Decoding Digital

While the technology enabling remote work has seen leaps and bounds in the last year, the foundations have been in place for far longer. In a time where the virtual workspace is more necessary than ever before, how much do we really understand it? In this episode, Mark Templeton shares his experience as a visionary in the virtualization space, insights on apps and the cloud’s development, and why remote work will continue to evolve.

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Figuring Out the Future of Work 

“Whether it was collaboration, software, or security or management or networking, video, different types of technologies, like voice to text, text to voice—we just imagined all the pieces that would need to be possible to enable work from anywhere.”

The Impact of Remote Work on People

“We talk a lot about technology, but technology is only as good as the people that adopt it. So as the pioneer behind the virtual workspace, how important do you think in-person collaboration is or human to human contact? Because taking human interaction away from even a work environment leaves a lot of questions about how you build a culture, how you share common values."

Returning to the Office

“What we found is that people overwhelmingly want to have the flexibility to work in a hybrid environment where they can choose what they want when they want. However, we've seen that productivity data and culture show that it's more effective if people are either altogether or all remote.”

How can companies use technology to solve problems? Brad Garlinghouse believes it’s about embracing innovation. In this episode of Decoding Digital, he talks about his impressive career and shares insights into where growing companies commonly make mistakes. He also discusses cryptocurrency and how it will have a lasting impact on customers and businesses.

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The Problem with Traditional Payments

“It's amazing to me that you can stream video from the space station, but if you want to send money to me in London, that's going to take days to get there and it's going to cost you a fair number. And it's like, wait, how did we end up here? Where I can do all these things on an almost instantaneous basis, but I can't move my own money from point A to point B.”

Disrupting the Middleman

“Today, if you and I were going to transact, there has to be a middleman involved. Pick your middleman, but there's a middleman everywhere. With a blockchain we’re saying ‘Hey, take out the middleman. You can still transact. You can have certainty, but you don't have to have trust.’”

The Power of Blockchain

“I think if you want to impact the most people and really put a dent in the universe, how do we reach 99%? Not, how do we get the 1% using Bitcoin for payments to 2%, 3%. No, I'm going to go work with the major institutions, the major governments. And I'm going to introduce these technologies in such a way that they can have a broad impact on a broad cut of the population—the unbanked, the underbanked—in ways that I think are pretty profound.”

Digital transformation doesn’t happen by itself. The reality is people are the driving force behind change. But how can you inspire your workforce to embrace digital leadership? In this episode, Dr. Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane discusses some of the key findings from his book, The Technology Fallacy: How People are The Real Key to Digital Transformation, and shares what it takes to be a digital hero.

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Digital Maturity and Digital Leadership 

“Over 50 percent of the most mature companies said, ‘we need more and better leaders to be successful in a digital marketplace.’ These digital maturing companies were actually doing something about it. They were far more likely to say they are developing the type of leaders that we need to work in a digital world. So it's not that these maturing companies had better leaders, but it's what they were doing to get and grow these better leaders inside.”

Training Digital Heroes

“You're going to have 30 percent of the people that will never be digital heroes that are always going to play it safe. They want to check the boxes and follow the rules. There's 40 percent in the middle that can go either way and are going to respond to the culture and respond to the signals from senior leadership. If you can convert that 40 percent to digital heroism, you're well on your way to digital maturity.”

Embracing the Soft Skills

“I've often said it's a lot easier for me to teach the average manager the technology they need, than it is for me to teach the technology leader, the management and the strategy and the business knowledge they need.”  

Not many start-ups can survive a direct attack from Amazon. So, when digital payment services company, Square, came up against the retail giant and won, it set Jim McKelvey on a mission to find out why. In this episode, Jim reveals the part innovation has to play in survival, the two classes of innovation and why they’re important, and how crises accelerate transformative change.

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The “Hero” Myth

“The people that I studied are not heroes. They are people who for one reason or another ended up in these weird situations where they had to become adventurers. They had to learn how to survive in the jungle. And learning that survival skill set is something that we're all capable of.”

Survival and Innovation

“Occasionally somebody gets dropped in the jungle. For some reason or another, they get put in a very hostile environment and then just don't die. And the process of not dying is what I study in the book. And it turns out to have this repeatable path. And that's what I call an innovation stack.”

The Role of Disruption in Innovation

“Throughout history, there were these companies who not only survived existential threat, but they then grew up later to become the biggest in their business. The biggest bank in the world, the biggest furniture company in the world, the biggest airline in the United States, the biggest frozen foods company in the world, the biggest automaker.”

Is data the new oil? Ross Mason pioneered improving integration to unlock more valuable data, but he believes this is only the start of driving change. In this episode, the Founder of the world’s leading API platform discusses how APIs enhance big data potential. He also explains how the gap between IT and business is closing as the lines between CIO and CEO begin to blur.

Ross Mason shares his thoughts on…

Defining APIs

“You hear people say an API is a product. The product realization of an API isn’t building the API. It’s putting all the infrastructure around it to help people get successful using it.”

API-Led Connectivity

“We’ve barely scratched the surface of what connectivity really means. APIs need contexts that know how to connect better and more easily, and group things together in a way that we can understand better as humans.”

The New Role of the CIO

“The role of the CIO is really to figure out the strategies within the organization to make [data] broadly available and actually get those assets to the front of the business where they can be used most effectively.