Great Leadership With Jacob Morgan

Peter Walmsley, the Chief People Officer at GSN Games, is an experienced and committed leader with extensive Executive Human Resources experience in multi-national organizations across the USA; Europe; Asia and North Africa. He has a track record of success in setting the strategic direction, driving organizational change, providing leadership for the function, developing and influencing critical business relationships and delivering results aligned to business goals in places such as American Express and Fidelity.

GSN Games is a leading provider of cross-platform entertainment, including social casino games and skill tournaments designed to fuel every player’s inner winner. They are based primarily in the US and India. Part of GSN, - Wheel of Fortune on TV. About 500 people, it is the design and development of these games. Founded in 1999 as skill games site WorldWinner.com, the company has evolved into a premier social, mobile and online games company.

Working at GSN involves an open workspace with game consoles all around. It is an open and transparent culture. Upper management is available to questions and conversation with employees. Unlimited vacation times with good benefits are also some of the perks of working at GSN. Additionally there is an emphasis on a healthy culture balance of work and private lives.

How do you budget for the ‘perks’ – such as free food or redesigning the office - often found in the office?

  • By spending a lot of time with general managers it allows for understanding on the needs of employees. Once he understands the needs he is able to facilitate the programs by using this antidotal data.

How do you ensure shareholder value at the studio level?

  • Make sure we have an effective operating model
  • Make sure we have an effective workforce plan
  • Make sure we have the right people

How do you deal with different offices and their cultures in different parts of the world?

  • Put in place a framework, a set of principles that are basic
  • Be aware of local customs
  • The local HR director is accountable for ensuring with local legislation and then working with leaders to make sure that all are aligned

Walmsley’s advice for individuals is to embrace change and reinvent yourself periodically

His advice for executives is to listen and hear, move away from personal discomfort, and have the courage to take risks.

Things you will learn:

  • What it’s like to work at GSN
  • How GSN handles the annual employee reviews
  • How Walmsley believes the role of HR has changed
  • How to deal with managers who don’t embrace changes in the world of work
  • How to handle differences in corporate cultures when you have offices around the world
Direct download: Peter20Walmsley20Podcast_DONE.mp3
Category:Business -- posted at: 7:41am PDT

Jenny Dearborn is the Chief Learning Officer and Senior Vice President at SAP,  a global software company. Dearborn leads an internationally-acclaimed and award-winning team recognized as the #1 performing corporate learning department in the world by eLearning Magazine. As global Chief Learning Officer for the 67,000 employees at SAP, Dearborn is accountable to design, align and drive SAP’s overall learning activities to enable measurable business impact. She is also an author of a new book, The Data Driven Leader.

Before SAP, Dearborn began her professional career as a high school teacher. After a brief stint in that role, she moved into education in the business world. She was Chief Learning Officer at SuccessFactors for two years where she won numerous industry awards for the measurable business impact of her sales enablement initiatives. She was at Sun Microsystems for 6 years where she was the global Chief Learning Architect across all corporate content and was the Chief Learning Officer for the Americas. Dearborn was at Hewlett-Packard for 8 years where she started as an instructor and instructional designer and progressed to executive positions as the Learning & Development leader for Global Sales & Enterprise Marketing, Global Technology Services and Global Corporate Learning Strategy.

According to Dearborn, people analytics is crucial for leaders to use the data to understand the best way to use their time. First, look at the goals you are trying to achieve. From there you identify data that you need to assess properly.

Suggestions for a smaller company to use data to form change:

  1. Start by asking questions – what are your problems? What are you goals? Do you have a dashboard to see how things are going?
  2. Do the research. Be curious. Put data together
  3. Build relationships. Be ‘nonthreatening’. You need to often convince the people that have the data to be willing to share it.

How does a person become a human leader in a world driven by data? Data allows you to be more human. It gives you the opportunity to focus on what people truly need to make a difference in their lives or performance. If we spend our time in a variety of programs or conversations that aren’t targeted – without knowing what will make the biggest difference in their lives then we aren’t being productive.

In 5 – 10 years Dearborn believes that organizations will have more tools to support productivity, more voice triggered support systems, more voice to text in our everyday environment and there will be more robots in our lives.

 

What You Will Learn In This Episode:

  • The fun collection that Jenny has acquired
  • The role super heroes play in Jenny’s life
  • What data is available on SAP employees and how it is used
  • What is the ‘coaching index’?
  • How to use data for leadership
  • How to start implementing People
  • Jenny’s perspective on Millennials
  • What SAP is doing internally around learning
Direct download: Jenny20Dearborn20Podcast_DONE.mp3
Category:Business -- posted at: 6:53am PDT

My conversation today is with Rebecca Chandler, the Chief Learning Officer and Global Director of the Learning Group at Steelcase. We are talking about real life examples of what Steelcase is doing to promote learning and development, how learning has evolved over the past few decades and how leaders and managers can role model the desired learning behavior in their organizations.

Rebecca Chandler is the Chief Learning Officer and Global Director of Learning and Development at Steelcase. Steelcase is a global organization that provides furniture solutions that reflect what they’ve learned about human behavior. It employs about 14,000 employees.

Chandler is charged with making Steelcase the pacesetter for learning organizations worldwide. Steelcase looks to her team for learning solutions that are linked to the needs of the business, and to progress in creating learning that is globally integrated and holistic in nature. Learning is embedded in the culture of their organization, Steelcase views it as just another way for their employees to "love the way they work".

A Chief Learning Officer is usually with tasked thinking about the learning infrastructure to support the local culture and goals.  They look at the curriculum, what the organization is focused on, how people share learning and how to speed up learning.

Steelcase education is on an evolution. They offer a lot around active learning. They understand that people need to engage in a variety of ways.  They have a “Think, Make, Share” program.

The ‘Think’ gives people a chance to do pre-work. This is often called a ‘flipped classroom’.  This leverages the time when people are together.

‘Make’ includes the time together which provides opportunities of creating projects with feedback from an expert.

‘Share’ is about learners/employees going back and teaching others. This solidifies the knowledge they’ve gained. Other times they may be asked to do some sort of action project.

Steelcase’s learning programs fit into one of these 4 buckets:

  1. Leadership
  2. Culture
  3. Innovation
  4. Functional Excellence

Technology in education – learning systems push content to the organizations. There is a need to understand how people are using technology and then design from that perspective. Technology should enhance the learning.

Role of culture in learning- Culture and learning go hand and hand. We like to develop curriculum that aligns with culture

Role of physical space in learning – Providing opportunities for people to use space creatively. At Steelcase they consider the entire building a living laboratory.

 

What you will learn in this episode:

  • What a Chief Learning Officer does
  • How the world of learning has changed
  • The role of technology in education
  • Real life examples of what Steelcase is doing to promote learning and development
  • How leaders and managers can role model the desired learning behavior in their organizations.
Direct download: Rebecca20Chandler20Podcast_DONE.mp3
Category:Business -- posted at: 9:57am PDT

Marc Goodman is one of the world’s leading authorities on global security and the New York Times Bestselling author of Future Crimes: Inside the Digital Underground and the Battle for Our Connected World —selected by the Washington Post as one of the 10 Best Books of 2015 and by Amazon.com as the best book of 2015 in Business & Investing. Goodman founded the Future Crimes Institute to inspire and educate others on the security and risk implications of newly emerging technologies. He also serves as the Global Security Advisor and Chair for Policy and Law at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, a NASA and Google sponsored educational venture dedicated to using advanced science and technology to address humanity’s biggest challenges.

 

Beginning his career as a police officer, over the past twenty years Marc Goodman has built his expertise in next generation security threats such as cyber crime, cyber terrorism and information warfare through work with INTERPOL, the United Nations, NATO, the Los Angeles Police Department and the U.S. Government. For over a decade, Goodman trained numerous expert working groups on technological security threats while serving as a Senior Advisor to INTERPOL’s Steering Committee on Information Technology Crime. He has worked with various UN entities and was asked by the Secretary General of the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to join his High Level Experts Group on Global Cybersecurity.

 

Crime has changed drastically over the last few decades. One major change is the ‘location’ factor. Previously, crime was local – a bank robber or a car thief who lived locally, committed the crime locally. Now, the internet has changed that and the location of the crime can happen anywhere. For example, someone in Russia can attack someone in San Francisco. This requires law enforcement to work very differently. “You no longer have co-location of victim, criminal and evidence.” This factor has broken the criminal enforcement system.

How does hacking work? Cyber attacks are automated. This is another thing that is different than the past. Previously someone had to do the crime. Now it’s automated. There is ‘crimeware’. It can be programmed to do identify theft, attack data, etc. Only a small percentage is customized. Those are often the state sponsored attacks.

 

Identity theft is more serious than credit card theft. A person takes over your credit cards but also mortgage, Facebook, medical records and so on. This can take years to clear up.

 

Additionally, there is the hacking of video cameras – for instance through baby cameras. Perhaps you take your cell phone into the bathroom – you don’t want someone to hack into that while you are there. Every computer is hackable. Your phone, your camera, your car are all ‘computers’ and, therefore, hackable.

 

Ninety-five percent of all data breaches can be linked back to human error. If employees are not aware of ways this can occur they are putting their company at risk of being hacked. Companies are being proactive training their employees. For instance, they are sending out fake phishing emails to assist with knowing which employees might click on a bad email and then using it as a teachable moment.

 

A few things people can do to protect themselves:

· Increase laws, public policy and regulation. Regulation could be useful. For example, CA first to have mandatory data breech hack notifications. As the result everyone in CA was notified. People in the other states were not notified. Good data breech notification is important and strong penalties. · Check out to see if your accounts have been hacked @ haveibeenpwned.com · Go to Goodman’s website: futurecrimes.com – tips

· Be careful what you ‘click on’

· Consider changing the account in your computer that you are using in the ‘administrator role’ to a ‘user’ role.

What you will learn in this episode:

· How crime has evolved over the last few decades

· Steps you can take to reduce your risk of being hacked

· Find out how your online dating site might give away more info that you want it to

· How the Equifax hack happened

· The connection between terrorism and technology

Direct download: Marc20Goodman20Podcast_DONE.mp3
Category:Business -- posted at: 11:32pm PDT

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