Cracking the Code with Sudhir Ispahani

Gerald Glennon is the general manager of The Kahala Hotel & Resort and holds a bachelor’s degree in hotel administration from the University of Denver and a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a marketing emphasis from the University of Northern Colorado. He is a board member of the Hawaii Tourism and Lodging Association, SKAL Hawaii and the Hawaii Culinary Education Foundation. Glennon also previously served as an executive board member of the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau and was a past chairman of the Oahu Visitors Bureau.

In this episode, Gerald recalls how his moral upbringing in the Southern United States fostered a curiosity of people and how this genuine interest in humankind led him into a prolific career in the hotel industry. Gerald shares with Sudhir how he has learned to move on from past mistakes and grow as a leader because of that approach.

President, Technology, Product, Xperience, Comcast Cable Tony Werner credits growing up poor on a farm with teaching him invention skills. While Werner has been a leader in innovative thinking for decades, he is still on the frontlines of technology and can see into the future because he's helping to create it. In this discussion with Sudhir Ispahani, Werner shares a must-do list for business leaders and his predictions that the pace of innovation is getting even faster than in the past.

Film producer and author Kathy Eldon tells how traveling the world with her parents gave her a global view, but it was the death of her son, Eldon's life changed when her son died while working as a journalist in war torn Somalia. Inspired by her son Dan, Eldon founded a film production company to tell important stories. 

Broadband and Internet infrastructure pioneer Lorenz Glatz shares the inspiration of how the first time he connected to a California computer from Austria he realized that was his future. Glatz worked with Cracking the Code his Sudhir Ispahani to create Liberty Global in Europe. He later became CTO of Kabel Deutschland. Now an advisor & investor, Glatz looks for innovation relating to the economy going digital.

Nikesh Kotecha, Vice President, Informatics at Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, studied biomedical engineering at Boston University and then earned a PhD in biomedical informatics from Stanford University. Kotecha leads interdisciplinary teams to build analytic applications to address problems in healthcare. As an adjunct faculty at Stanford's Systems and Computational Immunology Program, Kotecha is involved in training the next generation of scientists who will use these methods and analytics to address problems well into the future.

Mike LaJoie, founding partner of LMT & Associates, was a pioneer and innovator who played an important role in creating the technology and infrastructure that is now at the core of so much in our daily lives. In this episode, Lajoie shares his story with Sudhir Ispsihani about how his start in the manufacturing industry building machine for making baseball bats led him to digital technology. This path led him to Time Warner Cable, where he rose to the position of chief technology officer at a time the media giant was developing new ways of delivering content to households. LaJoie is also the founder and

J.T. McCormick, president and CEO of the innovative publishing company Scribe, shares the story of his remarkable rise from poverty as a child to an entreprenuer and business leader. McCormick is open about his struggles so that he can teach people lessons learned from his own mistakes. His advice is that you can't change the past, so look forward to what you can control -- the next hour, next week. You can have an impact on your future.

Dr. Jan Uddenfeldt is known as the "father of mobile communications" because of his decades of research and invention of wireless technology, starting with Ericcson in 1978. Dr. Uddenfeldt was inducted into the American Wireless Hall of Fame and has received many prestigious awards for his contributions to the wireless industry. He now serves as senior advisor and board members to multi-billion dollar companies and to tech startups. Uddenfeldt shares with Sudhir Ispahani his strategy of being first in an industry.

Kay Buck leads an organization in Los Angeles that is battling against human trafficking and slavery. In this episode, Buck, who is the executive director of the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking (CAST), shares with host Sudhir Ispahani how a tragedy in her childhood put her on a path toward leadership.

Ann Zeichner transitioned from writing for a tech magazine in the 1980s to blazing the trail for woman in tech sales. Her focus early in her life, her mentors, and goal setting led Zeichner to a career running her own company and then as a venture capitalist. Zeichner shares with Sudhir Ispahani her "kindness" style of leadership that features direct and authentic communications. Listening to people is a key leadership tool that leads to higher performance, she says.