 Live from Houston, Texas. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Welcome back everyone. We are live here in Houston, Texas for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. So my co-host, Jeff Frick, the general manager of theCUBE Business here at Silicon Angle Media. Next guest is Eileen Fagan, Vice President of Innovation and Transformation work programs into it. Yes. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. Great to see you. I mentioned your name on our intro this morning on day two kickoff around the opportunities that are out there. Certainly the gender pay thing is the top story that CNBC and the New York Times will write about. That if it bleeds, it leaves. That's the red meat that causes controversy. But the reality is that there's a lot of women in tech today, still needs more. But there's opportunities. And this community here demonstrates clearly that there is support in a big community. You've had a great career, a computer science major. In the prime of your career, your tech athlete, both baseball fans, we've talked about that yesterday. Go Bluejuice. What are you doing it into it? Talk about the role it into it. Because you're operationalizing some cool things. Yeah. So, you know, if you step back and think about it, the one constant in the world is change, right? Individuals have to change, companies have to change. And you take a company like Intuit that's been around for 31 years, we continue to have to evolve. It's my job to drive our transformational change programs. And it's, I have to say, it's a fun job. It is always high risk, high visibility and never been done before kind of stuff, which makes it fun and it relies on my tech background. But we have to think about both as individuals and at a company level, what is it that we need to change? And the first thing we do when we operationalize that is we go out and we learn from the best wheel makers. This is a good example from an individual level, a great place to go and learn what's going on. We've seen all kinds of fascinating things here. I'm sure you've seen a bunch. Is it lonely at the top? As you climb that mountain, as we say, you know, entrepreneurs have the same problem too. It's like the CEOs of a startup is probably the loneliest job on the planet. Women in tech also can be an interesting journey. Share your perspective because you've had a great career, you've had a computer, again, computer science major, back when it was all male dominated. Back at IBM, we both worked at IBM back in the day. Even today, there's more computer science. Stanford University just announced that women in computer science is the most popular major for women across the entire school. There's new roles in computer science, visualization, user experience, applications, entrepreneurship, so the definition is changing, but your journey has been interesting, so share your thoughts on what you've been through. Going way back, and you're right, I was a computer science major in the 80s, and there were not a lot of women in that field at that time, and it's great to see that transformation. I started at IBM as a programmer. We were building satellite control systems, which was very fun and interesting. I mean, think about satellite data way back when, but on big mainframes and different kinds of technology that we're working on today, and then I drifted into a marketing world because that was another interesting place to go. MCI was my customer, Telecom was big back in the day, and then we went, and then I actually took a leap and became an entrepreneur. And if I think about that journey, it was an interesting step outside of a big company and that realization of, now I'm going to work with 100 companies around the world, and boy, do you start to see a different perspective in lots of different places. My IBM had a great culture, even though mail dominated, they still was a great culture. When you got in the wild, welcome to the real world kind of thing. Yes indeed, lots of interesting things. Back in those days, there were moments of, I would be the only person in the room that some, you know, the men wouldn't shake hands with. There was a Eileen Go get the coffee kind of a moment, even though, you know, I'm the consultant coming in. It was an interesting world. The world has changed a lot and it's so great to see. You know, there are women executives, they're not treated that way anymore. It is a great, I actually think there's a ton of opportunity and a ton of help. We'll come back to some of the things that we'll talk about culturally, I think that you're leaping in through, but also the change that's happening now is a lot of the younger generations coming in and certainly they have not been exposed. They don't have that scar tissue. They haven't been, you know, they might've been bullied and harassed, all that stuff happens all the time, mostly more on women than men, I'll say on the online, whatnot, but now there's real careers, there's real career growth and so the flywheel is developing around women in tech or women are in tech generally across the board in computer science. So what are the things that you see that are important to really operationalize, not only the pipeline, what are they going to call it, but also attitudes and policies and the word politically correct gets kicked around all the time, which, you know, I cringe. I mean, I don't like that term. A lot of women that I know don't like that term either. It kind of reinforces bad things. What's your take on the operationalizing of opportunity? I think when it comes to opportunity, you know, you're right, there are a lot of young women who are coming out now have technical backgrounds. They need to be able to look up and see women in positions of power and they need to be able to see women being successful and being able to do interesting things. The things that women really want to focus on, I think, and men, I don't think it's actually any different. They want to change the world. I mean, isn't that what we all want? We want to make an impact and we're all looking to do that. And so it's interesting, I did a little poll this morning around what are the questions that women would most like to be asked when they're being interviewed or, you know, they're out talking about what they do. Hold on, this is just an interrupt. This is a play on the whole interview debacle that happened at Dreamforce around Susan Wojewski. Wait, how many husbands have you had? How do you balance it? All these female questions. Men don't get the same question. Men don't get the same questions, right? They don't get focused on collaboration and their work-life balance. So we were talking about one of the worst questions you had. So instead, we're going to turn it around. And talk about what are the questions women wish they were asked more frequently. So what's the poll saying? Let's get down. So here we can do a little family feud thing and talk about, but here are the questions that came up at the top of the list. What is the future of the company? What is the future of technology? What are the company's strategic priorities? What am I doing? So instead of talking about how I'm doing it, which is often, I think, the questions that people go down, ask me what I'm working on. And that, I think, is really interesting. Ask me about my technical expertise, my background. What are some of the interesting technologies that I'm working on? So those are sort of the top questions that women really want to hear. And I really think it's a switch from how do I do my job to what am I doing? Because there's a lot of, as you point out, there's a ton of interesting things that women are working on. And there's been some fantastic talks here around different technologies and things that people are really focused on. I think that gets washed out in the laundry is that people forget that they're doing great stuff and that they focus in on what they think everyone wants to hear. Hey, how do you balance your job? How do you take care of your kids? Do you feel bad about that? These are the kind of annoying questions that come up all the time. And really, I think it's, don't ask me about the differences about me. What makes me different? Ask me about what I'm doing that's super interesting. Okay, so what are you doing there? That's super interesting. That's super interesting. What a great question, John. Thanks for having me. So, you know, my role, as I said, is to drive change and innovation add into it. And I, you know, it's a company that I love because we're very mission focused and we're very value-based, but we have to continue to evolve. And our job is to think about how to go out and see what are the things that we need to do differently. And I'll give you an example because, you know, I have a big title but people always ask, what does that actually mean? And so, if you think about, I'll just dial back several years because it's an easy thing to understand. You know, back in the day when the iPhone came out, we looked around and everybody was carrying them at the executive level and throughout the company, everybody has one, but our products aren't on phone. This, I mean, we're going back to like 2009, 2010 here. But still, it was sort of like, why not? And then you dig in and you start to ask the questions, why not? Well, if you remember back in that day, apps were 99 cents or they were free. So, what drives a general manager to allocate resources against something? How am I going to make money? So, we turned around and we said, all right, we got to look at how are people actually making money? And we took our entire executive team in for a two-day offsite and we did two things. We had them all talk to people who were making money and had tremendous growth rates in the mobile world. And we had them go off and do a little scavenger hunt to play with the actual native features of a mobile phone back in that day. And it was amazing how having that visceral, personal experience can really change the direction. So, one of the things that we get to do is we go out and we look and learn. That's probably my most favorite part of my job. We're working on right now, companies, big software companies tend to do what? They tend to slow down. And get a little behind in technology. There's a ton of those things in the news all the time. So, what do you need to think about to do that? Well, the first thing we tend to do is go out and learn from other companies. You know, if there's one thing that's true, the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed, right? That's not, I'm obviously stealing that quote from somebody else, but it's so- It's a great quote. It is a great quote and it's so true. So, why not go out and learn from the best wheel makers? And then my job is to think about how to bring that in and apply that in our world, which is going to be different than anybody else's. You're going through those questions and you're going to have to give us the list before you leave. Yes. So you can use them all day. Absolutely, but we had Renee Zogon from Edna and she talked about, really, again, we talked about yesterday with the language of business and the what. And when she talks, she talks about how much money she made the company in a dollar number that gets people's attention. Not how she did it or why she did it or a process, but she goes right to the bottom line and gets your attention. When we talked to Kim Stevenson a few weeks back, she talked about our IT department. And remember, I was humongous. Hundreds and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of impact goes right to the number. And what a difference that does to just be, you know, kind of full frontal with business impact. Right, right. Yeah, because women are doing those things, right? We are driving a lot of that stuff and there are women in the executive suite, maybe not in big numbers, but certainly in impact. These things are happening and there's no reason why we can't talk about what those things are. Well, you said differences. People always like to talk about differences and you said, don't do that. Talk about what they're working on. But if you look at what people are working on, you can then look at the differences. Men and women are different. Boys and girls are different. Love that clip from the elementary school, the girl backpacks over here and the boys over here. Natural clustering, just natural genetic human behavior. But as one society now, there are differences. I want to ask you this specific question based on what people are working on, women in particular, in computer science today. How has computer science changed? We were speculating on the opening that the range of disciplines with UX now has opened up a whole new set of opportunities, machine learning, there's a lot of creative data science work going on. So, is there actually a difference in application of the female brain? Men are from Mars, women are from beings, whatever the expression goes. I mean, are there certain things that women are just better than men at, in your opinion, statistically or just anecdotally when it comes to computer science? Interesting question. I, you know, certainly there are a lot of women in the design world, but I, you know what? I am scanning my brain and I honestly, I can think of incredibly talented women who are doing all of the different technology things you just mentioned. Data scientists and into it, several of them are women. We've got phenomenal deep technology people who are doing the underpinning mobile, how to get data out of mobile devices, right? Like how do we pull? So you really don't really see a pattern? I don't, I, you know, there are probably certain things, you know, the one that comes to mind is architecture tends to be male dominated, but not entirely, but that was, that's one that I. That might be a little bit tipping on the scales. Maybe that's just because I see that. It's hard to say. I mean, I'm biased. I mean, I have my own bias. I'm just, you know, and. What do you see? Yeah, I mean, what I see, I mean, it's my bias, maybe that's wrong, but I do see women across the board. I think computer science certainly has changed. Back in the 80s, it was systems programming. Yeah. You know, now it's across the board, a lot of coding and also design. Now I want to shift gears to a tweet I just read here. It says advice. This is from the keynote from Susan Wojcicki. Advice for women starting their careers. Find where you can learn, grow, and find unique things you want to do. Yes. So that brings up the whole how to start your career, how to start the journey, and also brings up this concept of mentorship and sponsorship. And we get sponsors for theCUBE to bring us here. That's cash. That's help. So that's about getting help. How is sponsorship and mentoring and helping people get into the workplace? What's that dynamic today? And how does it compare from when you were in your career early on? You know, if I think back, so let me answer today. I think it's, there are, certainly mentorship is really important. I think again, women need to be able to join a place that they feel really excited and passionate about the work that they're doing. And then they can find that sponsorship from anybody. I don't think it always has to be other women. If you find your niche of what you love to do, I think there's a lot of opportunity for you to just stay focused on that. And those opportunities are out there. You just keep looking and looking for them. Certainly finding other women who can help you. And I do find that I have women who work for me, for instance, who are struggling sometime with a work-life balance and things like that. And I help them navigate. Yes, exactly. I help them navigate that path and stay focused on what it is they really, really care about. And so I think where people will find their sponsors is through that passion of what they really, really want to do. That's my belief. I mean, it's not about going out and looking for a sponsor who can help me necessarily just get to the next level. It's constantly putting yourself out there and learning and staying at the cutting edge. So I think I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your job and transforming a big company that's been around for a long time. It's really hard, right? Innovator's Dilemma, still my all-time favorite business book, smart people making smart business decisions based on data will always miss transformational change. And we saw it took a change at the top of Microsoft with Satya to come on and really shift their gears into cloud. We're seeing with the EMC Dell thing as we come off of AWS, again, are they kind of late to the game? It's very hard to get people to change because, again, logical people making sound decisions based on what their customers are asking for, always miss discontinuous change. So what are some of the tips and tricks that you can share, your VP of transformational change? How do you start to make these big shifts and big changes in an organization that's been successful very, very long time with a real core set of products and services? And so you make a great point and companies will have to fight inertia, right? Because that's the number one thing that they'll do is stay where the money is today and not think about where it's going to come from tomorrow. And that's part of the other part of my job and there's a reason why they're together is the innovation part and thinking about what is coming. So we have an innovation advanced technology team and our job is to be constantly looking around the corner, looking around the bend. What is it that's coming down the pipe? We're looking today at things like the internet of things and how is that going to change people's personal financial lives, right? That's what our mission is about, improving people's financial lives. If you think about a world where there's data everywhere and there's the internet of things, you have to start to think about how is that world going to change? So, but of course that's interesting to people but you're not going to get people to shift on a dime to think about that. So again, it's step one is to actually go out there and explore what is the world going to be like. Then we pick those couple things that we think are going to be very impactful to our customers and we start to do some experiments. And we're very focused on experimentation as a way to drive change. And then once we figure that, we sort of think about it as explore, qualify. And then once we say this is a change that is really important, then we go all the way in and we start to look for experiential ways for people to understand that change. Like that's why I told the mobile example. Because it's a good example and easy to understand one of how you start to get that change. People don't get change from PowerPoint, that's my belief. Like you can tell me the world's going to change. You can do some PowerPoint exercises. I can point to things. John, you told a story yesterday about trying to forecast the world's going this way and people just go, yeah, you know what? We're doing this because that's what we know we're good at. And the passion drives the people and I think that's a key thing. I got to ask you, as someone who's leading a lot of change at a senior level, do you look around and say, hey, we need more people, you need more peers? Are there enough people at your level doing work? And then how do you see your vision of the preferred future? If you could have the magic wand or the pixie dust of the three wishes from the genie in the bottle. So one, peers at the top, leadership, what do you talk to? How do you get stuff off your chest or just riff on creative ideas at your level? I mean, how do you stay from not being too lonely and then to your vision of the future? Well, the good news, I feel very fortunate that we have some incredibly smart people. I work a lot with our founder, Scott Cook, who's still very actively involved in the company and he is just a learner in an incredible level. I've never seen anybody out learning about everything all the time. We have, like I said, an innovation advanced technology team. So there is a group of us who can kind of immerse ourselves in that world of what's interesting and what's coming. And of course, our leader, Brad Smith, is also a learner and I've never seen anybody pick up those new things and say, oh, we need to think about that. How are we going to weave that in? So I don't feel lonely in that regard. There's a lot of people who really are invested in understanding that this is super important. It's funny you say that, because Olga also really mentioned from into it, really a culture of learning. You don't necessarily hear that kind of top of mind awareness is really a core value from a company. And it really, really is. It's something now, I do tend to drive a lot of our corporate learning going out. Last year we focused on really deep learning too, like actually going in. I was telling this story to somebody from an executive level. One year we had our executives go out and actually shadow other leaders. Now, you'd think that's an interesting thing to do. Shadow other leaders in the company or external? No, outside. So we actually had our C-level executives go out and we matched them up with executives at various companies around the valley, around the world actually. And they spent a day watching what they were doing. And so here's the most fascinating part of that. In almost all cases they sat down and interviewed the executive at first and the executives say, yeah, this is what we do. And they told them, here's what we do. Here's how I run the company. Here's the meetings I'll have. Here's what you'll see. And then they went in and they actually observed those meetings. Completely different. It almost never matched. And so you ask yourself, why would those executives let us come in? So certainly they were willing to let us learn. But what they got back was, here's what I observed. Let's talk about what you did. So a blind spot potentially for the executives, they're sharing their culture and trying to give it some collaboration. But you have to realize, wait a minute, that's not working out the way I wanted it to. Exactly, we thought about it at one point and I did a bunch of research on product reviews. Very standard thing. Think about, I mean, it sounds boring, right? But think about this. All over the place people are doing product reviews as a way to decide what to build. Are we building the right thing? How are we building it, et cetera? Do you know there's almost, there's very, very limited data out there about how to do a good product review. It seems kind of funny that that's true. Like nobody writes about it, nobody thinks about it. And yet it's so core to how products get built. So we went and did what we do. We shattered a bunch of people doing them and got to watch different people across the valley. And then we did it with our own executives and we realized, you know what? We don't, nobody teaches an executive how to do a good product review. There was no, there's nothing in their literature. So people grow up doing what they do. What they saw somebody else do. Off the cuff or last company or other. Last company, what I learned, what I saw somebody I admired do it. Or frankly, hadn't really thought about it. And so we actually had them videotape themselves doing it. And then we got to talk about that. And they would learn. And we set up some training sessions where not, it was more of a seminar where people did product reviews in front of the other executives. And they got to watch and learn. And you know, we learned some really interesting things about how you want to leave a team. You want, because it's really about the people who are building the product, right? There's the product you're looking at. But how do you want to leave the team? They better be focused on what they're supposed to do. They better know what they need to do. And be energized to go do it. These are fundamental kind of things. So one of the observations that we're making here in theCUBE, so now second day, obviously we've done Grace Hopper last year. We did a fly by there. Is that there's no real right answer. The context of women in tech can always be blown out of proportion. But the one thing that's consistent that moves the mission forward. And I want to get your thoughts on this. This is kind of our observation from the data we're seeing. Is always be learning and transparency. Those are the two consistent variables that seem to move the ball down the field relative to changing things. Whether it's more pay, more opportunities, product reviews, integration, fixing the workplace. What's your comments on that? Because that seems to be the fixed variables that seems to do well. That keep coming back up. That keep coming back up. Always be learning because if you're learning you're learning new stuff, you're aware. And if you're transparent you get the right data. And being transparent about what you know and what you don't know. So I actually love that observation. I think being a constant learner and a lifelong learner is what is going to make us all successful and staying passionate about what we do. Hopefully, and I think this is true for women and men that we don't get to a place where we're like, yeah, I know how to do it because the world keeps changing. And even if you think you know there's always a way to do it better. And so one of the big things that we focus on also is experimentation. Not believing, there's the highest paid opinion in the room often wins. What about data, right? Go out and experiment. So often if people come in and they tell me, no, this is what we should do or I know that that button should be orange or something else. It's really, have you run some experiments with real customers? Have you run some tests on the way we're going to try to change things? That's what we did with the product reviews. We just ran experiments. We watch people do it, we learn. There's nothing like learning by doing. That would be the one comment that I would ask is not just learning book learning but learning by doing and be vulnerable. Be vulnerable. And that goes with your transparency comment. Yeah. Being vulnerable and willing to say, hey, I don't know, but I'm going to dive in. Allie, thanks so much for sharing your insight here on theCUBE. Really appreciate the data and sharing with the folks out there. Final question, what's the vibe like here? Just give a quick take because a lot of people have a formal right now. Fear of missing out. I'm seeing tweets. I wish I was there. I'm getting texts. I wish I could have gone. Good energy here. What is it like here for the folks who couldn't make it? What's going on here? You know, just amazing energy here. It's so fun to see all these incredibly smart, talented women all in one place, sharing their thoughts, sharing their excitement about our future. And that's what it feels like. This is all about the future. All right, Allie and Fagan, Vice President Entude here inside theCUBE. And we are looking to hire more people. If you want to be part of theCUBE team, we're looking for digital analysts, technical engineers, field producers, content managers, on-camera hosts. We are hiring women as well. We need women on our team. We have an all-male crew here. We were kind of reprimanded, kind of ashamed by the women in tech here. Jeff and I, we do want women on our team. We love women in tech. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with more after this short break.