HH71-04-03-2022_mixdown.mp3

Harpreet: [00:00:10] All right, what's up, everybody, welcome, welcome to the @TheArtistsOfDataScience happy hour, your host Harpreet Sahota. Hope you guys have enjoyed the last couple of weeks of the happy hour sessions. Last week we had been taken over as host. The week before that we had Antonio taking over as host. I'm back today for just a few minutes. Just a quick message to the community. I'll probably be gone from hosting duties for the next several weeks. While I was on vacation in California,

Speaker2: [00:00:40] My

Harpreet: [00:00:41] Basement was flooded, which means all of my equipment, all of my podcast gear, my computers, all that stuff is just ruined. So I have no way of actually recording. I'm actually renting out a co-working spot here for the time being. So, you know, I'm doing my thing. We will bear. We will forebear my friends. We will be back here. We'll be doing it. We'll keep this happy hour of going every single week. Anyway, we can our friends. If you guys want to help support the show, want to help give back if you've learned or gain anything over the last few. Years, almost two years of this thing. Feel free, now's the time that I would love to have you guys help. There's a link on every single episode to buy me a coffee. Go ahead and do that. I'll use that for you to have to get some more equipment because I have no clue and insurance is going to come through and hook me up. So please, I would appreciate your support. There's a link right there in the chat, in the description of the show, wherever you're watching. Speaking of the show, hopefully you guys get an opportunity to tune into the episode that I just released today with Fabrice Mazdoor.

Harpreet: [00:01:55] It's a great episode actually recorded that one over a year ago, so it's been quite some time since [00:02:00] we recorded that, so I'm happy to finally get that out. But definitely check that out for me. It's awesome. Had a great time talking about his adventures. I'm pretty much all over the world, man. So it's really cool to see other news. Now, other major news, except that Eric is taking over at the at the helm today as host, so please do give Eric a warm welcome and you know he'll be the one taking over today. I don't know what's going to happen when I end my portion of the stream. So let's do this. Let's make Eric the host. And I don't know what's going to happen on LinkedIn if it'll still be streaming on LinkedIn or not. Hopefully it is. If not, no worries. This will always be. It was fun. Yeah, it's always be recorded and shared on spot on Spotify and Apple playlist and all that stuff. Eric, with great power comes great

Speaker2: [00:02:59] Responsibility over to

Harpreet: [00:03:00] You, my friend. Thanks so much for taking over hosting duties. Also, big shout out. Last weekend I got a chance to hang out with a bunch of people live in drag for the first time ever. Gina Doherty being one of those is nice to see Gina on it with Kiko, Zach Wilson and Mark as well. Mark Freeman's There was great time taking with everybody. Thanks for coming out. Appreciate you guys being there. Everybody else in the room. Rashad, what's going on?

Speaker2: [00:03:28] Finn Russell and Mark Bartolo.

Harpreet: [00:03:31] Thank you guys so much for being here. I got to sign off. I got a bunch of shit to take care of at home. As you can imagine, there's a just a pile of madness in my basement. Guys, take care, Eric. It's on you, man.

Eric: [00:03:43] Peace. All right. Maybe we're still streaming live. Maybe we aren't. Looks like we still are. Cool. By the way, Rashad, Hey, how's it going? It's been a long time since I've seen you in real, in real life. But see you on LinkedIn all the time now. All [00:04:00] right, so I actually had a couple of questions I was going to ask anyway, so this actually worked out just fine. So the great reshuffling has continued to wreak attack upon the companies of the world, including but not limited to my employer. So my boss this last week, she's worked at LendingTree for like 10 years, and so she decided that she wanted to make a move and try something different after 10 years. Good for her. Happy for her. So I'm in the not that unusual situation, but the situation of I'm going to have a new boss now. I don't know who my new boss is. They have a backfilled the position yet, but they're going to. And so I was just going to ask. I guess kind of two pieces, one is I don't I would probably be involved in some kind of interview related conversation. And so if you were having an interview with the person who might be your boss, what would you ask them? And once they are hired and now they're your boss, what would you do to best set up the like, set the relationship off on a good, good start?

Speaker4: [00:05:08] You stumped the panel.

Speaker5: [00:05:11] I can go. I have something about four boxes ranging from engineering leader to like a product leader like Tito. So have the range. Or is interviewing them. I've interviewed like peers or people who could be my boss a little bit. I guess when I, I'm interviewing someone like high level. Probably just I really want to know, like some of the biggest challenges they've overcome things that don't have a textbook answer and then want to understand their principles. Because no matter how much experience you have, there will always be trade offs in the decisions you make. So I kind of want to understand like how they deal with those trade offs. And that's one way to look at it in other ways, like what are their biases? [00:06:00] So given the situation, they will tend to do this versus that. That's kind of what I'll ask. Beyond that, it's hard to say. I mean, still keep friendly, of course. And then as far as like, once hired, how do you how do you make the relationship off on the right foot? Well, you might remember the feeling of being new in a place and feeling like disoriented and being overloaded with information. Sometimes it takes a while for a new person to be exposed to, like like the gritty stuff like some of the politics or some of the like. I guess inside

Speaker2: [00:06:41] Information they might just

Speaker5: [00:06:42] Get like the general. This is how the business works. And then like, OK, now go sort of thing. Or maybe they'll learn the priorities of their leaders, right? But then they're like, Well, how do I actually do that? So if you can give them like all the ground details, that would not be part of their standard onboarding and sort of like, well, if you want to make the decision, this is my perspective. I feel like that could be helpful. It's been people have told me that when I told them that stuff, they found it helpful sort of being a little more authentic and open, I guess. And maybe the standard Hey, nice to meet you in our 30 minute one on one welcome. Tell me about your experience sort of thing, which is like the standard. So going a little deeper, I'd say, is probably. General key to that doing that, well, I like it.

Eric: [00:07:30] Cool. Thank you. So you drop something and said you had a comment.

Harpreet: [00:07:37] Yeah. So I think I'd approach it from a more rounded perspective and try and speak to them for their management style and work style, maybe put to them some scenarios like say there was an issue in the team and we had to solve it or say if I had if I had been the cause of an issue that we had to correct. [00:08:00]

Speaker2: [00:08:00] How would you

Harpreet: [00:08:01] How would you deal with me? How would we go through that situation to try and get an idea of of how they would react? I mean, they're likely to try and paint that as prettily as they can enter in an interview situation. But still, I think it's a useful question to ask and perhaps also ask the celebrations of challenges they've had to face in the past, personally and both in the company. And then maybe also go on to say as a as a courtesy from yourself in this kind of reverse situation that you'll be there to offer them as much support and learning facility in their on boarding, even though they're going to be your manager until they're kind of up to speed. So to let them know that they can come to you to ask questions that you might be able to give them and that you'll be completely open and honest with them

Speaker2: [00:08:56] In the expectation

Harpreet: [00:08:58] That that kind

Speaker2: [00:08:58] Of direct

Harpreet: [00:09:00] Honesty will be reciprocated

Eric: [00:09:02] Like that earlier. Earlier this week, the the I guess my boss's boss, you know, got us together and and she said, You know, looking forward, I don't know exactly the timeline of when this person's when this person is going to be, this position will be backfilled, she said. So I can't promise certainty, but I can promise transparency. And she she's always delivered on that. So I didn't doubt it either, but it was just a really nice sound bite. I made sure to like, write it down as a quote because it needs to be on a news to be on a mug or something that I'm going to keep in mind. Moving forward, I liked it a lot. Thanks for that.

Speaker4: [00:09:40] You know. Yeah, so a couple of thoughts. First wanted to comment. Kind of build on what Russell said, because it's really important to get to know the management style as much as you can. And although of course people are going to, you know, want to present themselves in the best light, [00:10:00] that's the point of an interview. You really do want to know things like, you know, how do you motivate people or what do you think are the things that motivate staff or how do you like however you want to phrase it? But you know you can leave it open ended. You can ask them, What's your management style? Probably less detail in your question might be better. And as well picking up on something, Rashad said. It's kind of like when you can ask them, how do you when you get here, assuming you're hired and you come in, what what strategy do you think you might employ to understand the organization better? And what I'm driving at with this question is that I've seen it again and again a lot of times like I've seen people manage up or manage their peers and manage up, and they're the nicest people ever like. And then I've seen them treat people below them like absolute dirt. And when I learned of this and I was a person's peer who did this, and when I learned about this, like my impression of him instantly took a nosedive because I don't like that.

Speaker4: [00:11:16] I think that's crap. The people are, you know, some of the lowest tier people, quote unquote, they're the ones doing all the work. And another thing is you can learn a lot from those folks. So rather than, you know, strictly hobnobbing with their peers or people senior to them, I would like personally to see them want to talk to, you know, in depth, everyone is going to report to them as well as others across the organization. That's how you really learn. And as well, like, yes, I think 100 percent, you can help that person get on board and understand how things actually work once they get there. [00:12:00] And I would offer that for sure. I would be a little cautious because until they get in there and you start to see how they operate, you don't necessarily know how they're going to use that information. And if I didn't have personal experience, that was not quite so positive, I wouldn't throw that out there. But I'd say, you know, as trust builds trust tree, it's all about that. So as as the trust builds, you can continue to offer more and more and see how that goes.

[00:12:35] Oh, thank you. Ben?

Speaker5: [00:12:40] So I definitely want you to ask them to invert their org chart from memory on the whiteboard and see how fast they can do it, that 100 percent has to happen. But aside from that, when you're in the interview with them, this is going to be the most seriously. They take your questions. So if you ask them a question and they feel like they're, you know, you feel like they're kind of disengaged, that tells you everything you need to know going forward about how much concern you're going to get, because that's what you I mean, really? Look at it that way. I think you are going to get the best possible side of them during the interview and to look for nonverbal cues. If they're engaged with you, that's a good sign. Leaning in open posture, not worried or concerned about you because a lot of times leaders come in and they're intimidated by existing staff. And that's one of the things that I have to coach new leaders or leaders making a transition about is don't worry about the people that are there. They're there to support you. You want them to be better than you. There's no wrong side to that, and you want to look for somebody that understands that piece, like they're not looking to be the technical smartest person and lead because they're the smartest person in the room. You want somebody who can lead because they're actually a leader. And the other question [00:14:00] that's always a good one is have you ever come into a situation like this one and don't explain it like literally leave it kind of open and watch where they go with it? Because somebody who's been around the block a few times is going to say, Well, what do you mean in this situation? And that'll be the immediate clarifying question.

Speaker5: [00:14:18] But somebody who's a little less experienced, that's probably who you're going to get at the management level or junior director level. They're going to start explaining to you what they think they're walking into, and that will give you the greatest sense of their capabilities in how well have they to this point assessed what they're picking up. And that's really the better the leader, the closer they're going to be to the reality of what's going on because it's usually not too hard to figure out what's going on. So those are all kind of the things that I would ask and the things I would look for. But more than anything else, you know, when they start. Give them two weeks, you know, definitely say your high, say what's good. You know, I'm here to help you obviously know where I am, but for two weeks, just leave me alone. For the most part, they're going to come see you just plenty. But they're overwhelmed. And if you give them more information about the situation, oh my God, you may even. And they don't have a point of reference to figure out who's giving them the straight and who's giving them the corporate line. So they don't know if you are setting them up or if you are helping them out. They have no

Speaker2: [00:15:38] Idea. And depending upon the type

Speaker5: [00:15:40] Of corporate culture they came from, you may have someone who is looking out for, you know, stabs in the back from the people below them or so give them some space. And that's really the best thing I can say for those first two weeks. Give them some space, be available, you know, just keep saying, I'm here. If you need me, let me know what I can do to help. [00:16:00] And if they look at you like, I need help and I don't know what I can ask you for. That's when you start talking about what it is that you can do. And and maybe some things that you might be able to help them through.

Eric: [00:16:12] I don't feel really good. I like it a lot. Thank you, Russell. You want to say what you added in the comments here. I haven't had a chance to read over yet.

Harpreet: [00:16:22] Sure. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to think because I've already had it go speaking, but I basically said that an additional salient point would be following the experiences we've all gone through with the pandemic impacts over the last couple of years.

Speaker2: [00:16:37] You know, say

Harpreet: [00:16:38] To assuming everything's great again and there's another extreme worldwide event such as that. What nonstandard methods would you look to employ to promote positivity and resilience within the team? You're responsible for

Speaker2: [00:16:55] Managing, you know, outside

Harpreet: [00:16:56] Of everything else, just

Speaker2: [00:16:57] What?

Harpreet: [00:16:58] What would you go the extra mile for to make sure your team was was doing well under extreme circumstances?

Eric: [00:17:06] That's great. Yeah. You. Like three interviews worth of like good questions and stuff here now. So just do you want to catch up or do you want to jump in

Speaker6: [00:17:21] The nice one? You know, it's interesting. I every week I do a kick off call with my team kind of lay out the priorities for the weekend. And there's always, you know, kind of a, you know, the last slide is always here. Here's here's a big idea to think about. You know, in this week, what I talked about was just Stephen Covey's, you know, a circle of influence versus circle of control, if you've seen that before. So it's like sort of a concern, I should say vicious circle influences. Circle concern is like all the things that you're concerned about, like, you know, am I, you know, am I good looking? You [00:18:00] know, am I going to get nuked tomorrow? You know, as my model working in production, you know, and in all these things and then circle of influence is basically OK. So out of all these things, like what can I really control, right? And so I told the team, look, I mean, a healthy way of approaching the week is like, you got to focus on what you can control or you're going to get eaten alive, especially with the news these days. I mean, it's enough to bring like the most stoic, sane person to their knees, like we're not in a healthy state right now in the world. So, you know, that's you know, there's there's only so much I can do as an employer and as a boss to tell people, you know, have a positive attitude. Anything that can instill in them is, look, I mean, how you approach each day and how you bring yourself to adjust to life these days is what you need to really focus on. I can't do that for you. So. But. So what management techniques are good in a global nuclear conflict, I have no idea. We haven't been here for several decades, so.

Eric: [00:19:05] Cool, thank you very much. Anybody else have any questions they want to ask? My notebook just fell on the floor, so I'm going to take a moment to grab that standing desk. Didn't have quite enough space for it, I guess. Ben, how is your most recent trip? New must.

Speaker5: [00:19:26] It was crazy. So I've been to Saudi Arabia four times in the last two months. It's twenty five hours every time. Yeah, my favorite time. Maybe this last time. Every time we go. At the end of the week, I'll I'll tease my CEO and say, Did you learn anything? And it's it's a stupid question because it's like, of course you did. But yeah, I feel like every trip I do when I go there, I age a year, [00:20:00] so it's good.

Speaker6: [00:20:05] All right. Really, there? Sounds great.

Speaker5: [00:20:08] Yeah, it's it's a neat place. It's totally different. Like I've actually been very inspired by them, I said. So, Joe, I think one of the I think being in the U.S., we were very U.S. centric and we're pro democracy. And I think what you realize in Saudi Arabia is they can actually do things we can't. So when it comes to innovation or routing resources, they can actually move much quicker than we can. And we're seeing that. So we a couple of weeks ago, they had their lead conference, first conference. They had one hundred thousand attendees like. So you don't normally have to build a conference over time. They had one hundred thousand attendees and and they had celebrities walking around like people like who's who in AI, people you've seen on Joe Rogan's podcast or like walking around the conference. And so it's it's crazy what they can do when they want to do it. A, you know, I heard you guys are talking about the Ukrainian conflict, which I think is top of mind for everyone right now. What does it mean? Yeah.

Eric: [00:21:10] Yeah, and how to be a manager during the Ukrainian conflict, I guess where it was going, I guess. Or just being a manager during, I guess, crazy times in general.

Harpreet: [00:21:23] Well, I mean, we've done that already.

Speaker6: [00:21:28] Know managing that was like a crash course in a bunch of stuff like remote work for some people and obviously, you know, people going crazy from working at home for a couple of years now. So I think managing is tough on a good day when you don't have a pandemic and looming nuclear thermonuclear warfare and stuff. So it's like, I don't know. It's a tough job, everyone says it's easy, I have to go on and go try it out for a couple of hours. Let me know what you think about that. So.

Speaker4: [00:22:02] Well, [00:22:00] speaking speaking of I,

Speaker5: [00:22:05] I you can say real quick. It reminds me, I think people that know me on this call know I'm a huge storytelling nerd and a big part of that is knowing your audience. And so knowing Putin and his priorities when you really know his priorities, it makes a lot more sense. It's hard to say something like this makes sense, but it, you know, he's been warning people for so long about Ukraine not joining NATO and not joining the EU because he sees it as a threat to him. And I guess in the U.S., I'm not justifying anything that he's doing, of course, because I think it's insane and I think it's terrible. And we have a lot of people over there that we care deeply about that are being harmed by it. But it's it's interesting when you really understand your audience and Joe, you've got a lot more experience with China and understanding them and their mindset. And I think unfortunately in the world today, a lot of times we don't understand the other side not. And by saying that, I'm not saying I just fight anything that Putin's doing because I think it is out of control. But I think if we had understood him better, maybe we would have. I don't know. Maybe that's the controversial thing to say. Would we not be here fighting if we had understood what his triggers were?

Speaker4: [00:23:15] So, yeah, I. Sorry, I was just going to say from what I've read and seen, I think it's taken a lot of people by surprise, it really seems. By many accounts, to be a strategic misstep, let's just say it that way. That's an understatement. An armed conflict is like has many damaging repercussions, not just now, but for years to come. And here's a question, and it kind of brings it back to Data science. Over the last several years, one of my interests is cybersecurity, actually, and I can't entirely explain why, other than it's my [00:24:00] risk management side and kind of thinking and seeing, you know, trying to see around corners for potential risks to an organization, to society, et cetera. And many of you may be aware, have read the book Sand Worm by Andy Greenberg, who is a writer for Wired. It's an amazing book in its own right. I mean, it's just it's written really well. It's fascinating, and it's all about the elite team of hackers and so on and the Russian security apparatus. And Putin is a long time security guy. He he knows all the ins and outs of information warfare. He's the head of the KGB back in the day and the Soviet days. Some of us remember those days, and the information warfare machinery they put in is extremely sophisticated and effective. And if you read sand worm or if you know much about their efforts, I mean, they shut down. I think a lot of Ukraine's grid back in 2014 and shut down the internet, and I can't remember which country.

Speaker4: [00:25:12] No, but Latvia or Estonia, one of those former Eastern Bloc kind of countries. So the fact that they're doing a physical invasion now seems kind of bizarre, and it seems to have taken a lot of security analysts by surprise. It's true. It's no secret that Putin wants to reconstitute, if not the Soviet Union, then the Russian Empire to its former glory. But I think people didn't think that it was going to. Go this route, especially given all the sophisticated tools they have at their disposal, relatively cheap cyber warfare tools that they could utilize. It's like you kind of go, OK, I don't get this. This doesn't make [00:26:00] much sense. It's tended to unify Europe. It's strengthened European allies and resolve and Western allies. It's probably strengthened NATO. So it doesn't make a lot of sense. And there is one article that was actually posted by someone to Mexico's feed on LinkedIn, and I thought it was really good. It talked about Putin's state of mind and how it seems he's grown more isolated during the pandemic and seems to have. Gone into more of a I don't know what the word is, but more of a fantasyland or a historical revisionist attitude towards Russia and their destiny. And Russell Russell has his hand. So maybe we can come back to the kind of data science and cyber security, information warfare, misinformation and all the rest a bit.

Harpreet: [00:26:55] Okay. Thank you. Yeah, and I guess what I wanted to say kind of ties together what you were saying then general, what Ben was saying before that, you know, the storytelling and the the understanding of another's perspective, I think it's not just that, you know, the rest of the world hasn't really been on the same page as Russia and Putin, etc. I think it's that they haven't wanted to be. And that kind of comes back to, you know, the cognitive biases like confirmation bias, anchoring bias, all those types of things. It suits the agenda to not consider another's perspective. And I think that's very much how a lot of the Western politics and the Western powerhouses, you know, superpowers and other first world countries, Europe and the Americas, etc. have been for it. And then from the other side of the fence, I think there's equally, you know, the same cognitive biases coming from internally in Russia. You know, they have their own agenda for for what they want to do as a country, [00:28:00] and they'd say this is the the political regime there rather than the country as a whole. That's very exclusionary and isolating. So, you know, a confirmation bias is just present everywhere in modern life, really very few situations more extremely than this, with very few situations with more extreme circumstances or consequences, should I say as this? And there was one last thing that I want to say, which was not quite so related to this current conflict, but slightly associated. And it was. I responded to someone else's content on LinkedIn recently talking about the great resignation and how

Speaker2: [00:28:45] People's mindsets

Harpreet: [00:28:47] And general mental well-being was and what perhaps was leading to the great resignation

Speaker2: [00:28:55] And this

Harpreet: [00:28:55] Dissonance that, you know, globally most people have been feeling as a result of the pandemic.

Speaker2: [00:29:00] And there was one line

Harpreet: [00:29:01] In there that really resonated with me, and it was that everybody has been accumulating disappointment. So, you know, from the start of the of the pandemic impact, all of these additional disappointments and negative situations have been accumulating on top of those that were there before. And I think that is very likely what has led to a greater frequency of resignations or at the very least, employee dissatisfaction, even if it hasn't left or a resignation yet. So mental wellbeing and positivity in the professional work space, I think in most places is an all time low

Speaker2: [00:29:42] Currently because of

Harpreet: [00:29:43] Worldwide events. And then that kind of brings us back to the Ukraine situation. In recent weeks, this has just been an extra, you know, an extra headache for everybody. That's. You know, the likes to look at the world positively, this is the opposite of a positive event, you know,

Eric: [00:30:00] And [00:30:00] so much only so much piled up on your shelf before you're willing to take action.

Speaker5: [00:30:07] I just want to jump in quickly with the, you know, talking about Putin. He needs an enemy. And that's really what when you look at this move, it's because he's realized that if Russia does not have strong enemies, if they don't actually have enemies, it's very difficult to unify without that sense of this is who we are. This is who they are. And if you've had someone who's led through periods where Russia had strong, concentrated enemies, obvious enemies, then you begin to understand that Putin needs enemies. And that's what makes this just kind of terrifying in some ways. Is that Putin's calculus right now is that no matter who emerges as my enemy, as long as I can get the people in Russia to believe that that is an enemy? And that it is a strong enemy that is a threat and that we must come together as a nation, then I can reestablish my base of power and continue to govern. And I think that's the that's the real horrific part of this is he isn't doing it for any other reason than to create enemies so that he can continue to maintain a grip on power. And it's just it's really hard to imagine that it's something that that petty and that's silly because that's where, you know, the rest of the world has a hard time understanding that piece of it that we're trying to create. You know, we're trying to do like 3D chess. And when it comes to even the smartest of leaders, it's typically a simpler explanation behind what it is that they're doing. And if you look at the past and what's worked for them in the past, you can typically find the motivation.

Eric: [00:31:53] That's a really good point.

Speaker5: [00:31:56] Go ahead. Absolutely. That's really interesting because I I like to think a lot about human [00:32:00] intelligence and why we're so smart. And a big part of it is the size of societies that we can build. And you can get rulers and dictators that are good. You can get democracies and then you can get some, like Putin, where they can cause a lot of harm. And so it is kind of the good and bad of humanity. But we wouldn't be as smart as we were today if we weren't able to get past the small, isolated tribes that we have. And that's an interesting perspective, I haven't. Yeah, that that's useful to hear. I think I was going to say I think global affairs defies otherwise positive interpretations that we like to apply to the rest of human endeavors like, I don't know, wealth increasing employment technology like a lot of these things in the West. Anyway, we have this sort of linear view of how these things work, like everything is just getting better. And so when you look at something

Speaker2: [00:32:55] Like politics and

Speaker5: [00:32:56] You're like, Oh, we're going backwards with the hope that it defies it. And I think the main reason is because no one entity can control the global political situation. It's sort of you basically at the highest level, it's basically several entities that compete with one another. And so therefore, you get, you know, it's got like a game theory thing. Like if one person, if one entity wants to fight, then it kind of forces everyone else to fight or else they're going to get wiped out. So then everyone fights, and it's sort of an escalating spiral, whereas in something like, I don't know, like a free market, you know, in the West, you can sort of set conditions and create regulations, and for the most part, they are adhered to. And then you can sort of change the game, I guess, in a way that is difficult in global affairs. So then like strategy in its original inception in warfare, it becomes more relevant again, like what scares what? What's our goal like that sort [00:34:00] of thing?

Eric: [00:34:02] Suddenly, we're all playing risk again.

Speaker4: [00:34:05] Yeah, taking you back. I was thinking of Let's See! A book written by Amy Zegart called Spies, Lies and Algorithms. I've been listening to the audiobook version about halfway through, and she talks in some depth. She's a political science professor at Stanford, and she talks in some depth about cognitive biases, so she really maps out a lot of them and how they've contributed to some military failures, intelligence failures in the past, and one is called mirroring bias. So we look at others and assume they basically have the same motives and belief systems that we have and that that can be a really, really dangerous one to fall into when it comes to security and military. And she cites examples of of those failures. So I just wanted to toss that in.

Eric: [00:35:07] Thanks for sharing the resource. Dropped it in the chat and hopefully it'll find its way, I guess, into the LinkedIn chat. What's up, Ben?

Speaker5: [00:35:14] I had a more optimistic topic when we're ready to shift gears. It's about innovation in the future. I know I think I brought this up a few times, but I'm actually kicking off something in a few weeks to help spearhead innovation or be more involved with innovation at Data robot. But one of the one of the things we're doing is we're opening up the idea of funnel. So we want anyone in the company who has an idea to be able to contribute that idea and then have a rubric or approval process. So I guess the the question I have for the team is there's obviously so many books on this topic, right? Like Amazon, like everyone has books on innovation because I feel like it's something that is incredibly hard to do and most people fail at it. And then you have loon shots, you have these different things. So the [00:36:00] the thought right now is to have a rubric with a steering committee in the rubric protects us from all of the ideas because, you know, if you open the pipeline, hey, you got a thousand people to give you ideas. Some of the ideas coming in might not be ideas that you would invest in. They could also be really good ideas for other companies. And so right now we have a rubric where it's going to be scored on product alignment, strategy alignment patentability. We did have some feedback on flagging the innovation for incremental breakthrough or moonshot, which I liked, because then you kind of have buckets for. And then the big one that I hear a lot about is attribution. So what is your anticipated value that will come from this idea? And so I guess to share that with the group, I'd love to just hear people's reactions and thoughts on how do they think about innovation? Can innovation be scored

Speaker2: [00:36:51] With a rubric if

Speaker5: [00:36:53] You do have an onslaught of ideas coming your way? Because it's all about resources and prioritization, we we don't have infinite resources and we don't have infinite time in people, but we can execute on impossible things if we decide to do that.

Eric: [00:37:11] Just one thought, as you said, you know, can innovation be scored? So I'm on a just like a smaller scale but process improvement committee for one of the verticals I support. So every couple of weeks we get together and we have a scoring rubric as well based on the value of the confidence, the amount of effort. And so the thought of like, can we score innovation? I just flip it. I was just thinking about flipping it around the other way, like, well, if we don't score innovation, then like it's it's just going to kind of float out there. And I think that makes it much less likely for us to even just decide that we want to, like take a stab at one of the top 10 because, you know, I think that it just helps us separate out, even if it's like, Oh, these are our top five kind of favorite ideas, and there's a pretty good [00:38:00] chance that one of them is going to be awesome. One thing I really liked what you said is, is there a is there a moonshot, a moonshot versus an incremental value score? Because not everybody is going to have a moonshot idea and when you do, it's it's rare. And so I I really think that it's nice to be able to capture and and attribute value to both of them. It's important for a culture of continuous improvement.

Speaker5: [00:38:28] Here's what your thoughts are been. I was just going to jump in and say the if you look at the U.S. Army, DARPA, the Department of Defense, they're all grappling with that to where everyone in the world wants to innovate for them. But you know,

Speaker2: [00:38:43] They're looking

Speaker5: [00:38:44] At a fire hose and trying to figure out, OK, what in this fire hose makes any sense. And so they frequently publish. You know, here's what we're looking for. And that's one of the things that I think has been successful. I've seen it picked up by different businesses to I know Capital One's done in, Wal-Mart's done it where they publish, you know, here's four things and you can do this internally. You don't have to publish publicly,

Speaker2: [00:39:04] But they'll say,

Speaker5: [00:39:04] Here are the four core lines of innovation. And here are our strategies, our

Speaker2: [00:39:10] Main kind of sub

Speaker5: [00:39:11] Points under what exactly it is that we are looking for in an innovation. What does innovation look like? What are and they are coming out with not so much. This is what we need, you know, in specifying that. But they're getting very specific with this is what it would look like. And so it's not an idea of the direction that it'll go, except for those high level goals, but it's very much focused on you bringing us in innovation. This is what it would look like if you brought us in innovation because here are the innovations that have worked for us in the past, and they're really creating documentation and defining a framework not around a rubric for measurement, but really just explaining the framework of it. And they've got one that they just released for, you know what an A.I. and autonomous [00:40:00] system in the battlefield would look like.

Speaker2: [00:40:01] And it takes it

Speaker5: [00:40:02] From prototype all the way through

Speaker2: [00:40:04] To this is what it would

Speaker5: [00:40:06] Look like when we were ready to deploy it. And it's got, you know, it's a drill

Speaker2: [00:40:09] Down of, you know,

Speaker5: [00:40:11] Here's how we measure autonomy. Here's how we measure deep learning. Here's how we I mean, it's just it's so granular,

Speaker2: [00:40:18] But at the same

Speaker5: [00:40:19] Time, it's it's widely applicable to anything somebody would bring to them, but it really helps them to funnel people who

Speaker2: [00:40:27] Can go from.

Speaker5: [00:40:28] Here's an idea to here's the application of it or the execution.

Speaker2: [00:40:33] And for them, it's

Speaker5: [00:40:34] Really worked out well to to funnel it without killing off ideas.

Eric: [00:40:42] A little piece I'll add onto there, then I want to hear a Russell had to say was I used to work for an FBI. Well, that was like the focus agency. And so we we did things for mostly biology and health health related products, but also things for the Department of Defense, all sorts of stuff. And like Ben was saying, if you knew what the program manager's priorities were that made your phone calls with them a whole lot easier, and there were companies who are like, We work with such and such a medical device, and they're like, Well, we need a medical device that has this computer vision component to it. And they're like, our medical device will have that computer vision component to it. Here we go. And they would pivot to make that happen. And so I think I definitely like the idea of having some guidance as to maybe where you at a very high level, you have some visibility as to where you think innovation could go. And of course, you want to welcome it from others. But some people like me don't have your high level of vision. And so if you say we're looking at this computer vision thing at least gives me an idea of where to. We're at a point where to think or to research or to spin my wheels and try and come up with something. Russell, what were you going to say?

Harpreet: [00:41:54] As he bends hands up also, do you want to go first, Ben?

Speaker5: [00:41:56] Oh no. I left it up. I'm lowering my ego for you.

Harpreet: [00:42:01] All [00:42:00] right, thank you. Yeah. So I was looking this more of a philosophical or practical perspective to say,

Speaker2: [00:42:09] You know, OK,

Harpreet: [00:42:10] So can we score innovation? Firstly, if we if we could, perhaps it would be better to categorize it into specific criteria. So maybe deviation

Speaker2: [00:42:20] Points from

Harpreet: [00:42:21] Orthodoxy or expected evolution. So as you were saying, Ben, you know, a moonshot kind of wacky idea would score right up towards 100 percent end of the scale and something that was fairly standard fare, although outside of the spectrum of what had been built already but wasn't kind of breaking boundaries would be towards the lower end of the spectrum. So that could be one criteria, then the predicted success, plus the actual measured success if it goes to production. And those three factors together could give some kind of a good aggregate scoring on the effectiveness of the innovations and ultimately perhaps also added

Speaker2: [00:43:03] To a predictive

Harpreet: [00:43:05] Ml model to to to spit out some kind of a return if you put in inputs of prospective future innovations by advising those against

Speaker2: [00:43:19] The model of

Harpreet: [00:43:20] Everything that's gone previously. What do you think?

Speaker5: [00:43:25] I think having once you have an inventions previously or examples like you and Ben mentioned, I think that's helpful because otherwise it just feels like a white sheet of paper and people panic. They feel. But once you have examples and actually I was laughing then because for this meeting in a few weeks, I actually want bad examples. I want bad examples of innovation to show people that this idea, we quickly killed it in this idea we quickly championed. And I think one of the things you had on Russell is the anticipated success. That's actually something that really [00:44:00] the decision is, are you going to invest in attempting the innovation? We actually just assume it will be successful, which obviously is not true. Like it will fail, especially in the moonshot moonshots are likely to fail. And one of the things I'm a fan of is. And maybe this is me going through the meat grinder of a startup, but I feel like if someone does an innovation or if they do a feature, does that feature fails? If it's coming from opinion, it should be the worst day of their life. But if it's coming from a process, you can now critique the process if it's coming from. Does that make sense? Like if I if if I champion to all of you guys, we need to go invest a lot of money in this idea. If it doesn't work and if it's just my opinion, then that is that's a really crappy place to be for all of you because you trusted me. But if there, if it fails me, come back to process and say, Well, how could we have failed sooner? Like rather than doing the work, could you have gone and done some sales validation or user validation or like you? But I. All of this is just I think it's about process evolution, but it's it's kind of a fun idea. Can you? Can you prioritize ideas and with moonshots, that's a little harder because

Speaker2: [00:45:12] They're high

Speaker5: [00:45:12] Risk in a lot of times, they're not justified by short term value. Oh, an example of that innovation. Oh, so many examples of bad innovation. I think sometimes with technophiles they in and I'm sure many of you guys relate to this. You are. You love the space, you love the vertical that you're in. And if you're not careful, you could spin away on some PhD level spectrogram improvement compared to the baseline, something you could find on the open source community and your peers would be blown away. But the business is not. And so that would be an example of a very bad innovation because before you do the work, I want you to tell me how this will make money. And the three options are sales validation, user validation or marketing [00:46:00] or attention validation. So you will actually fail on sales validation because my sales validation, it needs to show up as a top three cloves reason and sales force because I think one of the issues is people try to throw things in

Speaker2: [00:46:11] Baskets to get credit,

Speaker5: [00:46:13] Partial credit. So your spectrum, your genius spectrum breakthrough that gives a five percent lift. The salesperson can't sell it. It's not going to close the deal. A user might use it, that could be just some justifications, and I might be able to get a webinar out of it. But compared to there's so many other innovations that are quite silly to not do because we already have revenue like pre-revenue commits, right coming in. And ideally do innovations that hit all three innovations that users like innovations that sales loves to sell, to expect fire and then innovations that we're thrilled to throw a webinar around or marketing because it's that's kind of the dream scenario. I do have an innovation coming up that will only succeed on the attention front. It actually fails on sales and fails on the user. But I can justify it from a marketing perspective. So that would be like Google's some of their stunts they've done with the video games. Depending on the numbers, I think you can actually justify that entire project based on the intention, some people might disagree.

Speaker2: [00:47:20] I know, I know that's been in

Speaker5: [00:47:22] The news, the four hundred million dollars spent on deep and and maybe they can't justify the new business from that attention or I saw they applied that technology to optimize some power grid. So maybe that's a bad example. Maybe they have not been able to justify their spend. But the hope would be if you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars that you can justify it.

Speaker4: [00:47:42] Um. So, Ben, what do you think about? I just thought of something while you were talking about this concept cars. I think we've all seen pictures of concept cars at auto shows. They look amazing. And truth is, they never actually go anywhere. A lot of the time. [00:48:00] And yet they may have put a lot of money into that. Now is a fraction of total investment or whatever. It may not be that much, but it captures imaginations. And I wonder if that's part of what you were driving at, so to speak.

Speaker5: [00:48:17] So Gina is something that's helpful for professionals to keep them engaged as they like to see cool stuff. And so building investing money to build a concept car analogy, and I, even if it doesn't directly impact the product, I think in some cases it can be justified, which is a great point. I think I professionals are some of the most high maintenance people on the planet, just because you're so, you're so sought after so that that makes it difficult to retain you. There's this concept of like talent, gravity. So if we're all working together, that's great. We'll keep working together. But if some of you start leaving now, I have a problem. But if you have a talent gravity, then that it's a good way to keep people. But what you mentioned, Gina, sometimes they need to see the concept cars because that's that's what they really want to see in the first place. But they you have to justify a business and so you can't just keep building concept cars for fun. Maybe someday, someday we will just build concept cars for fun, and I. I'm going to read through these comments because I think there's a lot of good stuff here on the side from you guys, and I appreciate it this this innovation stuff is tricky. Much easier to get it wrong than to get it right. There's an aspect to this I'm slightly afraid to bring up, but there is the emotional relevance and resonance of innovative ideas because it's not immediately obvious why we should do anything or why we should be innovative in the first place, like we here are taking it as a given that we should.

Speaker5: [00:49:52] But there is a lot of the world that does not. And so I think part of the criteria. It can't just be like marginal [00:50:00] improvement in some measurable quantity. There's also like, you know, the talent that you have and maybe the talent you want to attract and is the innovative idea you have exciting enough to make. People want to commit their blood, sweat and tears to it. I think that can be that is an aspect of kicking innovative things to do along with the more, I suppose, measurable, rational things. You remind me of the point where sometimes the most boring things make you the most money, but they don't excite your talent. And so that that's kind of a good reminder that. You need you need to balance, need an outlet, at least depending on the business you guys want to come work for my Bayesian startup, we just have Bayesian models applied to insurance and you're like, I'm good, I'll do it. I promise to do some things. We'll do fun things on the side. But that was all you did.

Speaker4: [00:50:58] I worked for an honest company. Environment, health and safety, which was the umbrella company, was an insurer. So again, risk management, there's there can be some cool stuff there. Let's see

Speaker5: [00:51:12] You guys. Elon Musk is a good example of picking innovative ideas that are not only have a big impact or potential impact, but are exciting enough to get a lot of people into it. It reminds me of smart people like to work on impossible problems with other smart people, and so Elon is definitely feeding a bunch of engineers impossible problems. And I think for some people that that's really what is the most exciting thing you want to work on the biggest and possible problems with people that believe in that vision. Yeah, I we did a proof of value with space at my previous company, so I was on site at Hawthorne six times and the thing that blew me about blew me away about space. And our culture is everyone's drinking the Kool-Aid, and it doesn't matter if you're turning a wrench Elon's legacy as you're so it's almost [00:52:00] a cult following. So when you think of like vision and culture, I've never seen a company like Space X like ever the way they think about their vision, which is very inspiring. I don't think every company can pull that off because not every company is going to Mars or telling people they are.

Eric: [00:52:20] Oh, good discussion on innovation. Anybody else want to add anything?

Speaker5: [00:52:24] Stick with Ellen, he's great at like the moonshot is really where I'm going. And then he pulls it back and makes it applicable like he he he takes the part of the moonshot that works and he makes a product out of it. And I think that's his genius is he advertises, We're going to Mars, we're going to Mars. And then he put Starlink satellites up, you know, he launches a car into space and then he actually does like returnable rockets

Speaker2: [00:52:47] That can take satellites up

Speaker5: [00:52:49] And does like he does the really interesting PR, but then monetizes the really boring stuff that he gets the engineers to do because they're doing, we're going to

Speaker2: [00:53:01] Mars. But what I need you to do

Speaker5: [00:53:03] Is build me some Starlink satellites because we've got to get paid. And he started doing this with Tesla like he, you know, he was the electric cars, batteries, all this stuff. And then he, like, pulled everybody together and said, Look, we're going to go out of business here in about six months if we don't start delivering cars. I need you guys to do the impossible.

Speaker2: [00:53:20] And and he took all

Speaker5: [00:53:21] These people that were doing moonshots, and all of a sudden they were doing like applied practical. We've got to get this out the door. We've got to improve our ability to ship,

Speaker2: [00:53:30] And he's incredible

Speaker5: [00:53:31] At that. He really is because he gets people motivated by the big stuff and then using that, he gets them to like Productize. It's awesome. I like that perspective because it's like you give them the carrot. So the way through the mud, you just have to make sure the carrot is interesting enough.

Eric: [00:53:49] It's still about one that's actually been I've never heard that before. I really like that.

Speaker5: [00:53:55] I know Ben is going to say I'm a big fan of ideas, growing legs like [00:54:00] I always think you should have three or three or five ideas, crazy ideas in your head. And they just kind of sit there and fester and then eventually one of them grows long legs and crawls out of your mind. And so that's I. I do like finding things like once a year, four legs are growing and this idea is going to happen. And if I don't have resources internally, then I get resources through partners. It is growing legs as if it's just something I like, maybe it's a creepy thing to think about, like some spider esque thing crawling out of your mind, but for me, that makes a lot of sense.

Eric: [00:54:36] We all right. Any other thoughts? I had a question, but I'm just going to save it for next week since we had plenty to talk about. Who knows, we're going have questions next week. Oh, well, nobody has anything else, and I think we'll go ahead and wrap it up and pretty much jump into the weekend here soon. I don't really know what I'm supposed to do to end it other than hit the stop button here. So I'll say Harp, you would say you've got one life on this planet. Why not do something big? Cheers, y'all. That's probably what he would say.

Speaker5: [00:55:05] Yeah, yeah. Thanks, everyone.