um, like so many students. After I graduated, I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do. I I think that may be the most common scenario. I'm not incredibly sure, but I think the main thing is in terms of coming into the industry, I work. And now I just kept my eyes and ears open and tried to maintain a very opportunistic posture when I came out of university, Um, so that I was, you know, show me, say hypersensitive to any opportunities that would sort of come my way. Now, as you might imagine, that takes a little bit of time to ultimately find for some of us what it is that you really wanna dio for others. They know the very beginning of university, and they go on and they actually do it. I think that's really special, and it's great. Um, but the short answer to your question is, one day I had a friend introduced me to a company that was working on something very interesting in Seattle. They had gone to the University of Illinois. Andi had licensed the original music browser source code, uh, with an idea to release it as a commercially available product for getting onto the Internet. And this was in 93 late 1993. So there wasn't a commercial mosaic Web browsing product at that time, and that was my first job and that interest me to technology introduced me to the Internet, and that's how everything started, but

killer role. I have a very unusual role in the world of I team in technology, because currently I'm leading all of what we'll call traditional. I t. Uh this would include everything from data network storage, compute desktop management. What have you telephony? But I also manage, um, design product management, things like mobile. So I manage what is often called digital teams. So I function as a cross between a chief digital officer and the CEO. Uh, that probably will become more common as industry start looking for CEOs to leave the innovation strategy to leave the digital transformation conversation. Um, but my hours, I would say, You know, on average for me personally, I'm probably working 65 to 70 hours a week. I don't think that's necessary. Um, it just so happens my job is, in a way, kind of my hobby. You asked about concrete priorities. So your priorities are going to generate depending on your role. Quite often, they will evolve around things like culture. Um, they will revolve around things like, um, tending to the existing business. And then thirdly innovating. No big surprise there. Right. Um so those were probably might Might have three priorities. The most important one, the hardest one, is always evolving the culture of the company to accommodate the rapid change going on in the world.

when what students are going to hear a lot about our topics, like digital transformation. The thing that I think is important to remember that that is so much more than a catchphrase. So much more than a buzzword. And here's what all of us get up in the morning and essentially get the same newspaper, so to speak, right? All of us presumably have access to the same information we read the same Internet. And so the question then becomes, If we're all getting the same information, why do we in business have stories like, uh, let's say, Blockbuster video, Right? Um, if we're all reading the same newspaper in the morning, what's happening to traditional retail in most cases, but not all cases, The interesting question is, in a select few cases where companies are reinventing themselves, what makes them different from everybody else? They have the same information we do, and that gets to the heart of the key challenge, which is a culture of innovation, and I'll give a very specific example. Let's take Domino's pizza. I think most people today who work either in business or in finance would now describe Domino's pizza as, um a digital commerce company that happens to sell pizza, not the other way it remember. But that's a rare story. And so the interesting nous is toe understand why?