Driving Business IT Transformation and Diversity with Mike Anderson

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Narrator

We're in an era of rapid change where resilience is vital. The Davood for thought podcast dives into the most important topics in government and technology today. Our host, Davood Ghods, sits down with his vast network of colleagues to dish on the tech challenges that affect us all. Follow this podcast on your favorite platform and join the conversation by sharing it on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.

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Davood Ghods

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Davood for Thought Podcast. I'm Davood Ghods and I will be your host today. The way I stay up with the pressing topics of tech and the government of today is to tap into the panel of experts I've had the honor of connecting with over the years. Today we have Mike Anderson on the podcast.

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Davood Ghods

Mike serves as Chief Digital and Information officer for Net Scope. Over the past 25 years, he has built and led high performing teams across various disciplines, including sales, operations, business development and information technology. He joined that scope from Schneider Electric, a global Fortune 500 company serving as senior vice president, CIO and digital leader for North America in 2020.

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Davood Ghods

Constellation Research named him a member of the Business Transformation 150, an elite list that recognizes the top global executives leading business transformation efforts in their organizations, their national diverse city council also recognized him as a Top 50 CIO for diversity and Inclusion in 2020 and 2021. Before Schneider Electric, Mike served as CIO for Cross Mark, where he digitally transformed the business capabilities for the 40,000 employee service provider to the retail and consumer goods industry.

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Davood Ghods

And also he has held executive leadership roles at Enterprise Mobile, a microsoft joint venture that is now part of Honeywell Insight software spectrum and invert a Web services pioneer he co-founded in 1999. Mike serves on numerous technology and industry advisory boards and volunteers. His time working with nonprofit nonprofits focused on mental health and suicide prevention and those that benefit the development of our future workforce in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

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Davood Ghods

Mike Without sharing any more of your background, I want to welcome you to this episode of the Food for Thought Podcast and ask you to tell us about yourself. And for someone who doesn't know about your background, please give us an overview and what you're working on these days. Welcome.  

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Mike Anderson

Oh, Davood, thank you so much for inviting me to be part of the podcast today and speak to your audience. Super humble and just excited to be part of that today. You know, so for my background, you know, beyond what was in my biography, you know, the best way I could sum up my career is, you know, I started out as a software developer and then very quickly got caught up in what we all, you know, referred to as the dot com days and had my own technology company.

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Mike Anderson

And that took me on a path where instead of staying the traditional I.T. or, you know, writing software path, I moved into roles, running sales, engineering teams, business development teams, running sales, engineering groups. And so when you when you look at that, my my career kind of went down that path for for about a decade. And I, you know, did work for a microsoft joint venture.

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Mike Anderson

And every every path in my career, it was often someone, you know, tapping me on the shoulder saying, hey, we have this opportunity. And, you know, would you be interested in and in some cases was we don't know what your role would be, We just want you as part of the team. And I went down that journey for about a decade, and then one of my customers tapped me on the shoulder and said, Hey, how would you like to be a CIO?

00;04;26;00 - 00;04;51;04

Mike Anderson

And that's when I joined Cross Mark. And, you know, that was a fun experience for me. You know, I you know, one of the things that I brought to the table as a CIO, I was often the shadow I.T. person is, you know, as we commonly referred to it, prior to being a CIO, I was the person that brought Salesforce in because I wasn't, you know, as pleased with our CRM system we were using as a company because I felt like it was slowing me down and there were better options.

00;04;51;06 - 00;05;13;09

Mike Anderson

And so going from being on that, see, it brought a level of empathy when I came over to be a CIO, and what I found in my first CIO role was that oftentimes, you know, business leaders felt beholden to the organization to get technology initiatives done. And oftentimes what they try to do is work around I.T. in secret, which is commonly referred to as shadow I.T., to get things done.

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Mike Anderson

And again, because I live there, I empathize, empathize with that. And so that was a fun experience. And, you know, one of the things I brought to my teams was, you know, the notion of, you know, what problem are we trying to solve? You know, let's think about this as if we're running a business. You know, how do we think about the return we're making on the investments we've got?

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Mike Anderson

Because we don't have an unlimited supply of money? Even though what I found in it is a lot of people believe there was a monetary you you would shake and just, you know, dollars would fall out. And, you know, so bringing that that business minded focus to the team. So we we centered ourselves on how does this impact the customer and how do we work back from the customer?

00;05;51;17 - 00;06;11;29

Mike Anderson

How do we focus on our frontline employees and make their life easier? You know, that was something that was, you know, a new fresh look for a lot of our teams. And, you know, the journey I had across Mark, I happened to do a lot of transformation with Salesforce, and it just so happened that, you know, a chief customer officer at Salesforce said, Hey, we've got this opening over at Schneider Electric.

00;06;12;04 - 00;06;29;18

Mike Anderson

I'd love to connect you with the CEO for North America. I think the two of you would hit it off. And if it's not the right fit, that's great. You know, you two are great people. You know, you'll have a great conversation. So that that conversation obviously led to me joining Schneider Electric. And it was, you know, interesting story, you know, that I want to share.

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Mike Anderson

You know, we talk about mental health. You know, my family was impact impacted by the loss of our my niece by, you know, died by suicide in 2018. And I was actually through that journey, you know, when I was at Cross, Mark, I was in a great place. And when I met with the CEO of Schneider Electric, she said, Hey, I want you to meet one of my leaders and in Dallas.

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Mike Anderson

And so we met at the end of March in 2018. And shortly thereafter, the next week is when our family was struck by that tragedy. And about two weeks, two or three weeks later, as we were having a celebration of life for my niece in Nashville, Tennessee, I was exiting the freeway for the hotel we were staying at, and I saw this building with the Schneider Electric logo on it.

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Mike Anderson

And I went to my hotel room and I Googled it, and I recalled that when they were recruiting me about recruiting me for the job, they said, Hey, would you be willing to relocate to Nashville? We've got a big I.T. presence there. And sure enough, I found out that's the office that they were talking about. And it was minutes from my sister left and I took that as a sign that the universe was telling me this is the place I need to be.

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Mike Anderson

And so that was part of the reason I joined Schneider Electric is I just felt like that was a sign. And, you know, so, you know, that's, you know, part of my the mental health and suicide prevention is really, you know, help, you know, helping, you know, tackle that problem that exists today. You know, especially with our college age students, you know, that are off, you know, university for the first time away from their support systems.

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Mike Anderson

Right. So you know that you know, and then the signs then led me on to and that scope is is the stop on that. Now. I mean, you know, a lot of people commonly refer to it as you've gone to the other side. I don't really know why they say that. I think everyone has a product or something.

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Mike Anderson

We just happen to be in software. But, you know, call it the other side, call it what you will. So now I'm working on the other side and enjoying every minute of it. You know, what I can tell you is that life moves a lot faster in a in a nimble technology company. That's a hypergrowth phase relative to a large global industrial manufacturer with 140,000 employees around the world.

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Mike Anderson

It's a very different set of challenges and things move much more quickly. So that's, you know, a little bit about my background and kind of what brought me to here. So thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.  

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Davood Ghods

Thank you for sharing some personal information also. And it's admirable that you're working in the area of mental health and suicide prevention. You talked about shadow i.t. Something that I had had to deal with also for many years as the very CEO i orals that I've heard at different state departments in california. You know, with your varying experience. Interesting background. What do you think in 20 to what do you think are the emerging trends that you're seeing in the I.T. and business fields that we should all be paying more attention to these days?

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Mike Anderson

Well, I'll start on the comment around when I think about, you know, shadow i.t. There was a loss back in November. I was, you know, in a roundtable and it was particularly, you know, topic of conversation with shadow i.t. And one cio, you know, put it perfectly, he said, my ceo came to me and said, I want you to stop referring to it as shadow i.t because what it really is is business i.t and we you need to stop trying to control it and start figuring out how to support it.

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Mike Anderson

And I think that's just a perfect context. You know, there's, there's, you know, there's actually a Gartner article that came out a few weeks ago that I posted about on LinkedIn where they talked about business technologists. And, you know, when you think about technology, it used to be, you know, we had the IT groups and we were the ones that had the propeller hats and sat in the back room and had the answers, all those complex problems.

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Mike Anderson

And you knew how to work with this black magic that was called it and technology. But what we know is today everyone's got you know, everyone's a technologist, you know, everyone's coming to you today saying, well, it's so easy. I just download an app for an app store. And, you know, here we are often off we go, or I found this college kid down the street to build me an app and, you know, two weeks Wait, why does it take you two months or two years to do the same thing?

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Mike Anderson

Right, right, right. So we've we've all been to that been to that movie. And you know what? I when I look at that today, you know, I, you know, often talk about this is my my eighth grader when he was in seventh grade last year, he learned Python in his robotics class. And, you know, I take that a step further.

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Mike Anderson

You know, three years ago, you know, I had the opportunity was at Shiner Electric to go visit Clemson University in the head of computer science at Clemson said that Python is the is being is the number one language being learned by college students today more than any spoken language people are learning Python because it's the language of the data.

00;11;14;04 - 00;11;41;23

Mike Anderson

It's the language of the cloud. And so if we think about the people entering our workforce today that are learning Python and as early as the seventh grade, they've grown up in a world where they can simply download an app from the App Store or when they have a problem statement, they can type their problem statement into a Google search and within seconds they've got all these software as a service solutions that they can that pop up in the list in the search results that are potential solutions to their problem.

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Mike Anderson

So we have this this workforce coming in today. And the but the challenge is they're not coming into jobs. A lot of times are coming into every role. But it and and if you put up that person's knowledge against even the people we've had 90 for 15 or 20 years. You know there's not parity. In fact a lot of times those new that new workforce has more what I'd say digital in their DNA than a lot of our people that have been on our jobs for 15 to 20 years.

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Mike Anderson

And so I do feel like we have to shift our mindset away from one of control to to one of how do we provide governed innovation, secure innovation at the edge of our company? Because if we can empower the people closest to the problem to solve the problem with technology and all the resources at their disposal, it's going to give us a level of agility that's going to really help us, you know, tackle and do things that we've never seen possible.

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Mike Anderson

Right? So when I talk, when I see one of the emerging trends, I Philly really feel like that context shift in our mind away from shadow i.t and control to business i.t and enable I think is a is a big shift that we're going to see in 2022 and we're going to see that rise of the business technologists and we're going to continue to see that as we move forward over the next 3 to 5 years.

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Mike Anderson

And honestly, you know, going forward completely right. The only thing I would say to that is standardization becomes very difficult when we have to support different types of technologies because the business needs that. And that's been my experience. But I agree with you that the trend is going in that direction and it needs to be able to support it.

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Mike Anderson

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think one of the things I'd add on to that comment is, you know, and that's one of the thing that was interesting, that the kind of Jeremy Tonet scope was the ability to to see that the applications people are bringing into our environments before the emotional attachment occurs. And let me let me let me unpack that one a little bit, right?

00;13;43;06 - 00;14;00;10

Mike Anderson

Because, you know, you know, as CEOs, we often believe, you know, people have a problem. They'll go to our app catalog or ask their local i.t person, do we have a solution to this problem? But we all know that's not how it plays out. They don't go look in the app catalog. They don't ask the right friend if they have a solution to it.

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Mike Anderson

What most people do is they go to the google search, they type in their problem statement. They they they may find the solution of their problem. They may not. So they will perfect their search. Until they do, they land on a potential solution. They'll find maybe one or two solutions. When they find one that they like the most, they'll fill out the contact form or they'll sign up for the free trial.

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Mike Anderson

And then they get a demo and they sign up and they get this kind of this proof of concept going with a vendor, and they may ask their coworker in the seat next to them, Hey, do we have any do we have to use this software internally or do we have licenses? And, you know, oftentimes that person kind of shrugs, their shoulders, goes, I don't know.

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Mike Anderson

And and so then they take that person once they bring this new solution in and they bring them on, they bring them on to the journey with them. And pretty soon they've got a groundswell of support around this new application they found and they form this emotional attachment. And at some point it makes its way to the table of the IT team.

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Mike Anderson

When you're at, you know, let's say it's supply chain, the supply chain leader has the business partner that's sitting at the table with them and they say, Hey, we've got this application we'd like you to support. And then, you know, a few scenarios can play out. The best possible scenario is, Hey, we already have that application. We use it.

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Mike Anderson

I'm glad you like it. We'd like you to. We can get you set up on our environment we have internally. That's your best outcome. The one we often write into is you've. You've already picked a solution. Does exactly what that solution does. And now it becomes who who picked a better solution or who. Who has the better date for the dance.

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Mike Anderson

Yeah right. And you in that in that friction ensues. But then there's a third bucket, which is, you know, you haven't solved the problem yet and then the then you want to have a dialog. Okay. Help me understand the problem you're solving, not because you want to stop it, but you really want to understand. Is that a unique problem for that one particular function or business unit, or is it something that's more pervasive that other people are also trying to solve Because if you can solve it more consistent across the organization, your point around standards, that's a win win for everybody.

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Davood Ghods

Exactly. That's what's been exciting about METCO, because you have that visibility to have those conversations and catch people before the emotional attachment occurs. Right? Right. It's not just a standardization that's, you know, resiliency, too. And that kind of leads me to the next question. I think you would agree that adjusting to the pandemic was challenging or challenging. We're all organizations, and now even before this one is over, everyone should be thinking about what the next major disruption like the pandemic is going to be.

00;16;30;26 - 00;17;04;24

Davood Ghods

And how better prepared are they. So resiliency is a big topic of conversation these days. What are some examples of resilience you've seen in the past year and what is the one thing you think organizations should be doing to improve resilience?  

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Mike Anderson

That's a It's a great question. When I when I think about that, you know, I think if you asked a lot of CIOs back in the end of November, none of them would have thought that log forge was going to happen, and nor did they think it was going to impact, you know, the way they collected payroll for their part time workforce working in manufacturing, especially. Right when you look at, you know, companies like Kronos were time clocks. They were told, hey, guess what, your time clock is not going to work for three week the next three weeks, institute your backup or disaster recovery plan. Most people were like, I never thought I needed a disaster recovery plan for the time clock. Right. So, you know, I think resilience has taken a whole new meaning in the past, in the past year.

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Mike Anderson

And that wasn't even from the pandemic. That was just from the rate, the rising tides of the security breaches and security incidents and the attacks we see today. Right. And so that's a so when I think about resiliency, you know, my my counsel to people is start with work and that where's the worst place for me to have disruption occur and start use that as a starting point.

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Mike Anderson

Say, okay, if disruption occurred here, how would we recover from that? And what is our offline way of working or what is our backup way of working if that were to occur and use that because you know, you can't tackle everything all at once, right? You know, a lot of us, you know, when the pandemic shifted, the first thing we said is how do we get people to be able to work from home?

00;18;09;13 - 00;18;23;12

Mike Anderson

Right? And the first thing we all did is like, okay, first thing is how do we get the VPN to work so people can connect and get to that? Data centers in the app, the applications in the data center. How do we make sure we can get visibility and keep them safe working from home? That was the first thing we all focused on, right?

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Mike Anderson

And so and then we worked, you know, worked onward from there. Unfortunately, we made some suboptimal decisions like split tunneling traffic off of VPN so that we could create good experiences on doing things like Zoom and teams, right? And then that just opened up Pandora's box. And more and more you know, more traffic started becoming split tunnel and we lost visibility and in controls, you know not I wouldn't say control what really the visibility to it so we could protect our people but again is is I look forward to the future.

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Mike Anderson

I think we always have to ask ourselves, where could we have the most painful disruption occur in our business? And then how do we how do we put a different plan in place? And that may be today the time clock that we didn't think about. That may be a painful area because I can't pay my people. They're probably not going to come to work if we can't, you know, guarantee them we're going to pay them, you know, if a technology disaster occurs.

00;19;13;15 - 00;19;53;16

Mike Anderson

And so that would be the way I would frame it is just come up with that that mindset. And then work down the list as appropriate. Yeah, we are offering a resilience as a service service offering that goes into disaster recovery and some of our customers are taking advantage of that and it needs to be tested. It needs to be developed because the disruptions could be a natural disaster like flooding, earthquake fires, technology disruption, disruption like the one you just mentioned or a disruption similar to the civil unrest that we experienced last year.

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Mike Anderson

So disaster recovery need to plans need to cover these and be tested and not just sit on a shelf. Absolutely agree with you talking about what motivates people that you work at direct technology. We always talk about how we are going to get the project done, but we also ask ourselves why we are doing what we are doing.

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Davood Ghods

What is your why? In other words, what motivates you in your work? You know, for me, it's you know, the thing that I always look at is I like to I feel like people want to know they're winning, right? They want to know they're doing something that's meaningful and it's contributing to you know, it's making sure that they know there's purpose around what they're doing right.

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Mike Anderson

And purpose can be in the mission of your company, you know, what's that? How is it helping the the the world around us make us a better place? You know, that can be something gives meaning me, That was something definitely when I was at Schneider, you know, we were focused on sustainability. And to me, that was something that was very important and that motivated me.

00;20;53;11 - 00;21;11;22

Mike Anderson

When I got up every day was the fact I was working for a company that was driving that sustainability. You know, when I when I look at net scope, you know, that security is important, right? You know, making sure people aren't distributed, aren't disrupted, you know, when, you know those crisis occurs or when a ransomware attack occurs or what have you, you.

00;21;11;27 - 00;21;32;04

Mike Anderson

But for me, you know, as a leader, you know, you know, my why or what motivates me is, is people being able to achieve things and unlock their full potential. You know, I've always you know, I always enjoyed coaching team sports and coaching kids and just, you know, seeing someone unlocking the potential that they have that sometimes they didn't know they had.

00;21;32;06 - 00;21;48;26

Mike Anderson

Right. And it's it's you know, for me when I when I look at leading a team, you know, I've got an amazing group of leaders that I have on my team here at Netscape, and I learn from them every day. And so what motivates me is twofold. One, on them unlocking their potential. But then the other piece is just learning something new every day.

00;21;48;28 - 00;22;07;02

Mike Anderson

You know, I think if we all took time and just wrote down every day, what was the one new thing we learned today? We would be amazed at how much we learn on an annual basis. And if we just multiply that over years, just think about how much information and knowledge and wisdom we gain, right? And and how can we then take what we learn and then pass that down to others. You know, I think is is always important. And so that's you know, that's really my why right. It's really, you know, how do I help other people achieve their full potential.

00;22;07;04 - 00;22;33;20

Davood Ghods

Exactly. Yeah, that's a great motivator. So related to that, what inspires innovation on your team? You know, you talked about unlocking their potential, but how do you inspire your team to be innovative?

00;22;33;22 - 00;22;51;18

Mike Anderson

You know, that's a great question. You know, when I when I think about innovation, a lot of times you get in these conversations today around digital transformation and we put it we basically say digital transformation equals innovation. You know, an innovation can come in a lot of different forms, right? You know, I try to separate digital transformation from digitization.

00;22;51;21 - 00;23;11;00

Mike Anderson

You know, digitization is basically modernizing something that a capability that already existed. You're just accomplishing the same outcome. But with newer technology, you know, so we've had video conferencing for a long time. You could call it transformation. Moving to Zoom, really what we did is we move that, we move the brain from being in our data center to the cloud.

00;23;11;03 - 00;23;34;11

Mike Anderson

So it's really modernizing to keep up with the time. But when I think about digital transformation, it's it's radically transforming something to achieve an outcome that wasn't there was wasn't possible before. Right. And so that's when I saw when I think about innovation, you know, for me, it's really getting encouraging people to think about the things that they are learning and the how would you apply them to the problems that we see.

00;23;34;18 - 00;23;53;11

Mike Anderson

So good example of when I think about an area of innovation is when I think about cybersecurity. The bad actors are always they're very difficult to keep up with or a lot of times they're multiple steps ahead of us because their day job is to make life bad, you know, make life bad for us. Our day job is to make sure we keep our business up and running.

00;23;53;18 - 00;24;13;18

Mike Anderson

Right? And sometimes those things can be a lot of times they're they're moving faster than we are. And, you know, and so when I think about that, I think about artificial intelligence and machine learning and think about how do we remove the human delay factor from, you know, security policies as an example. Right. So when we think about a technology here, what are the problems we face today?

00;24;13;18 - 00;24;33;03

Mike Anderson

Well, problem we face is I have I see something that needs to be fixed. I sign it to a person. They go apply the fix. The time in which I identified that there's a problem and I actually got the problem addressed, especially in the security world, is a time in which I could be, you know, have be vulnerable to that attack or vulnerable to whatever that problem is.

00;24;33;06 - 00;24;58;14

Mike Anderson

And so the more I can eliminate that human delay from an operational standpoint to be able to put the policy in place or make the configuration change necessary to eliminate, you know, my vulnerability helps me, you know, you know, keep protected or back to the resilience pieces helps me become more resilient. Right? So I challenge people to say, how do we how do we take advantage of some of these new technologies to solve the problems we face today?

00;24;58;14 - 00;25;20;20

Mike Anderson

So one problem I'm looking at is how do we use artificial intelligence to eliminate the delay factor in, you know, the human that sits in the chair between the problem and the solution and, you know, knowing that we have to establish trust or how do we get how do we establish that trust to say, you know, I trust that this is going to make the right decision so I can turn on the autopilot mode, Right?

00;25;20;20 - 00;25;36;25

Mike Anderson

And so I think that's an area so so looking at these new technologies and challenging, saying how could we how could we leverage some of these new technologies to solve to solve some of the problems in front of us. Now, it's not the traditional here. I found a new technology. It's my hammer and everything looks like a nail.

00;25;36;26 - 00;25;54;27

Mike Anderson

I'm going to try to I'm going to go try to solve every problem with this new technology, which is often a challenge. You know, I'm sure you've been to that movie before that we we face, but it's a it's around, you know, understanding the technology, understanding being a good student of the business we're in and then putting those pieces together.

00;25;54;29 - 00;26;14;17

Mike Anderson

Right. And so that's part of the part of the thing I look at for inspiring innovation. It's always challenging people to learn something new every day and then ask themselves, how can they help apply that right? And so when I think about innovation, you know, it's just talking to, you know, a new, you know, entry, You know, a new worker in the workforce yesterday works for a different company.

00;26;14;17 - 00;26;29;09

Mike Anderson

A friend of a friend, and she works for a large one of the global s eyes. And she was talking to me about her business and she was asking me for career advice. And what I one of the things I told her was, you know, the best thing you can do is be a student of your business and build your network.

00;26;29;11 - 00;26;49;29

Mike Anderson

And so I told her every what I challenge her is every week schedule a virtual meeting with someone in a different department that she hasn't met before. And, you know, if she can ever get to do it twice a week, that's great. But start with just for this year. Once a week, meet someone in a different department and just get to know them and what they do in the company, what their what their role is.

00;26;50;01 - 00;27;15;18

Mike Anderson

Because by doing that, you not only build your network, but when you think about innovation, you learn about problems that are faced in other parts of the organization. And so as a technology leader, especially when you can understand that attacking the new technologies that come that are available to us and you're a good student in the business by learning not from, you know, something that's, you know, abstracted three or four levels in the organization, but ideally from a frontline worker to learn about the challenges that they're facing.

00;27;15;20 - 00;27;32;04

Mike Anderson

That allows you to then, you know, find new innovative ways to apply technology to solve problems that people on the front liners are are facing. And those those frontline people that face off to our customers, which are the people that, you know, we should care about the most because those are the ones that, you know, you know, keep us employed.

00;27;32;07 - 00;27;51;20

Mike Anderson

Right. So if I think about, you know, government, state and local government, you know, our constituents, the people that are in our communities or the people that we face off to, how do we make their life easier and how do we make life easier for the people that are on the front lines that service those people? Right. That's something that I would encourage people to look at and get to know what the problems are and ask questions and learn.

00;27;51;22 - 00;28;09;24

Mike Anderson

You know, there's a a when my bosses early in my career reminded me, he said, you've got two years, two eyes in one mouth. Use them in that proportion. Right. And I think that's that that's been great advice that I've tried to pass on to others as well.  

00;28;09;26 - 00;28;33;27

Davood Ghods

Thanks, Mike. Thank you for providing even examples on how to inspire innovation on your team. We ask all of our guests a couple of personal questions, too. So here are the last two questions. What is something that would surprise people about your background or interests that's not necessarily out in the public?  

00;28;34;00 - 00;28;51;25

Mike Anderson

You know, that's a that's a great question. You know, one of the ones that I think has been out there before, but it's not public is I'm a I'm a foodie and I love to cook. And it's interesting to me, it's always a new learning experience and I love to kind of learn the pairings. I'm also a big fan of of red wines and Spirits and just appreciating them, you know, always a love. It's a learning thing, right? I like I like to learn about new spirits. I like to learn the meat. I love to meet the people that make a dish or make a spirit or a make a wine.

00;28;51;25 - 00;29;10;08

Mike Anderson

Just to understand kind of their passion. Right? So that's something that's always that's that's definitely of interest to me. You know, a fun fact that a lot of people don't know. I was a football player in college. You may not gather that from my my LinkedIn profile, but I was a football player. But I was also in high school, the president of our chess club.

00;29;10;11 - 00;29;24;29

Mike Anderson

So you don't often find that combination. We have a president of a chess club and a football player that was not a very common, you know, common thing together. So I also loved to love to play chess. And I'm highly competitive. My kids always tease me because they said, you know, a lot of times your dad, you're supposed to let your kids win.

00;29;25;01 - 00;29;46;29

Mike Anderson

And I'm like, No, you don't build resilience. You know, if I just let you win, you know, you got to learn to you got to have perseverance and learn to be resilient, get back up and get in the fight. And someday you'll win. Someday when?  

00;29;47;01 - 00;30;05;25

Davood Ghods

Very good. Well, hopefully when this pandemic is over and you're in town, we can get together to share some good food and spirits. Then, Mike, Where can people find you and keep tabs on what you're working on? How can people support your work?  

00;30;05;25 - 00;30;32;05

Mike Anderson

You know, you know two things. You know, one is on the professional side, you know, LinkedIn is a great tool. You know, I try to share thought leadership whenever I can. I admire the people that there's so many people that do a much better than I do. And but that's a great place. I try to share things, you know, whether it's talking about how we can be more inclusive leaders in our in the workplace, talking about the latest trends in cybersecurity or, you know, some of the personal passion topics. I talk about a lot, you know, mental health and suicide prevention. I think that's something that we need to make sure that we we make all of our people, both at home and at work, feel comfortable talking about and remove the stigma.

00;30;32;08 - 00;30;49;16

Mike Anderson

But then also, you know, agility. Agility is a big topic of mine. You know, how do we in leadership, how do we how do we as leaders help grow the next generation of leaders and, you know, really change the notion from leadership that it's a you know, you don't have to have people report to you to be a leader, right?

00;30;49;17 - 00;31;06;18

Mike Anderson

You can be a leader by leading a cross-functional team and changing some of the notions around that. So to keep tabs on me, connect me on LinkedIn, I'm trying to get better at Twitter. You know, my marketing department has been on me, Hey, you need to tweet more. So I've been trying that out as well so you can connect to me on on LinkedIn or Twitter.

00;31;06;18 - 00;31;35;18

Mike Anderson

On LinkedIn. My my profile is email by Anders and on Twitter it's underscore meander. So please connect out there. I'd love to, you know, carry on the conversation as well. And then also just back on the mental health piece, you know, let's make sure and remove the stigma. Let's make sure that we make an environment that's safe for our people to talk about, you know, the things that are that are challenging them because mental health is not just something that impacts a a subset of people.

00;31;35;18 - 00;31;53;22

Davood Ghods

It impacts all of us. And I think we've all felt that during the pandemic. So let's all support each other and, you know, that'll all make us make everyone better. So thank you so much for having me on the podcast today. Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us today, Mike. Thank you to all the listeners out there for joining us as well.

00;31;53;25 - 00;32;11;20

Davood Ghods

We will see you in the next episode of Davood for Thought, where we will shed more light on the human side of tech.

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