Transformation | Ep. 158

Welcome to another exciting and informative episode of the Data Gurus podcast!

Today, Sima is happy to have Camille Nicita, the CEO of Gongos, joining her as her guest for the show. Camille is one of the four founding partners of Gongos.

In this episode, Camille shares her early career experiences and the journey she has been on since the founding of Gongos thirty years ago, which culminated in her becoming CEO. She also discusses the step-by-step transformation of Gongos and explains what they do to meet their clients’ needs in a world of big data.

How Gongos came about 

While she was doing an internship at an automotive group for a research company, John Gongos asked Camille and three others to join him when he decided to go out on his own and do a startup. Camille was young and had no commitments at the time, so she took a leap of faith and agreed.

A great experience

Camille found getting thrown in at the deep end a good learning experience! From the get-go, she loved being part of Gongos because she was with a group of smart people with whom she enjoyed doing things.

Restless dissatisfaction

Part of the DNA of Gongos is continuous improvement. Every year since she started working at Gongos, Camille has continued to learn, grow, and become better than she was before. At Gongos, they call never resting on their laurels restless dissatisfaction.

Seeding the future of the organization

As the company grew, Camille started to interview people, recruit talent, and place the right people in the appropriate positions. She always kept her eye on the future and where the organization was going. She made sure that she always took on board the kind of talent that would seed the future of the organization.

Camille’s path to becoming CEO

Throughout her years at Gongos, Camille always took on new challenges and opportunities. Early on, she became a member of the leadership or strategy team that determined the key direction of the company. She took on many different roles and learned as much as possible about the organization. She also stayed at the forefront with all her client interactions. She listened carefully to what her clients needed and brought back what she learned and fused it into all the areas of the organization. That primed her well to become CEO.

Camille never aspired to be CEO 

In 2012, John Gongos passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. Camille was COO and a minority shareholder at the time. When John passed, she became the controlling shareholder. It was natural that she also became the CEO because she honored John and felt that he would have wanted her to do it.

A new vision

After John passed away, Camille and the other leaders in the organization rallied together to prove to the world that they could carry on running Gongos in the same successful way as before. Big data was coming onto the scene at the time, so they also took the opportunity to create a new vision for the organization.

Customer-centricity

At Gongos, they have always been into customer-centricity and helping their clients make good decisions. When their clients started to rely on data that was not created by them, they started looking at their capabilities beyond qualitative and quantitative research that could help them to help their clients thrive in a world where data is abundant.

Challenging data

The most challenging data for them to work with was big, messy sets of enterprise data. They soon learned that they needed to structure that data to work with it. They also needed to have data engineers on their team in addition to data scientists, to structure the messy data.

New talent

They started bringing into the organization people who are potentially good researchers ...