11/12/2018
By Peter High. Published in Forbes.
Seth Goldman was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, and throughout his life, he dreamed of ideas to pursue. That tendency was enhanced when he crossed paths with Yale School of Management Professor Barry Nalebuff while pursuing his graduate degree in business administration. The student impressed the professor with his insights, and his willingness to productively debate ideas in class. A couple of years after business school, Goldman went for a run in New York City, entered a convenience store, and despite his thirst, was not impressed by the usual suspect beverages on offer. He viewed this as an idea to explore. As it happened, Nalebuff was returning from India, where he had participated in a tea auction. The process had led him to think of how best to brand tea. The name Honest Tea came to him.
These dual epiphanies proved fortuitous, and eventually they went into business together. In this interview, Goldman tells his side of the story, including a bottling issue that brought the company to the brink of failure, the value the company derived out of using game theory when engaging with investors in the business, and how they maintained so much creative control even after Coca-Cola purchased the business.
(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please click this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: Can you talk about your relationship with Honest Tea co-founder Barry Nalebuff, who was your professor at the Yale School of Management? How did your relationship move from student-professor to start-up co-founders?
Seth Goldman: Because both my parents are professors, my family had rigorous academic discussions at the table when I was growing up. To many students, Barry was an intimidating presence, and there were stories of students who were brought to tears in his classroom. I was fortunate that the first course I took with Barry was on political and economic marketing, and having previously worked on presidential campaigns, that was in my wheelhouse. My first interactions with Barry came from a position of strength, and I had strong insights that gave him a positive impression. The next course I took with Barry was on competitive strategy, and similar to the first class, I had some creative ideas. In this course, I put together a business plan for something related to urinary tract infections [UTIs], which is obviously substantially different than my idea for Honest Tea. Barry thought my idea showed bright and creative thinking, and he appreciated the fact that I was not a pushover in the classroom. I believe having that strong presence and pushing back in the right way can make a strong impression, which it did for Barry.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.
11/06/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes.
Seemantini Godbole has been named the next Chief Information Officer of Lowe’s Home Improvement. She will begin on November 12. She joins Lowe’s from Target Corporation, where she has worked for nearly nine years.
A press release from Lowe’s noted, “Godbole helped lead Target’s digital technology transformation, including the re-architecture of the company’s digital platforms, implementation of agile product management, and the introduction of technology for new customer experiences including mobile applications, buy online and pick up in-store programs, digital wallet, localized pricing, and customer loyalty and engagement offerings. Seemantini has led development of long-term technology roadmaps, portfolio planning and engineering, operational support functions and ecommerce platforms. She is passionate about enabling great customer service and developing top-notch technology teams.”
Marvin Ellison, Lowe’s president and CEO said, “Seemantini is a tremendous addition to the Lowe’s executive leadership team. She is a proven retail executive and brings to Lowe’s extensive expertise in transforming digital platforms to drive outstanding results by focusing on the technology needed to improve the customer and associate experience. I am confident Seemantini is the right leader to advance Lowe’s technology efforts for the future.”
11/05/2018
On October 28, IBM announced its intent to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion. This marked the largest software acquisition ever. Prior to announcement, I caught up with Red Hat Chief Information Officer Mike Kelly, who offered thoughts on the steps his team had undertaken to continue to improve Red Hat’s product (using a Red Hat-on-Red Hat program), to advise technology executives at various stages of leveraging open source technology, and in improving the overall operation. Clearly these are the sorts of improvements that helped make the company attractive to IBM.
Peter High: Could you describe your purview as the Chief Information Officer of Red Hat?
Mike Kelly: I am part of our executive team, and I have a variety of responsibilities relating to IT at Red Hat. The responsibilities are as follows:
10/29/2018
A few weeks ago, I co-hosted a meeting with Gamiel Gran of the venture capital firm, Mayfield Fund. It was held in Santa Monica, California, and it included a dozen leading CIOs from Greater Los Angeles. The CIOs offered thoughts on areas that have them excited and others that keep them up at night. Ultimately, there were five topics that rose to the top of the minds of the gathered CIOs:
Managing Through the Threat of Amazon
The breadth of Amazon’s reach and the threat that it will inevitably become broader still was of concern with the gathered executives. Retailers feel this most acutely, as one retail IT executive expressed, “If Amazon points their radar at us, we are in trouble.” But it is important to note that B2B companies such as industrials and OEMs are also concerned. One of the areas highlighted was B2B distribution. As their logistics and shipping capabilities grow, this could be a natural extension of their offering.
There is a general consensus that there is no way to “Amazon proof” one’s business but that it is important to continue to innovate and to develop an ecosystem of partners that will help bolster one’s self against the threat of Amazon or other digital native organizations for that matter.
Arthur Hu joined Lenovo nine years ago after more than eight years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Hu ascended the ranks to become Chief Information Officer a bit more than two years ago while still in his 30s. In that role, leads the information technology function and business transformation activities for a Chinese company with major operations in the US and in a variety of other countries. As a Chinese-American who speaks fluent Mandarin, he leads a diverse team, and spends roughly half of his time in Beijing, and half of his time either in the United States or at other strategic locations for the company.
Hu pushes his IT leadership team to have a strong grasp of Lenovo’s strategy, what is happening in the broader industry, as well as to remain abreast of crucial technology trends in order to drive transformation. He also strives to be the company’s first and best customer, leveraging its technology, and providing feedback on its strengths and where it might improve.
Hu represents the CIO of the future, in many ways. His ability to work seamlessly across the two biggest economies, his ability to impact the company’s transformation and products, and his ability to master both strategy and tactics set him apart. He describes his journey and his methods herein.
Peter High: Could you describe your role as the Chief Information Officer of Lenovo?
Art Hu: As the CIO and business transformation leader at Lenovo, I have a dual role. I am responsible for keeping the business running and creating a strong employee experience, which involves our workspace and our private and public cloud. The second element of my position targets Lenovo’s business transformation. In this role, I focus on defining and evolving our business processes and models, which ultimately helps us serve our customers better and improve Lenovo’s competitiveness.
10/23/2018
By Peter High. Published on Fobres.
Schneider National’s CEO Chris Lofgren describes the company’s relationship with innovation in the following way: “Innovation and technology are in our DNA. Our success and long-term success are dependent on aligning the flow of information through technology and making it available to people so they understand the implications of the decisions they make. That’s at the heart of operational excellence and who we really are.” Lofgren is a former chief information officer of the company. The current member of the team with that title is Shaleen Devgun. He and his team focus not only on ways to drive efficiency through the operation, but, importantly, they also focus on revenue-driving innovation, as well.
Case in point is the company’s In-Cab Telematics toolset. This is an area that has been core, largely driven through a partnership with Qualcomm that goes back multiple decades. Dependence on a single vendor was deemed too risky to be a sustainable model. Devgun and his team got to work on a a multivendor transportation marketplace with consumer grade tablets, Internet-of-Things devices, and apps. The results are noted below, and they are the basis for Devgun to be named a Forbes CIO Innovation Award winner.
Peter High: Please describe the innovative idea that you and your team in IT pursued. Please be specific, including the steps you undertook to implement the idea(s).
Shaleen Devgun: Schneider is a pioneer in telematics innovation, beginning in 1989, with its partnership with Qualcomm to create the first in-cab two-way satellite communication system. This innovation was a strategic differentiator for Schneider, but it eventually led to a critical operational risk: Dependence on one vendor. This monolithic, single purpose-built system was installed in tens of thousands of tractors and trailers, any transition would be difficult.
Schneider’s TECH team stepped in and mitigated this risk and simultaneously created a multivendor transportation marketplace. We replaced the purpose-built system with consumer grade tablets, Internet-of-Things devices and apps. Our transportation marketplace is filled with custom Schneider apps and apps from third-party providers.
10/22/2018
Gartner Symposium was last week, and as they do each year at the event, the company has identified a top ten strategic technology trends for the year ahead. Gartner defines “strategic” as those technologies that will have significant disruptive potential over the next five years.” Here is a summary of the trends:
Nike’s Global CIO Jim Scholefield is leaving the company to join Merck as Chief Information and Digital Officer, effective Oct. 29.
Scholefield will be responsible for leading all aspects of information technology and digital strategy, including developing and implementing new and emerging technologies and capabilities to drive efficiencies, strengthen the security of the company’s infrastructure and support the company’s growth. He also will lead the development and innovation of digital strategy across the company to foster innovation.
Scholefield noted, “I’m honored and excited to have the opportunity to join Merck, a company that has made – and continues to make – a significant difference in the world. I look forward to contributing to the Executive Committee and to helping the company further succeed by driving industry-leading technology and digital capabilities across all aspects of the business.”
Shafiq Khan was remarkable digital leader at Marriott International. First as the Senior Vice President of eCommerce and then as the Senior Vice President of Channel Strategy and Distribution, he helped grow the company’s digital sales from $150 million to $15 billion. Under Khan’s watch, the company became one of the top-ten companies in digital sales in the United States.
A native of Pakistan, Khan would return frequently, and the state of the country’s education system for the poorest members of society were stark. Khan began to connect the dots between the work he did at Marriott and a way to help solve global literacy. Teach the World Foundation was born.
The company has developed digital tools to help teach those children who cannot afford basic education Pakistan, and the program has expended to Bangladesh, as well. Later this year, Malawi will be added as the third country. Khan makes the point that global literacy is not only a worthy undertaking to help the most vulnerable of the world’s citizens, but it should also have much broader economic and societal benefits. He describes his journey herein.
(To listen to a podcast version of this interview, please click this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: You are the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Teach the World Foundation. Could you describe the foundation and its mission?
Shafiq Khan: In a macro sense, our vision is to enhance human potential by furthering knowledge and learning, specifically by increasing literacy. Two out of seven people worldwide are not functionally literate, which is a huge cost for the world. To help minimize this issue, we decided to use our digital background to make a social impact on the world by enhancing human potential. Digital technology has clearly made a massive impact on every domain, and our world has changed as a result. However, this change has not translated effectively into the education space. Because education is a non-profit and non-competitive space, we have not seen digital technology leveraged there. Our mission is to establish and deploy models of literacy and learning effectively and with scale through the power of digital technology. We want to prove that we have a new way of learning that will address two massive issues that the world has.
To read the full article, please visit Fobres.
10/15/2018
By Peter High. Published in Forbes
Kai-Fu Lee is a true citizen of the world. Born in Taiwan, he emigrated to and was educated in the United States (including earning a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon). He worked for four legendary technology companies: Apple, Silicon Graphics, Microsoft, and Google. At multiple of these companies, he worked in China, including leading Google’s efforts into China.
His time leading Google China was notable as it was a rare exception of an American company succeeding for a time, growing market share from nine to 24 percent between 2005 and 2009. He believes that if Google had remained steadfast in their pursuit of the Chinese market, the company would have been able to have its own piece in the overall Chinese puzzle. He left the company to found his venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures in September of 2009, and a few months later, Google closed shop in mainland China.
Lee has written a new book AI Superpowers. China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, in which he describes China’s entrepreneurial rise, the parallel tracks that the US and China are on, and the difficulties companies from one country have in penetrating the other, the opportunity and the issues that artificial intelligence will lead to, and much more. Sinovation Ventures is a $2 billion fund, and a full third of that investment is in artificial intelligence. In this interview, he discusses themes from his book, his perspectives earned from having been a leader both in the US and in China, his investment philosophy, and especially artificial intelligence.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 28th interview in the IT Influencers series. To listen to past interviews with the likes of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Steve Case, Craig Newmark, Stewart Butterfield, and Meg Whitman, please visit this link.)
Peter High: In many ways, you personify what I and many others believe to be one of the key ingredients of America’s entrepreneurial spirit: the immigrant’s experience, which is fundamentally entrepreneurial. As a native of Taiwan, you were an immigrant to this country. You went to undergraduate and graduate school in the United States, and you worked for a number of iconic technology companies, such as Apple, Silicon Graphics, Microsoft, and Google. There was a time when people believed China lacked an entrepreneurial spirit to fully compete with the United States and Silicon Valley. That seems to have changed in recent years. As somebody who has spent time in both countries, could you talk about what has led to this dramatic growth of China’s entrepreneurial class?
Kai-Fu Lee: I believe a combination of factors has driven up the entrepreneurial spirit in China over the past twenty years. These factors are as follows:
There is a rapidly growing market with many business opportunities arising. The government has jumpstarted programs, such as the mass entrepreneurism and innovation plan, that are designed to reverse the traditional conservative mentality. Chinese entrepreneurs now have role models to look up to, such as Jack Ma, who was not a super genius with a Ph.D. from MIT, but instead, he was the boy next door who went to an ordinary school and could not get a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Jack went on to build the largest e-commerce empire in China based on inspiration.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
