We meet Emma Philpott MBE - academic, cyber security expert and business leader. Emma tells us how her career has meandered to a good place, and that is okay. That when she was underestimated and frustrated early in the piece her best boss saw her potential and gave her the support to grow in her own way. And how she landed in the right place through adversity: changing tack and building communities of cyber security firms, driven by a sense of fairness. She explains how mistakes and failure can be turned into opportunities with the addition of a sense of optimism. Emma closes by explaining how the organisation she founded and runs succeeds because it is inclusive and proactively recruits neuro-diverse people. It's not just the right thing to do, it's good for business.

We meet Daniel Avancini, an academic turned entrepreneur, analyst and business person turned coder. He tells us about how he doesn't always know his final destination, but he understands the direction in which he wishes to travel and makes decisions so he heads that way. How he hedged (in his parlance) by keeping one foot in academia and one in corporate life. And Daniel has some great advice for those starting out who are challenged by the impact of AI on the future of work: understand your passion and what you are great at, and add value by doing things that AI can't do. 

We meet Dr CJ Meadows - from the US, based in Singapore, having worked around the world from Japan to India and beyond. An accountant by training and IT pro by practice, CJ is an entrepreneur, consultant, and educator who runs a not-for-profit using tech to bring access to education to excluded folks. We spoke about how her career (and life) path has never been linear or conventional. We discussed how the future of work will require leaders who can use design thinking to focus on solving new and real problems rather than building the shiniest tech. She explained how her best bosses showed empathy and support, and that those same skills are useful in family and personal life make for great business success. CJ ends with some great lessons for life: follow your own path, and try not to kill each other. Words to live by.

We meet Arno Schilperoord, a global leader for Heineken who believes that coding is magic and poetry, offering the opportunity to create something from nothing and infinite possibility. Arno tells us how studying physics and using computer models and writing computer code to help in the analysis was his way into IT. He says that in IT everybody was learning things for the first time, and explains how designing resilient high-performance solutions was just a small step from his current practice of architecture. Arno tells us that great bosses are able to spot and resolve problems early, and that great leadership isn't just about technical expertise, it's about awareness, timing, and creating a culture of high performance and creating an environment where people feel safe and feel supported.

We meet David Jones - a chief architect, CTO and CIO who describes his work as elevating business technology strategy through architectural excellence. David introduces himself as someone who loves collaborating, doesn't do politics and is always honest. He tells us how he got started by choosing to study electrical engineering inspired by his brother and a French pen pal, and espouses the value of practical, in-industry training over academic learning (although he returned to his own school to teach). David tells us how he was supported to accelerate his career by studying bleeding edge tech whilst he was working in an operational business, and how that taught him a valuable architectural lesson: the best solution for the organization you are in may not always be the most current technical solution. David's message to those starting out is to follow your passions, learn, and be open and curious - you never know where life will take you.

We meet Jim Wilt, a voraciously curious CTO, distinguished chief architect and engineering advocate. Jim's enjoying a stellar career with roles as CTO, CDO and chief architect across a multitude of enterprise organizations. In this conversation we learn about his success and failures, and how he may have learnt more from the latter. He takes us from being inspired by a Disney movie to learn to code on paper because he couldn't afford access to a computer, to working in medical research and winning prestigious awards for huge organizations. He describes a great boss in McDonalds who taught him the value of giving your best to everything you do, including the story of the janitor at NASA who sent a man to the Moon. Jim shares how he needed to be convinced of his own expertise, and shares the view that material success follows passion and focus - don't waste your time being safe.

We meet Paul Preiss, the CEO and founder of the IASA, the not-for-profit professional association for all business technology architects. In our conversation Paul describes himself as unbelievably passionate person about everything he does, personal and professional, and how that helped him steer and build a storied career in technology. He describes how he went from doing a degree in Japanese, to what he describes as his calling: IT. His first roles in development, moving to become an architect with Dell, and on to great success. Paul tells us some of the things he learnt along the way, outlines his failures and what he learnt from them, as well as introducing us to some of the great leaders who helped shape him and his career.