 This morning, I have Subbu Alamiraju joining me from Expedia. We're going to talk a little bit this morning about getting unstuck and talking about culture. Coming up on stage, Subbu. Good morning, Gabby. Thank you for joining me. So Subbu, thank you so much for joining me. You... We've had such an interesting conversation this week. Yes. I think a lot of the common themes at Summit have been around the culture and the people and the process of the transformation. And I thought you had some really good points to make around culture and getting unstuck. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means to you? Absolutely. So I work at Expedia, and one of my jobs is to take all of our tablet platforms and move to the cloud. And this is a large, ambiguous project. I had a chance to work with a few other projects like this. And the constant pattern I see is that these kind of large initiatives that transform the company, they go sideways often. That's a default. End outcome is sideways. And you don't know what the outcomes are, what the end state is, and you don't know how to get it there. And even if you have a good understanding of what the outcome should be, you find maybe 10, 15 ways to get there, and all of them have some obstacles. And so teams, when they look at these kind of problems, they get stuck. They feel that they start blaming the organization. They start blaming the size of the organization. Large companies, you know, they're bad. The culture is bad. The management is bad. Or there's always some other team that is bad. Like, that team is not letting me move. So we get into this kind of stuckness that I see that we go through. And that's what made me realize that there's something I need to understand more to get to the cloud. It's not just about getting to the cloud. It's the culture part I need to understand more. So I spend more time understanding what it is. And would you say, in your opinion, that that's actually more difficult and more crucial to transformation than anything else? I think absolutely, yes. I think there are two parts to it. Of course, technology influences culture. So the kind of technology we create, if it is letting teams operate autonomously without fear, you get one certain kind of outcomes in culture. But if you choose a technology that always makes you depend on someone, it does not let you make choices on your own, then you get into a different culture that is always fear-based. Like if you file tickets, if you're required to file tickets to get something done, it takes two weeks. You think differently. You operate differently. You create different kind of processes. So I think technology plays a strong role, but definitely. But more important, I realize, is the mindset and the mental models you use to interpret how the organization works and how to deal with it. I've heard over and over again the theme at this event and all the sessions, the role and the importance that plays. How did you get over that? How did you and you lead your team to get over that? When I get up, I always, or when I get, feel stuck myself. I ask myself, what is the mental model that I'm using to understand the surroundings? If I'm in a difficult meeting, what am I going with the phase that says, I don't like that guy. I don't like the team. Or am I going with the phase, okay, let me try to help. Let me do my best in this situation. So that mental model, using the mental model, helps me get up right and walk with the right foot into the room. And the second most important thing is the mindset I use. So I want to characterize with three things. One is, am I going to the mode where I don't know all the answers, I'm not the know-it-all expert, but I'm going with the mindset that I'm going to learn, and not just me, anyone in the team can learn and figure it out. That seems to be the first thing that I look at. The second thing is that, can you say yes when you find a difficult problem, it cuts across 10, 15 teams, and outcomes are not clear, it's ambiguous. Can you say yes to that? Can you say get up, let's find five ways to do it, even if those are five small steps to get in the right direction, and I think we'll do it. The third, the most equally interesting thing is, can you take the constraints as not given to you? So oftentimes, there's one gentleman that came to me recently, he has a difficult problem that cuts across multiple teams. He said, Subbu, I need power. So power is not the answer. Can you actually question the constraints that you're given with and see can you change the constraints? And oftentimes, that helps move forward. And that's a very powerful statement, and it's a very powerful way to approach both building your team but also enabling your team to work with other teams. Has that changed Expedia as a company and inside the culture by thinking about it this way? Absolutely. I think one of the things that we believe is that talent is not given that anyone can learn. So we focus a lot on continuous learning, whether it's going taking courses or rotating horizontally to another team, spending six months, solve some other problems and come back. So we encourage this kind of continuous learning a lot. The second thing that we focus is that spend enough time in learning versus performing. So I'm a fan of Karel Dweck's analogy of growth mindset and learning and performance zone. So we encourage our teams to spend enough time to be in the learning zone where you get to practice, you make mistakes, you learn, you fumble around. But then you perform where you're actually showing what you do well. So we try to encourage both. And of course, growth mindset has been very helpful for teams to understand that they can learn and break barriers. Yeah, I'm a big fan of growth mindset. That's interesting. I suspect everyone here also wants to know what has been the outcome of that change? What are the measurable outcomes you've seen? Outcome is that people are happy. When they learn, people are happy. When they perform after learning, they're happy. When they find that they can apply the growth mindset ideas and to break problems and solve ambiguous problems, suddenly you realize that you can actually change the mountain by just moving each sand grain. So that creates a lot of people who are happy to do that outcome. I personally get up and I'm happy because I know I can deal with it even though it looks difficult to deal. That's great. You can make small steps. Small steps. You know you've changed an entire organization, right? So if you were to summarize next steps for someone that's like, okay, that sounds really interesting. How do I bring that back into my company? I think I would highly recommend this book by Coyle Working World Mindset. I'm a big fan of that. I just finished again listening to that second time. And there's another book that I really liked which highlights the concept of learning and deep work. The title of the book is Deep Work. Again, it taught me how to pace myself, spend enough time learning, so I'm continuously growing my career. I'm not just start learning, practicing what I learned five, six years ago. Which I think both of those things are key as we talk about digital transformation and changing company culture. That seems to be like a key part of that. We'll see if we really appreciate you coming up to talk to us about culture and the work that you've done at Expedia. I know I took a lot away from this and I'm sure everybody else here did as well. So thank you so much for coming and spending the day with us. Thanks for having me. Thank you.