Let me start by introducing myself, my name is Ted Schadler and I live in the Boston area, just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. I've been working for many years for the same company, but it's actually my third career. I graduated college I was a physics major and I went to get a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and I stayed for one year and I realized that I was okay physicist but not a great one. So I dropped out of graduate school at MIT and I became a musician. Now I had always played music in fact here, I'll show you, there's a base right there behind me. I played rock n roll for five years full-time that's all I did, I played 1000 gigs with these guys. I just talked to one of them last night because we're living in this very strange time and touching base with a lot of old colleagues and friends. So after that, I wasn't a good rock musician either, but I was a pretty good computer scientist and so I went back to school, very important. Every career shift has been accompanied by the school and so I got a master's degree in computer science, and I started working in a small software company in Baltimore, Maryland, and we build applications for the health care industry and I did that for about nine years. I was not married and then I was like, you should try something different. So I was engaged at the time and we moved back to Boston, back to MIT but to go to business school. I had a tactical back around, I was a musician, but I wanted to understand the business, so that was a great program for me. I was 35 sorts of mid-career, and after that, I did a startup for a year, and then I join this company called Forrester Research, which for me turned out to be the perfect job because it's about helping people, it's about understanding the impact of technology on the world. For example, we're doing work right now with the exposure notification that Google and Apple are doing to help with COVID tracking, and we're trying to figure out how to help our health care clients and our big enterprise customers figure out what that means for them and have a big advantage of the capability that's out there. That's a particularly timely kind of question, but when you think about the impact of technology on business, it's been dramatic, remote work, contactless payment, virtual customer care, all kinds of things. So I did a lot of things to get where I am and the things that I'm doing are very interesting to me both professionally and personally.

So I've been working for Forrester Research since 1997, it's a very long time. The reason why the job is different every day is there's always something changing in the world of technology and the impact of technology on consumers, on people, on students, on patients, on employees, on companies, on governments is dramatic. And so I get a chance to see what's coming, whether it's artificial intelligence or machine learning or Internet of things, self-driving cars, I get to see all of this and then figure out how to help big companies and it's mostly who worked with figure out what to do. So in my job I'm an analyst and what that means is that I talk to technology companies like Microsoft and Amazon and IBM, Oracle, SAP, and lots of others and then I also talk to companies that are trying to figure out how to use the technology. So I have a lot of conversations I'm on the phone a lot, and so that's part of what I do. A part of that is research and part of that service like helping clients. The other thing I do is I work with a lot of data. We do surveys of what people are doing, what they want to do, and then we work with that data. I also write a lot, I actually wrote a book in my spare time after I was a musician and I learned how to write I really enjoyed writing, so I love to sit down and really create something. I've written a couple of books, one about the impact of mobile on the world called the "Mobile mind shift". Another one on the impact of technology on the workforce called "Empowered". So writing is another thing that I do, and that's kind of how I spend my day. I also get to present on stage or in conferences like this, and that's kind of the musician side of me you know I like that engagement. So Weekly, it's not a 40-hour week job. Some weeks are 70 hours and other weeks are 50 hours not usually though that's kind of crazy. It's very often 45 or 50 hours a week, and it's a lot of variety of tasks, and I do travel not right now because of COVID, but I would probably say during the spring and the fall are busy travel season, so probably every week I would travel and I traveled around the United States. I would go to Europe, sometimes go to India, sometimes go to farther away in Asia and there's quite a bit of travel that's because you have to be where people are, where clients are so that is a big part of my job traditionally, so that's kind of how the week and the month in the calendar year kind of shapes up. It always has a collaborative environment where people together like nobody owns anything we all are in it together. And so to collaborate it really does require people to be together. You could be together virtually, but it's easier if you know somebody and so coming into the office is a big part of the Forrester culture. We do have remote workers, we call them home workers and we've had that for a long time because of course everybody lives in a place where there's a Forrester office. But it's not the biggest percentage of our employees, however, everybody is set up to work from home and a lot of people will work from home a day or two a week you know historically. Now, of course, everybody's working from home. When we come out of this, I think we'll see a lot more flexibility and working from home versus going into the office. I told you I did some work on a remote workforce I call empower, and one of the things that you learn which we haven't talked much about yet in our country is that working from home is great for work-life flexibility and productivity in many cases but it's not great for innovation. And so we're going to figure that out, probably next year when we look back and go, oh we missed some opportunities to create new things.

My work is mostly knowledge work and working with data. I'm not building software, I'm not doing machine learning or algorithmic development or anything like that. So the tools that we use are the productivity and collaboration tools. There's Microsoft Suite, there's a big informal use of slack because you want to work across corporate boundaries. I love working in the collaborative documents, so we're using Google documents for a long time, I love that because you see the changes you work and it's really simple. The Microsoft Suite is not as good it's getting better, but not as clean if you like as the Google Toolkit for that. But when you think about productivity and collaboration, you need that shared workspace, so those become very important. I'll say one or two things and then I'll pause. So I work in Word a lot because that's writing. I work in Excel a lot, I also work in SPSS, which is a statistical program to work with large data sets. I work in Powerpoint a lot also because we're always formatting and presenting our material that way. That's pretty standard stuff and as far as the new interesting things I already mentioned slack, we're using Mural a little bit, which is a whiteboarding technology. We use Microsoft teams internally all the time and zoom of course. So it's just a normal tool kit I would say.