I'll give a short answer to this question because it's taken quite a while to get to where I am in the order of decades at this point and it has not been a straight path, I don't know that it's ever a straight path for anyone's career. There is always a lot of unexpected things that happen in the course of your life and a lot of opportunities that you could never imagine present themselves to you. So I actually started my career not in technology I have a background in psychology, and social services and that's what I thought I wanted to do with my life and I did that out of college. I had some fun things that happened in my mid-twenties I married a foreign service officer I became a wife of a diplomat moved overseas and then when I came back I made this very practical decision to get into technology. I ended up working in a couple of agencies, the U. S. Government agencies doing cybersecurity work and that led me to my first big company called Symantec originally as an engineer and then later in sales. After maybe 10 years in engineering and sales I thought, wow I think I know how to do these jobs so what do I do next? And I thought that the field of cybersecurity was really fascinating, but I knew how to do the jobs I'd had and so I made this decision to try to expand my business expertise and my business skill sets but within the same field. So I took some sort of corporate strategy and alliance jobs and tried to just learn the different aspects of that business and those skills came in became very useful to me because when I made the jump from this niche space intact, which is cybersecurity into a broader tech industry when I moved to Microsoft, it turned out that while the cybersecurity skills were super helpful for me and there's a very specific reason why the fact that I had a lot of experience and strategy was really what allowed me to take on some of the big roles that I had at Microsoft as the CTO first for their worldwide industry team and then as the CTO for the U. S division Microsoft so that's the story. The incidents and the experiences that shaped my career path, you know there's just too many to count but I would say that the defining characteristic of those incidents the things that really shaped me is that I had the presence of mind to take the risk when I saw it. I have not been a risk adverse person and by the way that doesn't mean I've always made the right decisions or everything's gone my way because it certainly has not but I have always geared toward risk and opportunity. The second thing is that the incidents that really shaped me were moments where I was able to look beyond my current capability and think about what I was capable of or potential, or that I had experiences with people who you could say gave me a chance because they looked past my particular skills and said she's got character attributes that we think are really important, so it's not as much about what she's proven she can do as it is about what she has the potential to do.

Weekly work hours in a global company are long. When I worked in the US, it was a little bit more bounded because I just had the timezone for the US. When you have a global job you just have a lot of working hours. Microsoft is a pretty good company with respect to work-life balance but the reality is that corporate jobs are big and they don't have a lot of boundaries to them unless you can define them for yourself and there are many times in the course of a career where you have to have really specific boundaries and you could do that. But there are also times and opportunities to take certain jobs where you know you're not going to be able to do that and that's a decision everyone has to make. I had jobs where I really didn't have a lot of boundaries around the hours that I work because I have people who work for me who lived in Serbia, Singapore, and Columbia and all over the US and elsewhere and that just get stuff to do. What the responsibilities are, here's the thing these jobs especially in the tech industry and mine in particular are sort of split between the responsibilities you have to your customers and your markets, and then the responsibilities you have to the people who work for you. So I had a team of a couple of 100 people and a lot of the job is creating a culture where people want to work and resolving issues as they come up and creating opportunities for people and making sure just the engine of the company works really well. The most important asset any company has is always people, so whatever you need to do to create a culture that sustains the best and the brightest among you is really important, that's more than half of the job than the other part of it is making sure that we are current with technology, the industry trends. what's going on in the world, how can technology be relevant to that so that you could walk into the office of any C level person at any big company and they can say hey Jennifer this is what we're trying to do in our company with all these problems, your competitors, we have old technology, we've got budget and finance issues and tell me how technology can help and you have to really answer. So there's a lot of preparation that goes into not just understanding technology itself, but the world around you. So it's big they are big jobs, with lots of hours and lots of fun too.

Well, I think at most levels the big challenge is if there's just one category, it's the challenge of managing complexity and also managing conflict. So complexity means that the privilege of getting a bigger and bigger hub is that you've got to balance a lot of competing needs. You almost never have a budget that is big enough to do what you want to do, you almost never have enough people as you might need, you almost never can anticipate all the curve balls that get thrown at your way because technology is linked to the market, products don't have features that you need and your customers need. There are market conditions, recessions, layoffs, all sorts of issues happen all the time and it just creates a very complex environment. So the biggest challenge for anyone and I think any management position the second you take your very 1st line manager position all the way throughout your career you are learning how to deal with increasing levels of complexity and that's a tough one. And then conflict sort of goes hand in hand with organizational conflict and personal conflicts. Organizational conflict is just the necessary checks and balances that happen in a business like your finance team is very conservative, your product engineering team is very creative and they don't always agree on what you know the right path forward is and that's a necessary kind of organizational conflict that creates healthy balance but you've got to manage within that and behind those organizational structures or people, so there's that. And then you get people conflict which is tough when you're managing lots of people. I think there's a recognition in business these days that diversity really matters diversity of thoughts is what allows companies to build products that everyone wants to use. So it's sort of simple math but it's still a new thing and companies do really prioritize diverse teams. The reality with diverse teams is that you get people who have very different viewpoints and very different ways of working together and that as a leader, you got to make space for that to happen and then exercise your own empathy and try to uncover your own cognitive bias and all of that so that you can create an environment where conflict can happen and it can be healthy. So what are those approaches? I think ultimately, it's a practice from the complexity perspective, it's practice and learning time and just diving in from the conflict whether it's organizational people conflict if there was one thing you should do is know yourself because you're always using units or overlaying your own perspective onto every situation and the more self-aware you are, the better able you are to see across all sorts of different points of view.