 From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Women Transforming Technology 2019, brought to you by VMware. Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with theCUBE at VMware Palo Alto, California, at the fourth annual Women Transforming Technology event WT squared. And please welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Rashim Moka, the head of product at Automation Anywhere. Rashim, it's great to have you on theCUBE. Thank you so much, Lisa, very excited to be here. And good to see you again. You and I were moderating the Together Women Achieve event a few months ago that Dell sponsors back in, I want to say November 2018, where you, one of the exciting things in that swag bag was one of your five books, fast track your leadership career. Tell me about the book, what inspired it, what can readers learn in that book? Absolutely, so I come from a project management background and for me, everything has to be in the form of a template and that's how it works, right? So when I was new to my leadership career, I would read all these leadership books, but they would just focus on one area. So you had to read like so many books and skim through all those books to extract what worked for you. Now for me, it was important to kind of templatize that and when I templatized it, I actually started talking about it at various events. One of them was woman transforming technology last year and as I gave that, after I finished that session and I started walking out, one of the attendees came to me and said, this was such great information, do you have a book? And I said, no I don't, but I'll have one soon and then I met with my publisher whom I met through one of the speakers at W32 and we started working on it and in September we had a book. September 2018 and then probably surprisingly to you, 11 hours later, this book was on the Amazon number one bestseller list. Yes, it was. That must have been like whiplash, what? It was a very emotional day, it was a roller coaster. So we had thought about, my publishers had more belief than I did in terms of the book having the potential to be an Amazon bestseller and number one bestseller to be precise. And I was like, okay, let's give it a try. So I was supposed to go to Grace Hopper conference last year at that time and I decided to stay back because the book launch was planned on that day. So we started telling everybody that the book is on Amazon at about 10 o'clock in the morning and by seven o'clock I got a text message from my publisher with the screenshot saying it was number one. So yeah, very exciting. It took me a few days to realize what it really meant to be an Amazon bestseller. I bet that feels amazing. So tell me a little bit, before we dig into the book and what you're doing here at WT Square today, tell me a little bit about your career path in technology so we can understand some of the recommendations that you're giving the current and subsequent generations about how to fast track it. Where did you start? Was it, I was a STEM interested kid to college? Yeah, so I was actually studying to be a doctor because I come from India. So in India, there are just three careers. You're either a doctor or an engineer or you're nobody, right? So, and this was when I was growing up. So I actually unfortunately fell sick and could not take my medical exam and missed it, actually took the exam, missed it by a few points and did not know what to do because all my life I had thought about becoming a doctor and it just so happened that there was a computer science program that was out there and my mom saw a scholarship opportunity over there and she said, well, just give it a try. If you get the scholarship, then we'll talk about it. And then fortunately for me, I got 75% scholarship in that. So I was like, okay, I'll give it a try. So I botany majored and did computer science and that's where my journey started into the technology field. And got an opportunity to be absorbed within that group. The same company absorbed me as a developer and within six months I got an opportunity to write a book. And that was amazing because I never thought that I could be a teacher or be in front of anybody because I'm so impatient as a person, right? So then we started, when I started writing the book, I realized this is a great way to empower people and it's a great way to use my technical skills but also my writing abilities. And then six months down the line, I got an opportunity to be a project manager. I took that. So in my life, if you see my career path, I've kind of bounced around a little bit, taken risks early on in my career and I continue to take risks in my career because if you don't give it a try, you would never know. And that's what I tell women today, like when you come out of college or even if you are somewhere in your mid-career, don't tie yourself to a particular job role or to a particular area. Try out different things and if there's an opportunity that's given to you, grab it with both your hands and then figure out how you're going to do the job well. I like that. I always think if you have a goal that doesn't give you butterflies, it's not worth having. So in just giving our viewers a little bit of a snapshot, what are some of the things that they can learn and take away from fast track your leadership career book? Yeah, so first and foremost is understanding your superpower, right? How are you different from other people? What do you bring to the table that others do not? Because in today's day and age, almost everybody does a great job, right? What sets you apart for the next role is what you should always know. Building your personal brand, most often we introduce ourselves as what job title we have and the company that we work for. It's important to know and have your identity beyond the company. The third piece is understanding the difference between sponsors and mentors. And that is the place where I think women really need to invest some time because we normally seek mentors. We very, very go out and look at people and say, you know what, this person is going to be by sponsor and she or he is actually going to be my cheerleader when I'm not there in the room and recommend me for that next job. So that's the difference between a sponsor. I like that as a sponsor and a mentor's mentors giving you advice and guidance. A sponsor is actually out there championing. Absolutely. Why you should hire Rishi and bring her into your team. These are all the great things that she does. Absolutely. And then the other topics that we cover, we cover navigating work politics. Most of us tend to stay away from politics but actually how to get into that understanding that I would call it workforce intelligence if you will and leveraging it to further your projects in a good way. And then also building your support system. Now typically when we women talk about support system we think about just two aspects, emotional support system and the logistic support system. But there is also financial support system and intellectual support system and that's what you need to start building to be able to further your career. I've got to get a copy of this book. You probably have some. I do have some. I'm going to win get you. I need to get a copy of this book. So you have a couple of sessions here at WT, WT squared building voice experiences through Alexa skills but one that I want to dig into in the last few minutes that we have project you a DevOps approach to a leadership career. Tell me about that break out. Yeah, so if you really look at the concept of DevOps or CICD model it's development and then pushing it into operations and then moving into development again and then operations. So when you actually start preparing for your leadership career, that's the way you go. You rinse and repeat the cycle. What works for you in this role will not work for you in your next role. So how are you continuously preparing yourself and using that DevOps approach to kind of move to the next level is what we'll cover in that session. That's fantastic. So one thing I also want to mention is that so we talked about becoming a number one Amazon bestseller of the book, Fast Track Your Leadership Career just about six months ago in fall of 2018. It also inspired you to found an initiative called E-WOW, Empowered Women of the World. Tell me a little bit about E-WOW and why this book, book number five being so instantly successful was so inspirational for E-WOW. Yeah, so I come from a training and enablement background. So for me it was, and when you look at my personal brand it's all about enabling and empowering people. So I wanted to basically find avenues to be able to empower other women. And essentially at E-WOW we believe that every woman has the capability or is a leader in her own right. And all that she needs is an intellectual platform and a framework. And that's where E-WOW came into being. We started off with just podcast, doing weekly podcast, picking up topics around leadership and technical topics. We have audience in about 20 countries right now. And then as an extension to that we also launched five lexer skills. And that's going to be the topic that I'm going to be speaking about later today. And it was all about different ways of enabling and empowering people. I love that. Well, Rashim it's been such a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. Thank you for giving us some of your time. And we look forward to talking with you again about maybe book number six. Well, you never know. Last time we spoke on this conference I had a book in Wings. So you never know what's up. You never know. But thank you so much. Your story is very inspiring. And I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of that book. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at WT squared from VMware. Thanks for watching.