You've Been Heard

You've Been Heard

By You've Been HeardBusinessNewsTechnologyTech NewsManagement
Download on the App Store

You've Been Heard episodes

  • Security Is Just Business Risk

    Edward Marchewka, CIO at Illinois Bone and Joint Institute, joins You've Been Heard for a practical conversation about board communication, cybersecurity leadership, and the gap between technical expertise and business trust. He explains the information asymmetry gap, why fear-based security messaging often backfires, and how IT leaders can connect risk to confidentiality, finance, people, reputation, availability, and data integrity. The episode also covers adult learning, remediation ownership, third-party validation, operationalized security, incident response discipline, and the career lesson Edward gives every emerging IT leader: do not sit behind your desk.

    54 min
  • All My Projects Are Your Projects

    Dario Sarmiento started as a help desk fixer at one of the world's largest law firms during the dot-com boom. He thought his job was solving tech problems. Turns out, his real job was understanding how every department actually works.

    Now CIO at Wilshire Law Firm, Dario brings a unique perspective shaped by 25 years in legal tech and a master's in theological studies. His approach? Servant leadership that puts people first and treats IT as the connective tissue of the organization.

    We get into workflow intimacy (why IT touches every department differently than HR or Finance), the upside-down leadership triangle, and why AI governance is about teaching people to use the right hammer for the right job. Plus the story of an employee who almost quit to become a bus driver—and how Dario's intervention changed his entire trajectory.

    The biggest takeaway? IT's strategic advantage isn't technical expertise. It's proximity to how the whole business actually operates.

    34 min
  • 423- There Is A Cost To Know Things w/Steve Goudreau

    Steve Goudreau has been in IT leadership long enough to know the difference between being at the table and being heard. At his current role, he has a seat at the executive round table. At his previous company with five times as many direct reports, he didn't even have director-level access.

    The difference? Understanding what executives actually need from IT. Not helpdesk metrics or project status updates. Information that helps the company make better decisions about technology, risk, and investment. "You want the information you're presenting to move the company forward," Steve explains.

    We get into executive communication that works, AI strategy that starts with goals instead of tools, and shadow AI governance that doesn't kill productivity. Steve also breaks down technical debt as future cost made visible, the questions CEOs should ask their IT leaders, and why the strongest leadership skill isn't technical.

    His biggest insight hits different: "There is a cost to know things." Training costs money. Research costs time. But staying ignorant costs more.

    31 min
  • 421- There Is No Zero-Fail Environment w/Drew Ludwick
    Drew Ludwick brings military communications pressure, network engineering depth, and modern CIO judgment to a blunt lesson: technology will fail. The work is making sure the mission does not.
    Drew Ludwick did not plan to become an IT leader. He started as a network engineer who liked hard environments, messy infrastructure, and the pressure of making systems work when the stakes were real. That background shaped his view of so-called zero-fail environments. Drew argues that technology breaks at the worst possible time. The real discipline is building redundancy, preventive maintenance, planning process, and team readiness around the mission that cannot stop. In this conversation, Drew connects lessons from military communications and the White House Communications Agency to business IT leadership today. He explains why leadership intensity has to change by context, why IT needs a seat in business planning before systems are bought, and why data governance now sits at the center of AI risk. The conversation closes on a warning most teams will recognize: vendor management is becoming one of the next big security problems, especially as vendors add AI features inside business systems with limited visibility.
    Key takeaways: Plan for mission survival, not perfect uptime.; Frame technical risk in business language.; Govern data before scaling AI.
    54 min
  • 420- Lead How Technology Gets Leveraged w/Bart Waress

    Bart Waress has led IT across healthcare, telecom, banking, oil and gas, mining, data centers, and energy. His lesson is blunt: transformation sticks when IT listens first, speaks the business language, and proves value where work actually happens.

    54 min
  • 419- Common Sense Over Theatrics w/Nick Feczko

    Nick Feczko took the VP IT seat at DuBois Chemicals six months ago after walking away from an environment that ran on ego and politics. He came looking for a place where IT careers get built on common sense instead of theatrics, and he is running the AI rollout the same way.

    49 min
  • 417- You Can't Be Just a Nerd Anymore w/Josh Siddon
    Josh Siddon is rolling out managed Wi-Fi across three hundred multifamily properties at MAA. The infrastructure is the easy part. The hard part is pulling IT out of the back room and into the business, where it now has to live.
    Josh Siddon is VP of IT Architecture at MAA, one of the largest multifamily operators in the country, and the founder of ResiQ, a consultancy helping smaller operators navigate managed Wi-Fi, cloud migration, and PropTech vendor selection. His team is rolling out managed Wi-Fi across a 300-plus property portfolio, with per-unit VLAN isolation, 10-gig pipes, and contractors cutting cable through occupied brownfield buildings. The engineering is hard. What he argues is harder is the identity shift IT has to make alongside it. Josh says you can't be just a nerd anymore. A resident's Wi-Fi connection isn't a ticket, it's an operations promise, which means IT now lives in the budget meeting, the project planning cycle, and the CEO's goal-setting conversation. He traces his own ability to make that shift back to a mentor who made him work a week in the hotel, food and beverage, finance, HR, and the buffet line before he was allowed to touch IT. We get into how he's rolling the same playbook forward for the AI wave. Josh lived through RPA at a private-equity-backed retail chain, automating eighty percent of Tuesday-through-Thursday workload without cutting a job. He thinks AI is the same wave with fewer lines of code and the same trust-building work. His team at MAA integrates MCP and Copilot Studio into third-party systems to turn Copilot from a desktop tool into an enterprise platform, and he's a self-described Claude fan. Josh's prediction for eighteen months from now: the conversation won't be about the technology. It'll be about former CIOs and CTOs running companies as CEOs.
    Key takeaways: You can't be just a nerd anymore. People skills and business fluency are the job now.; Managed Wi-Fi turns IT into operations. A resident's connection is a promise, not a ticket.; AI is the RPA wave again. The trust-building work matters more than the tool.
    40 min
  • 416- Your IT Team Should Work Without You w/Scott Kutz
    Scott Kutz runs IT at a construction equipment dealership where excavators connect to the internet and OEMs move faster than the infrastructure can follow. His answer isn't to be the hero. It's to make himself unnecessary.
    Scott Kutz is five months into his role as IT Manager at Brooks Tractor, a construction equipment dealership where service managers remote into customer excavators in real time and OEM vendors push cloud platforms faster than most dealers can upgrade their bandwidth. He came from a larger privately held construction company where he watched IT people hoard knowledge, refuse to explain their work, and position themselves as irreplaceable. He decided early on that wasn't going to be him. Scott's approach comes from his father, a twenty-year Marine veteran in communications who taught him that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. "It's okay to not know, but it's not okay to stop learning and it's not okay to stop teaching. Because knowledge kept to yourself isn't being kind." That line runs through everything Scott does. He lets his team push buttons on decommissioned systems knowing things will break. He asks people what they do for fun so he can explain IT problems using their language. He told one coworker he fixed their computer by changing the spark plug in their engine. We get into how construction equipment dealerships are quietly becoming high-tech environments, why Scott turned a frustrated coworker into an ally who championed a company-wide bandwidth upgrade, and how he earned a seat at the leadership table five months in by learning the dealership's service operations before touching the IT. Scott's test for himself is straightforward. If he wins the Powerball tomorrow or gets hit by a bus, the business should keep running without him. If it can't, he's not indispensable. He's a single point of failure disguised as expertise.
    Key takeaways: Make yourself unnecessary. The business should run without you.; Let people fail in low-risk environments. They learn faster that way.; Learn the business before you try to change the IT.
    50 min

About You've Been Heard

From the publisher's feed

Having a seat at the table. Nice. Being heard? Nicer.

More shows like You've Been Heard

The Joe Rogan Experience by Joe Rogan

The Joe Rogan Experience

227,404 Listeners