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From Academic Overachiever to Tech Executive with Dr. Doreen Galli | Ep044
Episode Information
Show Notes
In this episode, Manuel Martinez interviews Dr. Doreen Galli, Chief of Research at TBW Advisors, about her remarkable career journey through the technology industry. Dr. Galli shares candid insights about her path from academic overachiever to holding senior executive roles at companies like IBM, Microsoft, AT&T, and DHL.
Guest Background: Dr. Doreen Galli is currently Chief of Research at TBW Advisors, a media company and industry analyst firm. She has held CIO and CTO positions at Fortune 10 companies and was a platform architect for Microsoft Azure. Her career spans operations, consulting, and advisory roles across multiple industries including telecommunications, logistics, and cloud computing.
Episode Highlights:
Dr. Galli opens up about completing a triple major in college while being an All-American athlete and working multiple tutoring jobs. She explains how she convinced her registrar to allow course overloads by presenting a detailed plan and backup strategies.
The conversation covers her time as the first postdoc at IBM’s Center for Advanced Studies, where she worked alongside technology legends like Paul Larson (father of SQL) and learned to navigate complex technical integrations under extreme pressure.
She shares practical strategies for time management, including Benjamin Franklin’s time blocking method that she still uses today. Dr. Galli explains how scheduling everything – including relaxation time – creates more flexibility rather than rigidity.
The discussion reveals the realities of working in technology, including how to handle the inevitable layoffs and reorganizations that come with change management roles. Dr. Galli emphasizes that business decisions aren’t personal and shares strategies for protecting your professional brand.
Key Takeaways:
Resources Mentioned:
This episode offers valuable insights for anyone looking to advance their technology career, handle workplace challenges professionally, or develop stronger leadership and communication skills.
TranscriptionManuel Martinez: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their career and the way that they’ve been able to manage it over time, to really uncover any lessons or ideas that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I’m pretty excited. I have with me Dr. Doreen Galli. We met at Toastmasters and the conversation has gone well. She had talked a little bit about some of the work that she has done, looked at her profile on LinkedIn. It’s very extensive. We’ve had some conversations since then. There’s no way we’re gonna be able to cover everything she’s done, but there are gonna be a lot of key lessons just in the short time that we’ve talked that I think are gonna be really insightful and important to cover. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Dr. Doreen.
Doreen Galli: Hi, nice to see you. How are you doing?
Manuel Martinez: I’m doing fantastic. Thanks for asking. How about yourself?
Doreen Galli: Good, thanks for having me. Looking forward, hope it’ll help some people.
Manuel Martinez: And that’s ultimately the goal. So if you don’t mind, just as we get started, if you can just tell us what your current role is and just a summary of the roles and responsibilities and then we’ll kind of get in more depth later on.
Doreen Galli: Okay, sure. I’m the chief of research at TBW Advisors. It’s a media company, member of the press and industry analyst. We publish conference whispers and whisper reports along with some other document types as well, but those are the heavy ones we drive out of conferences here in Vegas. The exciting part is there’s many aspects to it. So one is, yes, I’m at the conferences and acting as a member of the press as well as a photojournalist. So I have my camera. I take full video of anything and everything I can and I see and I analyze that and that’s a whole video as well as a document and ask people questions based upon things that people wanna know from the experts at the conference. The other side of it is being an actual expert in technology is when I get to advise people. So it’s different than consulting. It’s more like, you know how you went to college and when you were writing your English paper and you’re like, okay, I gotta keep this GPA up. So I’m gonna stop by the English lab. They’re very good at this stuff. Let me just bounce it off of them, get their sanity check on it. They almost always gave you one or two points that just made it that much better, right? But then what happens when you get to the professional world, right? You’re head of data engineering at your company who around is more knowledgeable about data that you can say, can you give me a sanity check on this? I can’t know everything. I’m busy with my head down in all of this. I have no time to pick up my head to go to talk to all these people and go to all these events and find out about the newest, flashiest things that are going on. The difference is a lot of the big firms and one of which I was trained at, when they are helping people that do the same type of thing when they give advice is they’ve never been there. So like Stephen A. Smith at NAB on stage talked about how he’s the highest paid sports analyst, right? So instead of analyzing tech, he analyzes sports who was never a pro athlete. And that’s like a big thing because if you haven’t been there, done that. But what about technology? Isn’t it the same? Why are all these English majors helping these engineers? Their advice is very similar to chat GPT. It’s never had a team of a few thousand engineers. It’s never designed software. It’s never used an architecture, realized it, lived with it. It’s never done any of those things. And all of that context comes through in their advice. And that’s actually why I left one of the big firms is they were giving advice that was absolutely terrible. I would give them recordings of when people listened to the advice from someone who’s not been there because a vendor suggested it. And then I would tell them what happened and give them the recordings. It’s very common analysts record all of our insights because we’ll listen to it to pick up more nuances, how we can help the person next time. And they didn’t change their advice. This looked like giving the poor advice to people. So from my personal brain’s perspective, yeah, that’s something you always got to protect. No matter what it is, you got to protect your brand. Even in tough environments, you have to find a way to execute and deliver, have something when someone says, “What did you do when you were there?” Then you can say, “I did this.” Ideally, something they can figure out from the outside. So you would say, “This was before and this was after. Remember when this company made this change? Like at Microsoft, remember they had pair of regions. Now they have a data boundary. How did that happen? I designed it.”
Manuel Martinez: And that’s good to know that a lot of kind of what you’re doing, which is, I mean, I’m excited to get to that point. I know you and I have talked a little bit offline about it. So that’s going to be a fantastic conversation I have around that. So now I’m going to ask you if you don’t mind, kind of tell me a little bit more about where you grew up and then eventually kind of what led you down the path towards technology.
Doreen Galli: Yeah, absolutely. So I was a kid in the Chicago Verbs. Youngest of five grew up predominantly most to my childhood. We lived in a three bedroom apartment with seven people. All five of us had one bathroom. I had a lot of influence from my siblings in many ways in terms of I could read and write before I started kindergarten. And I became an All American Runner because I ran with my brother who was in high school when I was in second grade. So that had a lot of effect on me, but fundamentally, and my entry school was pretty much a waste of time. I was at an eighth grade level in second grade, but it was a private school. So they wanted to get all that tuition from my family all those years. And they wouldn’t double promote me. So I did a lot of sports.
Manuel Martinez: Interesting. Yeah. To kind of keep you busy and entertained.
Doreen Galli: So I had something in life that was interesting. Yeah, I read every book in the library more than two times in my elementary school. So there was like, I was trying to gobble up information like I do now with the conferences, but there was just only so much information to gobble. So, but there are sports at least.
Manuel Martinez: So, and that kind of leads into the question of, all right, so obviously it came easy for you at least elementary school. You know, you’re doing sports to kind of keep yourself entertained when eventually you did move on into assuming higher level courses or classes even. Is that something that, was it welcome because of the fact that, oh, now th...
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By Career DownloadsEpisode Information
Show Notes
In this episode, Manuel Martinez interviews Dr. Doreen Galli, Chief of Research at TBW Advisors, about her remarkable career journey through the technology industry. Dr. Galli shares candid insights about her path from academic overachiever to holding senior executive roles at companies like IBM, Microsoft, AT&T, and DHL.
Guest Background: Dr. Doreen Galli is currently Chief of Research at TBW Advisors, a media company and industry analyst firm. She has held CIO and CTO positions at Fortune 10 companies and was a platform architect for Microsoft Azure. Her career spans operations, consulting, and advisory roles across multiple industries including telecommunications, logistics, and cloud computing.
Episode Highlights:
Dr. Galli opens up about completing a triple major in college while being an All-American athlete and working multiple tutoring jobs. She explains how she convinced her registrar to allow course overloads by presenting a detailed plan and backup strategies.
The conversation covers her time as the first postdoc at IBM’s Center for Advanced Studies, where she worked alongside technology legends like Paul Larson (father of SQL) and learned to navigate complex technical integrations under extreme pressure.
She shares practical strategies for time management, including Benjamin Franklin’s time blocking method that she still uses today. Dr. Galli explains how scheduling everything – including relaxation time – creates more flexibility rather than rigidity.
The discussion reveals the realities of working in technology, including how to handle the inevitable layoffs and reorganizations that come with change management roles. Dr. Galli emphasizes that business decisions aren’t personal and shares strategies for protecting your professional brand.
Key Takeaways:
Resources Mentioned:
This episode offers valuable insights for anyone looking to advance their technology career, handle workplace challenges professionally, or develop stronger leadership and communication skills.
TranscriptionManuel Martinez: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their career and the way that they’ve been able to manage it over time, to really uncover any lessons or ideas that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I’m pretty excited. I have with me Dr. Doreen Galli. We met at Toastmasters and the conversation has gone well. She had talked a little bit about some of the work that she has done, looked at her profile on LinkedIn. It’s very extensive. We’ve had some conversations since then. There’s no way we’re gonna be able to cover everything she’s done, but there are gonna be a lot of key lessons just in the short time that we’ve talked that I think are gonna be really insightful and important to cover. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Dr. Doreen.
Doreen Galli: Hi, nice to see you. How are you doing?
Manuel Martinez: I’m doing fantastic. Thanks for asking. How about yourself?
Doreen Galli: Good, thanks for having me. Looking forward, hope it’ll help some people.
Manuel Martinez: And that’s ultimately the goal. So if you don’t mind, just as we get started, if you can just tell us what your current role is and just a summary of the roles and responsibilities and then we’ll kind of get in more depth later on.
Doreen Galli: Okay, sure. I’m the chief of research at TBW Advisors. It’s a media company, member of the press and industry analyst. We publish conference whispers and whisper reports along with some other document types as well, but those are the heavy ones we drive out of conferences here in Vegas. The exciting part is there’s many aspects to it. So one is, yes, I’m at the conferences and acting as a member of the press as well as a photojournalist. So I have my camera. I take full video of anything and everything I can and I see and I analyze that and that’s a whole video as well as a document and ask people questions based upon things that people wanna know from the experts at the conference. The other side of it is being an actual expert in technology is when I get to advise people. So it’s different than consulting. It’s more like, you know how you went to college and when you were writing your English paper and you’re like, okay, I gotta keep this GPA up. So I’m gonna stop by the English lab. They’re very good at this stuff. Let me just bounce it off of them, get their sanity check on it. They almost always gave you one or two points that just made it that much better, right? But then what happens when you get to the professional world, right? You’re head of data engineering at your company who around is more knowledgeable about data that you can say, can you give me a sanity check on this? I can’t know everything. I’m busy with my head down in all of this. I have no time to pick up my head to go to talk to all these people and go to all these events and find out about the newest, flashiest things that are going on. The difference is a lot of the big firms and one of which I was trained at, when they are helping people that do the same type of thing when they give advice is they’ve never been there. So like Stephen A. Smith at NAB on stage talked about how he’s the highest paid sports analyst, right? So instead of analyzing tech, he analyzes sports who was never a pro athlete. And that’s like a big thing because if you haven’t been there, done that. But what about technology? Isn’t it the same? Why are all these English majors helping these engineers? Their advice is very similar to chat GPT. It’s never had a team of a few thousand engineers. It’s never designed software. It’s never used an architecture, realized it, lived with it. It’s never done any of those things. And all of that context comes through in their advice. And that’s actually why I left one of the big firms is they were giving advice that was absolutely terrible. I would give them recordings of when people listened to the advice from someone who’s not been there because a vendor suggested it. And then I would tell them what happened and give them the recordings. It’s very common analysts record all of our insights because we’ll listen to it to pick up more nuances, how we can help the person next time. And they didn’t change their advice. This looked like giving the poor advice to people. So from my personal brain’s perspective, yeah, that’s something you always got to protect. No matter what it is, you got to protect your brand. Even in tough environments, you have to find a way to execute and deliver, have something when someone says, “What did you do when you were there?” Then you can say, “I did this.” Ideally, something they can figure out from the outside. So you would say, “This was before and this was after. Remember when this company made this change? Like at Microsoft, remember they had pair of regions. Now they have a data boundary. How did that happen? I designed it.”
Manuel Martinez: And that’s good to know that a lot of kind of what you’re doing, which is, I mean, I’m excited to get to that point. I know you and I have talked a little bit offline about it. So that’s going to be a fantastic conversation I have around that. So now I’m going to ask you if you don’t mind, kind of tell me a little bit more about where you grew up and then eventually kind of what led you down the path towards technology.
Doreen Galli: Yeah, absolutely. So I was a kid in the Chicago Verbs. Youngest of five grew up predominantly most to my childhood. We lived in a three bedroom apartment with seven people. All five of us had one bathroom. I had a lot of influence from my siblings in many ways in terms of I could read and write before I started kindergarten. And I became an All American Runner because I ran with my brother who was in high school when I was in second grade. So that had a lot of effect on me, but fundamentally, and my entry school was pretty much a waste of time. I was at an eighth grade level in second grade, but it was a private school. So they wanted to get all that tuition from my family all those years. And they wouldn’t double promote me. So I did a lot of sports.
Manuel Martinez: Interesting. Yeah. To kind of keep you busy and entertained.
Doreen Galli: So I had something in life that was interesting. Yeah, I read every book in the library more than two times in my elementary school. So there was like, I was trying to gobble up information like I do now with the conferences, but there was just only so much information to gobble. So, but there are sports at least.
Manuel Martinez: So, and that kind of leads into the question of, all right, so obviously it came easy for you at least elementary school. You know, you’re doing sports to kind of keep yourself entertained when eventually you did move on into assuming higher level courses or classes even. Is that something that, was it welcome because of the fact that, oh, now th...