership. Another kind of softer topic, not big data topic. And when we talked last time, you came from Procter & Gamble. When I graduated from undergrad, one of the great kind of training programs was the Macy training program and May Company had one. So there were these kind of established things. IBM is always famous for their kind of training. It's a process where you went into a program and it was kind of like extended school just in a business context. You don't see that as much anymore. Those programs aren't as plentiful. And so many people with the startup bug, especially like in the barrier, they jump right in. I think you're mentioning off air, one of the companies you're involved with, the guys never had another job. So how do you see that kind of playing out kind of the lack of these kind of formal leadership opportunities and what's that gonna look like down the road is the people that haven't had the benefit of kind of this training and maybe it wasn't a benefit, get into these more senior positions. For sure, look, leadership development is a topic that is of real interest to me. I was so fortunate and am so grateful for the opportunity I had at Procter & Gamble. I spent nearly six years there and a big chunk of my time was spent in a leadership rotation program where you got to participate in a number of different projects and jobs but you had mentorship, structured training and education around what it takes to be not just a good manager but an effective leader, how you build a culture, how you engender people's commitment and dedication, how you really make the best of the resources that you have, how you manage your management, whether that's a board or that's a CEO or that's your shareholders, how you think about those things and really tactically what works and what doesn't. And being surrounded by people who are experts in their field, that was a long time ago, Jeff, and I don't see as many companies in the tech industry investing in that kind of leadership. And for kids coming out of college today, they're not rolling into structured leadership training programs. And so if you fast forward 20 years, what does that mean for the boards of the future? What does that mean for the Global 1000 and how those businesses are run? The good news is there's technology, there are plenty of amazing inspirational founders out there that have figured out how to build businesses on their own. And there's plenty of people like me who actually want to mentor and help to build out the skill sets of these founders and these executives. But I do think that like many other areas of training and education which have been democratized in the industry, there's an opportunity to democratize leadership development and leadership training. And so that's something I'm spending a little bit of time on now. Good. And one of the great points you talked about, again, go back and look at the other interview, just Google Jennifer at the hot of the cube, was really about as a leader, how you worked with exchanging value with your employees, right? Because to quote you for, they're not doing things that they might rather be doing, spending time with their family on vacation, et cetera. And how do you manage that as a leader of the company to make them happy that they're working and to give them a meaningful place to be and to spend that time that they're not spending on things that they might like more? I think culture is so important to the success of a business. There are some investors that think culture is like an afterthought. It's one of those soft topics that they really don't need to care about. But for employees today, culture is everything. If you are gonna spend a disproportionate amount of your waking hours with a group of people, it better be on a mission that's meaningful to you. And you better be working alongside of people that you think you can learn from, that inspire you, that stretch you to do more than you thought you could do. And so for me, it's about creating a culture of innovation, of performance, of collaboration, a real orientation around goals that everybody in the organization understands in a way that is meaningful to them within their role in the business, and that it's fun. Like, I won't do anything if it's not fun. I don't wanna work with people who aren't fun. I was really excited. Two of the women who were on my leadership team at Keynote flew here just to join me today and support me as I'm giving a talk, but also to go out and have a drink, because that's what we used to do after a long day at work. And I think you have to be able to create a fire in someone by making sure that they're being stretched, that they're learning and developing in that process, that they're part of something bigger than them, and that they can look back after a week, after a month, after a year in that business with you and realize that they made an impact, that they made a difference, but that they also gained something from it too. And I don't think we can ever underestimate the value of recognition, right? Not just money, but like, are you really recognizing someone for their commitment, for their emotional commitment to the business, for the time that they're spending and for what they've delivered for you, for the business, for your shareholders, for your customers? Jennifer, I could go with you all day long. I'm gonna get you one more if I let you go, because we're out of time, unfortunately, but you're now on some boards. There's a lot of talk, it feels like kind of the last plateau, not that we've conquered the other ones, but kind of the last plateaus to get more women on boards. And we hear it's a matching problem, it's not so much of a pipeline problem. From your perspective, what can you advise, how can you help either people looking for qualified women such as yourself to be on boards or qualified women who wanna get on boards to find them? That's a great question. I am very fortunate that there are people within my network that have spent time working with me and can identify pieces of my experience that they think could be useful within their investment portfolio, within their companies. I'm part of a board called Puppet. It's an infrastructure software company based out of Portland, super talented founder and team, fast growing business in a really important space, software automation. Great board. I mean, I joined that board because every single person on the board to a fault is an amazing accomplished executive in and of themselves, whether they're an investor or a career CFO or a career sales leader from the big technology side of the industry. And so for me, it's such a great opportunity to collaborate with those people and also take my experience and lend what I know and the pattern recognition that I have from running businesses to Luke, the founder and his team. But I tell you, I wish that and I hope that the market starts to really think about diversity at the board level from a longer term perspective. It's not just about how you find the women now. And by the way, there aren't that many female CEOs, but those of us who have sort of tick that box and had that experience, we are available and there are places where it's easy to find us. The board list, for instance, is one of them. The Athena Alliance, Coco, the founder of that business is here, women in tech. I mean, it's out there. It's not that hard to find us. The challenge I think is the depth, the bench strengths, like who are the next female leaders that are coming up that have functional expertise. You may need someone who's a marketing expert. You may need someone who's a product expert. You may need somebody who functionally knows consumer software, right? And it's really being willing as a recruiter, as a recruiting executive, as a board member on the Governance and Nomination Committee to say to your recruiters, to say to your investors, we want women on the shortlist, or we want diversity on the shortlist. Like gender diversity, age diversity, racial diversity, our diverse board makes better decisions, full stop, delivers better results. And I think we have to be demanding about that effort. We have to, the recruiting industry needs to hear that over and over again. And then on the flip side, we've got to develop these women, help them build the skills. I mean, when I talk to women who want to be on boards, I say, tell everybody you want to be on a board. Be specific about the help that you need, right? Find the people that are connected in that network. Because once you're on one board, you meet board members there, they're on other boards, it does snowball. And in fact, then you have to really choose the board wisely because it's not a two year commitment. You're in it for the long haul. So when you make that decision to choose a board, make sure it's a business that you have a real affinity to, that these are people that you want to spend time with over several years, right? And that you're willing to see that business through thick and thin. You don't get to leave the board if things go badly. That's when they need you the most. So my hope is that we become much more open-minded and demanding about diversity at the board level. And equally that we invest in developing women, men, people of different ages and bringing them to the board level. You don't have to be a CEO to be an effective board member either. You have functional, divisional, regional expertise that is a fit to that business. Then you're gonna be a very effective board member. All right, Jennifer, we have to let you go unfortunately. Thank you so much for stopping by and sharing your insight. No longer keynotes and now we can just use all our tags. Great CUBE alumni and tech athletes. So again, thanks for stopping by. Awesome, thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. Jennifer Tahada, I'm Jeff Frick. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Thanks for watching, we'll be right back.