It began when I was in grade school. My dad was a college professor and my mom was a grade school teacher, they said I was a difficult child; a curious kid. My older brother and my mom took care of me as I was the youngest and after school it was my dad's responsibility to watch me till that evening. So he took me to the university, and I was given to the college professors in his department who took turns watching me. So, I met either mathematics professor, history professor, the art professor and so on. Each day of the week was a different professor, a different topic and they kept me entertained through their specialty, they gave me a very broad background, more importantly they developed in me a curious mind. I was always asking why and each one of them taught me the interesting things behind each one of the specialties. So the reason "WHY" is so important because the WHY taught me many extremely valuable lessons; there is always more to the story. There's always something behind the way anything behaves and you should dig, get the information to understand and not accept what you observe, you must understand the physics, the properties of the laws behind how things occur. People and objects act in a particular way because of what? You may ask, how does that get me to where I am today? It is because I learned the most important lesson, understanding the basics of anticipation/predection. Once I understand the laws that goven things that interact, then I am able to anticipate what they will do or reactions they will cause. So, another part of the question here is the incidents and experiences that shaped my career. I would say that kind of background gave me confidence that I could handle anything because I understood the fundamental laws of why things behavior the way they did. So I feel very confident in going to any new experience. I gain the confidence to say "Yes" to everything that maybe I was too young or maybe I was stupid, but I just was fearless. Does anybody want you to do this that or the other? I didn't care how hard it sounded, "This is me. I'll do it." So I took on anything and then from that, I was able to figure out the ways to get anything done. I was always the one that did the hardest problems and could figure out the newest things to do and the methods that others had not conceived and led the path for others to follow. As you start doing those things time and time again, then you start learning all the new things, the broadening of your scope and you become more valuable. So the more you know, the more valuable you are and now you're on a path of continious learning, and that's what makes you persistently valuable, that's what gives you more opportunities and that's what makes you in demand. So, in a short vignette this is how I got from college to all the consulting work that I did to IBM to everywhere else, I just say 'Yes' to anything.

I have Research and development and technology transformation, I also lead a group that does technology commercialization. R&D is all about exploring the new things, the new frontiers and converting the impossible to unique advantage for my company. Kroger is not a typical company, we make our own robots, our own sensors. We made a video camera and wireless devices. Kroger has more IoT devices than any other commercial entity, everything is connected in our stores. It's an amazing thing how you can put sensors in stores and then build applications around it and the key is to then hide all the technology so that the customer just has a wonderful customer experience, and they really don't see the technology behind it. So R&D is all about finding things that others don't know, bringing relationships between things that others don't see and then developing that into a product and a customer experience the competitors do not have. Commercialization is all about trying to make money with what you know while keeping secret those things that make your company different than everybody else. You do not want to get away the secrets that make you special. Technology transformation is all about having to go from one set of technology to another in a continuous cycle. So how do you continuously transform? You don't want to be in a cycle where you transform once, and then 20 years later you're transforming again, and 20 years later you're transforming again. You want to be in a cycle of relentless innovation, where you're constantly transforming that way you are never caught off guard. You are continuously transforming all the time. No matter how fast or slow or whatever pace is, the right pace is the pace that keeps you in the lead. Whether leveraging machine learning, whether it's new advances in materials, whether it's something doing with physics that we've learned or perhaps we just blended everything together from every kind of field from mechanical engineering, soft material physics, electrical engineering, every IT specialist you can think of, there are no limitations. Right now we're learning proactive capabilities and how to blend those with robots of all the types. I want to take the material, the software, and electronic devices, and then use that in a manner that our customers receive a great experience and also enables us to detect clues to how we could serve our customer better right this minute. If I think about the cameras to detect audio, this might tell us other things such as alerting us to a safety event, or we could combine several clues we can observe about the customer's current experience to determine a frustration that can be immeidately resolved. It takes all that technology to make it look easy. So I see on the bottom a question asking about the amount of time I spent in the office or traveling home. For me a work space is any of those spaces that I'm engaging work, I could spend all week in the office, I can spend all week at home. I can work while I'm traveling on the plane and we have offices around the United States. We have, the ability to work from home when the weather is bad or when we just need some quiet time away from everyone else. We engaged via our collaboration tools and work just as comfortably in a different state, as we do right next to everyone else. So, office, trave, home, different office, different state it really doesn't matter. We work pretty much the same as we work standing by each other versus states apart.

You could think from Senior Vice President, CEOs, C suits of all the sorts to Senior Engineers to Engineers to managers, programmers, developers, project managers, there's not a title that we don't work within operations. Designers, you name it. With manufacturers all the time. Well, there's probably not a role that we don't interact with. The moment that you don't get the variety of people that represent either your customers all the way up through upper management, senior management, any roles in between, then you are not understanding what it's going to take to transform because you really got to understand the technology and the domain that you're working within from everyone's perspective, that's really what you can try to do get everyone's perspective.