 Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Jeff Frick here with the queue. We are at the VM Women at VM World 2015. It's a little side presentation that they put on. We had a great panel discussion and I'm really excited to be joined by our next panelist, Renee Zog, the VP IT Infrastructure and Development for Services at Etna. Welcome. Well, thank you. Thank you. It was a great time here. It was a great time. It was a full packed room and everyone was listening with rapt attention. And it was both men and women. It wasn't just women. It was diverse. Yeah, absolutely. And that's what we need. So you made some great comments on the panel that I'm really excited to follow up with. And one of them was really to be purposeful and with intention that this just doesn't happen accidentally. Things just don't change for the sake of change. Right. I mean, the discussion earlier was about unconscious bias and how no one does that intentionally. It's in our fabric of how we grew up and how our preferences are. And so it's so easy to sit back and do what you're used to versus doing something uncomfortable. And in order to change the game, you really have to force yourself in asking those probing questions and think about, am I really introducing change or am I just doing the same? And as leaders in our industry, we need to disrupt, we need to innovate, and you're not gonna do it with the same people. So we want the best talent. And if you don't do it with intention and the processes of your day-to-day work efforts, nothing's ever gonna change. So how do you execute that day-to-day? Is it within a particular process or maybe you spend a little bit more time thinking about? I mean, we're all busy. We have a trillion emails and meetings and we're racing to and fro. Is it kind of in the hiring process? Where is it that you can kind of take a half step back and be purposeful and intentional? Or have you been able to execute it and kind of work it into the way you do things? It's more of the latter. I think institutional is something that big enterprises need to do around hiring practices, around paid practices and merits and promotions. But the things that you can do day-to-day are like work assignments. You know how you always go to your go-to people? Everybody has their go-to people. Stop doing that. Go to somebody else and know what you're gonna find is that the go-to people are exhausted. They welcome somebody else coming into their space and helping them out. And what you're doing is you're developing somebody else and getting a different perspective. And I found that there was this one work product. We did the same for years. It was more of this management reporting. And it was very good and it was fine. But it wasn't until I said my go-to person wasn't around and I was gonna do this and I got Sally to do it and she said, why do you do it this way? We could do it much better than that and a lot quicker and as a result I got a much better product and I got just different thinking and oh by the way, now I'm her advocate. So it's something you can do very easily in your day-to-day practice but you need to be intentional about it. So the other thing I thought you talked about which was interesting is kind of mentorship and sponsorship and you just said that you're now Sally's advocate in your example. But it goes beyond what you mentioned just being helpful and not going to help you, et cetera. And you really talked about it. You basically turned the conversation into the conversation of business in this context because that's the language that people respect. Dig into that a little bit deeper. How did you come up with that and how do people respond to that? Well, one of the things that, this actually came from my own introspection, right? We had done a little bit of a leadership summit where we had to get feedback from my peers on my style of leadership and it was, believe it or not, very communal, right? That's to be expected. So my aha moment there was when one of my peers said, you know, Renee, you need to brag about yourself, about your accomplishments, about your organization, what have they done? You've done some amazing things. You've taken millions and millions of dollars out. And I said, geez, I'm not comfortable bragging. And he said, you're not doing it for you. You're doing it for your organization. Oh, wow. So that was a real turning point for me to give me permission to brag. I brag everywhere I go now, right? Yeah, that's a good idea. Because I'm like, okay, I'm really not bragging about myself. I'm bragging about my organization or in their accomplishments and their capability and their innovation. Oh, by the way, it's helping me, you know, bring up their value and what they contribute to the firm. So they're, you know, so I encourage my leaders to do the same and it'll, you know, keep rolling on. It's so, that's really interesting because Lori gave us a challenge during this, during the talk to sit down and write some attributes about ourselves and some accomplishments about ourselves. We're sitting at a table with probably six or seven people. No one wrote anything for like minute 40 of the two minutes that we had allocated. And I took to my partner, I was like, well, write something about somebody else that you like. And it's so much easier to say nice things about other people. So what you've done is twisted that and change talking about you and to not talking about you. So now it's easier to talk about you because it has a bigger purpose. Exactly. And in a delivery, just like she says, I'm not necessarily, you know, I'm the game changer. You know, I took $120 million out in two years. That's different. It's a big number. Yeah. And it's like instantly, okay, wow. All right, you got my attention. That's something, right? Show me, even when I'm dealing with the vendors and their products, show me how you can make a difference to my bottom. You know, a command's respect when you start to talk about the numbers, the business, the value, all of those things. All right, so I'm going to give you the last word, even though that was kind of the last word. You know, again, what advice for young women just out of college, getting started in their career, early days, you know, we've talked about, they haven't necessarily been encouraged to take risks as much as young kids. What, you know, you get a fresh crop that comes in, you get to walk in the room and introduce yourself and welcome to Aetna. What do you tell them? I tell them that everything's the art of the possible. When I started at Aetna, I was hanging tapes on the night shift in the data center. No one even knows, everyone's like, what is it, what is it? The tape, right? The big round ones. The big round ones, right? So I had a lot of advocates, but I also delivered the goods, right? And I took a lot of risk and I didn't necessarily have all the boxes checked. And that, to me, is exciting. And if you can jump into something where you know you have some boxes to check and you're going to learn them along the way, you're going to succeed. Yeah, and check them, all right? Be the person that checks them. Right, exactly. Absolutely, well thank you very much for stopping by, terrific panel. Jeffery here, we're at the VM Women Wear side panel, Jeffery with the Cube. Thanks for watching.