my path, and my story is have a long one. Um, I originally many years ago, uh, honestly did not know what I wanted to do, but I did feel that I wanted to the least make some kind of difference, whatever that men. So when I was in university, I took his many courses as I could that I didn't know very much about. So, for example, I wanted to originally do something in journalism or biology. But I took a business management for us, and I didn't really know why, but I knew I wanted to learn something new about it. Um, I took a computer science class back in 1975 um, in FORTRAN. I didn't know anything about FORTRAN or computer science that matter. But I took the course because I want to learn something new. So I would say that because you don't entirely know what your destination is going to be, it's really important or every student to maintain a sense of curiosity of G. I don't know much about that. It would be interesting for me. Toe. Go take a course in that and learn something. And that went across the board I you know, I took a class in in German. I didn't know a little bit about German, but I didn't know anything beyond just a tiny bit. But I took it because I thought it would be interesting. And it turns out it opened up a whole new world of thinking to be. And years later, when I went to Europe, even though my German was very rudimentary, it's still help. I could I could read Kaltschmitt like read. I can read signs. So e way Look at it is that every time you take you learn something new or you go to an experience in, you know, in the summer months or something, you learn some new skills that you really don't know how to get how you're going to use them in the future. And they become invaluable later on in life. Even when I was a Cornell, I was with my, uh, my junior year. I took a course in business law and I had no idea why I was taking a course. But it seemed interesting in the time. And it turns out when I was later it Sun Microsystems and I was working with some constant contract writing some contracts for the development group. I knew enough about contract law from that business law class to be of value to the lawyers, and his years went on later, that became ah ah, really important skill. No, and I knew that eventually want to do something of some responsibility. And as the years went on, I thought I would want from a president or CEO of a company not knowing fully what that really entailed. And as it turns out, my ability to work on on contracts was core to that hole. Uh, that job be able to interpret agreements and field already agreements, and now I do work with with SEC related documents and the the understanding of how to read. It's a very formal language, shall we say, and being able to appreciate how to read and write those kind of documents is really critical, so you can actually get the job done without, depending on many other people. So the other things is, Ah, as I was in my career, I started off in computer science while originally started up biology and immunology. But I left that feel that I went into your science. So had I not taken that computer science class a long time ago, I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have ventured into a computer science curriculum, and I also had some summer jobs doing some work in the animal science department at Cornell in getting data for, uh, experiments with the graduate students. Graduate students knew the math, but they didn't know that computer science. So I was part of. I was part of the effort to get the data, and they transform the data, and that's where my FORTRAN came to. Came to be a value. I couldn't have predicted that that how can you predict that? So every time I guess my key messages, every time you learn a new subject matter and a new skill, it opens up opportunities that you wouldn't have expected. And on an engine career moves on, you have greater choices to make. And so when I went into computer science, I, um, I started off as an engineer on the project manager, and then I got more familiar with customer requirements, so I decided to pursue an area excited. Pursue marketing is a career. As I learned marketing, I learned to understand sales cycle much better and also appreciate the complexity what the engineers were doing, so I could put together E could be the person to interpret what the engineers were doing and give that to the sales people and also go from the salespeople and expressed to the engineers. This is what they need and still you rebel, pull all that together. And as the time is time on on and you start putting together business cases, well, then you're your ability to put together. A business case is partly painted on like Maskell, of course, but also the understanding of what the customers need, how that translates into sales. How also say, Well, we're gonna need something out of the engineering group. They've actually build that product. So all that turns into a business management skill. And when you start getting into management of organizations, then you have to start also leaning on your ability to convince others. So it turns out going back and rewinding again. Back to my days of Cornell took horses in in writing, and one of the courses I took was the introduction of rhetoric. I had no idea where rhetoric class, but I I read that I read the course description on learning how to write and learning on a You know how to write in a convincing manner. That skill really didn't come to the forefront until probably 15 or 20 years later. But my ability to write clearly and it z just the way I put it with rhetoric sandwich you mean and meaning what you say. That skill set is so critical to your ability to lead an organization of any size, and it starts, is managing a small team of people. But when you get to managing an organization, your your written skills and your ability to to scale your your arguments so you can write things down in a way that's that's understandable. Too many, um, that becomes a critical skill to being able to manage organization. So I greatly appreciate that many people stress stem. You know that the engineering, math and science, but in fact really wanted to be a very good manager of an organization. You really have to have the writing skills and, of course, along that would that come the reading skills? So it's it's math, it's reading. It's riding its communications all together complete march that that complete your skill set as becoming a CEO on the president. Hope that helps a little bit of explaining how how you just have to have a very open mind from Dae Wan on your education and keep accumulating skills.

so the responsibilities and, uh, and in decisions that a President CEO has is to first of all, take decisions that the president of any organization your number one job is to make decisions, um, or or as I sometimes call it, your decision machine. So if you don't take decisions, you're just not doing a job. OK, But what that really means also is that you gather the information before you can take the decision to have neither do the information gathering yourself war work with team members for them to be able to gather the information to summarize it, condense it down. So that then the president thes vision. I go back to my years working at Sun Microsystems, where I was asked, pull together some information for Scott McNealy, who is a president of of Sun. And I would do that. I would gather the information as I was requested, put it together and, you know, reasonably condensed and clear after the clear, concise, um, summary. What it waas in, what the decision and what the question waas and what the recommended decision Waas. And it was the same over at Newbridge with Terry Matthews that I would I would put together a summary of Here's a decision We're trying to make this part of the market to go into and you have the marshal. Your arguments put together a clear, concise set of, uh, uh, summary what the situation is of Eichel, situation analysis and then present the here with my recommendations. And that was a stain also, even with Microsoft when I was working with Steam Bomber and we Bill Gates, At times you have put together a memo or present in a meeting, and you had to have again your arguments put together of Here's the situation analysis. Here is my conclusions, and based on my understanding of it, these are decisions that we as a company, should take. And I try to, um, put into every organization that philosophy so that it's not I as the president who is all knowing. But it's my job as a president to make a decision. No decision is the worst decision. A bad decision is actually not the worst one. It's not the best, but it's not the worst. The worst is no decision and letting things just set and, of course hoped make the best decision with the best information which gets back to working with your team to help them learn how to summarise the problem. Do situation analysis, put together recommendations and then you all you know, you all kind of work at it and say, OK, that's what we're gonna do it, working him, do that and then you go back and reassess and then you and then you go ahead and you maybe maybe alter course. But it's all based on situation analysis. Condense it down, taking a decision. It's always that. And so you ask your question about the work hours. The work hours are kind of unpredictable with the President CEO job there some weeks where it's gonna be, I'll say somewhat like baby, you know, you know, between you know, 30 Teoh, you know, 40 hours, I suppose, but more often it's probably in the 40 to 50 or 60 hours kind of thing. No, I havent in past years work many more hours in that, but I don't recommend it. And the reason I say that is that you all set the manage of stress. If you let stress take control of your of your work life your ability and make good decisions goes down. So what I also try to sell people is to try to get out and do some kind of exercise and just get out spend, you know, on our they just getting out because it actually improves your decision, baby. Believe it or not, So just your ability to get out, take a walk, Let the stress, you know, we're off a little bit and go back and go back and work on a problem and take decisions that I have to say. That's important part. So, uh, work life balance is very difficult in this kind of a role. But you have to, um, at least have a good balance between your focused work and then taking a break so you can go back and re focus on the problem again. So that's how it really you re characterize how the job of a President CEO ship work

that has changed a lot over the years. And so when I was originally starting up computer science back in the seventies, he was all about FORTRAN co Bowl and a few other languages that were kind of, uh, like you, some of the right. So and I In fact, I I programmed mostly in FORTRAN and some of the language in those early years. And then as the years went on and won a pascal went Teoh Peel one, uh, you went Teoh, uh, you want the alcohol? There are all kinds of languages out there. And what? And it was always the argument between the interpreted languages, compiled languages and really, thanks to the processors and the operating systems exist today, the languages have that difference to treen the interpretive the language probably changes, is really is really gone away. Um, it certainly come on extremely high performance. Ah, uh, development tools You working and see and working in some of the more Haul it. I won't call it basic. That's the cult of the more the languages that air that our greatest greatest flexibility They're great, but they don't give you a lot of protection from the operating system that low. So therefore now the, uh uh, you know, some of the interpreted languages and he know the Java script. Another tools like that, Um, those are those other The tools And also the the, uh, the development environments. The i d e. Is it exists it far better than they are. They when I was a science student. So I would say the algorithms haven't changed all that much with the exception of artificial intelligence. But that is only because now the databases are far faster. So now you can you now he can use programming languages that are more flexible to access data That is far faster than I could have dreamed of back in the 19 seventies and eighties. Um um, but the basic algorithms of ah Odjick haven't changed all that back. Um, So in terms of the frameworks, all the current brain marks that are out there right now for the I. D. S, their always evolving. So you always have to stay on top of most recent tools are out there. Um, the other is, um, in terms of models their way kind of going more into the project management models which I think actually is more relevant. Teoh to what I think students to be looking at. You know, for a long time the industry used what is called the waterfall awful, which was for that basically breaking down your project into small pieces and that worked fine for small projects. But I found early on when I was working, even if you look Packard, that the waterfall model was okay. But it didn't give you the freedom to do prototyping experimentation in that model. So I took an approach early on, which was to do kind of what people now call Scrum working on problems you don't really understand. So whether it was, you know, the use of a hash table going something else or or the use of some new algorithm that you're still looking at, like we're looking at hardware, uh, sema forms and how you can implement those using postures of the time you have to do small experiments. And then once you get the answers to the experiment, then you feed it into your overall waterfall model. So I'm still a fan of an overall project plan, but not necessarily drilling down into all the depths like we used to in past. So you have a larger blocks of. We need to finish this task this cash from this task while in order or parallel. But at the same time, you do have a scrap where you have people that go ahead and just without any constraints. Experiment when you've done the experiment, feed it back into the framework and then you have a predictable model. Where is the pier scrum model is is good for, I think, small projects, but not very good for large projects. And the waterfall is not very good for projects where a lot of, uh, things you don't understand and need Teoh research.