I actually studied in the UK, so I did an electronic engineering degree and when I came out of the university, I actually started with Toyota in a graduate training programme. So, and that was within the IT area. And so, I've been with Toyota ever since, 22 years of my life. I actually, but I've moved around the world with them. I've worked in and lived in five different locations. So, if I think back to my history with Toyota, I started off in the development area, working on mainframe computers, if you believe it or not, working in mainframe development and I was very keen to try to get as much experience as possible. So working from within software development, then program management, then I moved into the infrastructure areas, building data centers like racking servers, building servers, networking, and I just kind of, just trying to get as much experience as possible, then did that and then as a result of that they asked me to move to the US and I moved to Kentucky and then I spent four years in Kentucky. I'm working in desktop management, enterprise architecture, and then server and hardware operations. And then, once I did that, I moved back to Europe. But they asked me to move to Belgium, and I am from Belgium. I basically moved into the, back into the business area. So looking after the R&D and production engineering groups, so working on aspects like high-performance computing and CAE applications, things like that and from that I then moved into telematics, which is all the connected car features, starting that type of activity. And then from there, they asked me to go to Japan, so I went to Japan working on Global IT management and then from Japan to the U.S, and they asked me to come back to the U.S. and then I moved to Texas and now I lead up two areas, which is, I'm actually responsible for Toyota connected, which is a separate entity which I helped start-up and I'm also responsible for the whole connected vehicle groups. So it's been a very long career, 22 years, lots of different activities, probably switching jobs every 2 to 3 years and as you can probably tell, my goal was to get as much experience in many different domains, which I think is really important.

My weekly hours are kind of crazy, I would say, I work very long hours. I start very early in the morning. I start around seven o'clock in the morning, usually, I'll leave work around six or seven o clock in the evening, so doing 12 hour days is normal and then very often I'm on conference calls with Japan in the evenings as well. So, sometimes 2 to 3 hours in the evenings working on conference calls, whether it's with Japan or Europe or now, even India is normal. The primary reason for that is I have two jobs. I have two responsibilities, I run Toyota connected, and we have three offices, the US, London, and India, and I also run my group in North America. So that is my normal kind of hours. And of course, you have good days and bad days, so I'm not saying I'm a slave to my job, but one of the key points that I'd like to stress is I enjoy what I do. I love my job, and I think that's super important because if you love your job, you have the ability to work those kinds of hours if you need to. I travel and I used to travel a lot, I used to spend at least 40 to 50% of my time traveling, mainly Japan and the U.K. were the two main areas. So every month I would do at least two long haul travels going somewhere, and then I did now India responsibilities, it all starts tipping you off in India, and I was starting to do that. So that was all pre-Covid, post covid, I seem to spend more time working, I spend most of my time on video conference calls, morning until night. I get a lot more done, but it's also a lot of work, exhausting, but that is kind of my typical responsibility. When you asked me what responsibility and decisions do I do in a job like mine, quite a lot. You think about a company the size of Toyota. It's a huge company, over 300,000 people globally. But, I have direct responsibility to make massive decisions here in North America for all of our connected vehicle platforms. And on the day to day basis, I'm making a lot of those decisions. And then, from a global point of view, I've started taking responsibility full of global platforms, so architectural decisions, business decisions. That's a lot of the stuff that I do.

I think working for a company like Toyota or any large kind of company, the biggest challenge we have is getting a consensus to try to change a large company like ours, especially as we need to focus more on technology. We're a huge company with a huge history in manufacturing, trying to shift that coming to think more about technology is sometimes difficult. A lot of people don't understand technology, kind of the pace of technology. And so in the past, a lot of decisions could take time, manufacturing decisions could take time, in technology that's not the case. Technology is changing so quickly and the breadth of the technology is changing so much, so trying to get that type of understanding across all of our global executives is sometimes very difficult. So that's a big challenge, educating people, explaining to people how important technology is in the future. Not just in my domain but in every domain, whether it gets calls, but any other industry right, technology is becoming more and more important. What are the challenges, what are the other challenges, I think also is, hiring people, like recruiting, the ability to hire the right people in my area is challenging, and keeping a hold of them because the expectations of technologists today and types of kind of what they're looking for, what type of work environment they're looking for is very different to traditional corporations. Trying to bring that type of working environment and style into a large organization like mine is a challenge.