Leadership: Data and Strategy (Notes from Week of May 6 - 12, 2019)

This was a very fun week for listening. I caught a ton of material and insights from very creative leaders on how they've looked at strategy and building great teams, align companies and progress in a successful manner. Their methodologies or frameworks didn't always align, which was also refreshing to hear. We often get stuck on the same methods if we hear them repeatedly - I'm under the impression that this becomes dangerous if held as a truism when others may question this way or go away from it - there isn't a one-size-fits-all to building businesses! Especially when information is plentiful, and people / ideas are a few clicks away.Zeke Zelker is a super-creator who has pushed the envelope of creating and producing engaging videos, whether it's marketing material or tv or films. Definitely worth checking out, especially as media content in video / audio has increasingly been the mode of consumption.Benito Cachinero of the Egon Zehnder Leadership program talked about 4 things he looks for and teaches in leadership. Also, he covered the importance of how to strategically allocate resources when looking for growth or expansion, both in economic and human capital.A CES overview of consumer tech trends by the a16z squad was intriguing! Alarms, smart home and other products that caught their eye as options to drive the future of homes and how we'll interact on an everyday basis.Caryn Seidman-Becker discussed privacy of data and personal biometrics as the CEO of CLEAR - trying to improve the ease of security while fighting the image that people think of when hearing what it is they do to enable this. Brett Hurt was fascinating - building multiple companies early in life and calling up his friends to start a new one. Deciding the name? Hilarious. All of this before getting into Clarabridge's sentiment analysis with Ellen Loeshelle. She realized how much different types and ways to look at data / text could help in analyzing a plurality of business cases, across many industries - not just customer data for their clients. Last but certainly not least, Stephanie Cohen needs no introduction - but she discussed how she perceives data for company progress and leading the groups needed to achieve her goals.I hope you all enjoy!

• Zeke Zelker, Creative Transmedia Branding (Wharton XM)
• Talks about his films being cine-experiences, and as a DIY videographer how he can control all aspects Considers business along with creative direction - makes sure to align them
• 4 phases of content: ignite, sharing short form content, main event, reward
• iDreamMachine - his prod co. & producing Billboard about 4 people living on a billboard
• Has 7th most viewed drama on Hulu (InSearchOf) - engaging audiences to become a part of the story
• Encourages people in the environment to create content, whether it's a blog or short snippets - become part of the overall story
• Chris Carosa, author of From Cradle to Retirement: Child IRA (Wharton XM)

• Making money as child, pre-teen and then teen
• Child: golf balls selling - golf course, lemonade stands, etc
• Preteen: babysitting, lawn mowing, card collecting
• Teen: W2 eventually, card collecting, babysitting and other types - photography, writing
• Parents can save $ for child by investing in child IRA ~$1k or up to gift amounts of $6k now as long as W2 income

• Benito Cachinero, Egon Zehnder Leadership Solutions (Wharton XM)
• Previous President HR at DuPont HR
• Discussing potential ~4 factors for leadership (direct contradiction to measurements in being accurate)
• Aligning resources for growth strategy in new markets - China vs Midwest, for instance
• Pulse Check on Consumer Tech Trends (a16z 1/17/2019)

• With Benedict Evans, Steven Sinofsky
• Trends at CES - no consumer product themselves, just a lot of all parts of supply chains / manufacturing Batteries in 10k - 100k, so know what you want
• TVs were not curved (nobody bought curved) - had 3 ft bar and tv came out above it in 10-15sec
• Or edgeless Samsung blocks "The Wall" where you could make them as large as you wanted - LCD in any shape/size
• Sizes could be anything now, amortized supply chain and manufacturing plants vs idling
• Media content providers and apps
• Pausing / syncing and Samsung apps with Apple video - clunky or AirPlay hardware
• NorCal vs SoCal or California vs other states (think Apple phone vs the rest)
• Easiest product to get alarm from 12+ companies for an hour to plug stuff in and it's done
• Proprietary electrical wires until they got low energy Bluetooth and now it's everywhere
• Lock or other nuts and bolts having SKU proliferation or new homes Have to know gen contractors, Home Depot, developers and fragmented
• FirstAlert smoke alarms - mesh wifi since they're hardwired or battery Put wifi in the alarm (to go to phone, etc…) - lots to do it with insurance or risks
• Alexa chip supplier to connect everything
• Apple tried to do Home Kit but eliminated everyone because almost nothing was implemented - wasn't easy
• Amazon has leverage for hardware but it has to benefit them for Alexa and being useful
• If all makers saw HomeKit, could join war for Alexa vs Assistant (now that everything has their discovery appliances / connect)
• Compare electric toaster to holding bread in front of fire and similar progressions
• Show about running experiments is CES vs show about finding business value
• Cultural part of CES - Japanese hand clapper The founder of Ukrainian and employee and others that were hustling
• Caryn Seidman-Becker, CEO of Clear (Wharton XM)

• Biometrics and buying Clear
• Talking about the reactions for people getting to skip lines - make it more efficient
• Allow TSA agents to work on what is actually important
• Trying to describe to change customer behavior in the privacy aspect of what they keep
• Biometric data but encrypted and secure

• Brett Hurt (@databrett), co-founder and CEO of data.world (Wharton XM)

• Discussion of Edgecase (Compare Metrics), BazaarVoice (running backend for a lot of ads)
• How they stumbled onto the data.world site - calling his co-founders of next big idea
• Rod Hochman, MD and President, CEO of Providence St Joseph Health Leadership (Leadership in Action, WhartonXM)
• Talking about being a junior member of the board of physicians when he started out
• Leadership and how he went into the administration side as a young physician
• Administration for many physicians is beyond the time / scope of many - hard to think of it without doing MBA or taking time Important to combine the two for the expertise and management
• With this business, how much is going on between clinics or hospitals and the network
• Sentiment Analysis, Ellen Loeshelle, Dir. of Prod Management at Clarabridge (Data Skeptic 4/20/19)

• How positive or negative a customer may be expressing a review or otherwise, polarity
• Academically, may have entire text as positive vs negative
• Clarabridge - helping their clients understand their own customers
• With hotel experience: could be multiple levels - service, cleanliness, check-in, overall
• Using a clause, individual tokens, lemmas, parts of speech and how they're related
• Dealing with 21 languages natively, and having computational linguists on staff to understand the grammatical syntax or individual contractors Vocabulary can change, but not necessarily syntax (think: sick)
• Sentiment is rules-based engine as BI tool for her end users - full control / transparency for analysis ML in place with w2vec for tuning rules in the engine since those change based on context/industry
• Flipping sentiment or negating and modifiers as using the extreme ends of sentiment analysis (-5 to 5 scale) Structured stays similar, but lexicon changes contextually and sarcasm / transcriptions as more difficult unless obvious or explicit
• Sentiment goes along with their emotion or effort analysis for customers
• Enterprise tool and APIs for engine on enriching internal systems
• Considering sentiment analysis as table stakes now - different than when they first started when they were ahead
• Client in small kitchen appliances used Clarabridge to treat sentiment on competitors, specifically for pressure cookers Eventually saw that the sentiment split for pressure cookers and that pushed them into doing Instapot
• Stephanie Cohen, Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy (a16z 5/7/2019)

• Stephanie - CSO for Goldman, member of management committee, Was in M&A and investment banking for Goldman
• M&A is experience-based business, M&A with same people - rarely would be one-and-done - just a method of executing strategy
• Bad examples of M&A - likely hard to keep up with growth or expectation of growth but tries to buy the growth
• Her worst example: Fiat Chrysler with government owing, Canada + US and pension
• Trends: velocity of M&A is greater (cited $1tn of M&A last quarter), amount of private equity has about $1.5tn for buyers (divest vs sell)
• When she started, needed a strategic buyer - now, just need to provide an answer to how the business is a good alone activity
• China / Asia as higher volume in general
• "Anti-trends": still very analog as M&A, person-to-person; continued evolution may come with digital capabilities
• Preparing or thinking of selling:
• Don't wait too long to sell (assets no longer strategic, more the business will atrophy) - be proactive of business portfolio
• Build relationships early on with financial or strategic buyers
• Best M&A banker he's seen: Tim Ingrassia (analyst originally) - corporations, legal, bankers Friendly, relationships and doing business without 'playbook'
• Figuring out strategy, which companies you want to buy and the alternatives (top targets, organic version, next a, b, c plan)
• What to pay, rumors of what others would pay - what's it cost to you?
• Thinking creatively about deal? How to design the right compensation packages? What's the integration strategy?
• Clients are thinking of deal with integration people and how to get synergies to work the best
• "Charm offensive" - ultimately, most sellers make decision on valuation - if you've developed best relationships, you get other information
• Walk-away price
• Top down vs bottom up strategy - mentions $CAT as shifting toward RR vs sales, and not unique to just financial services
• Not one instead of the other (fee-based vs recurring) - good deposits bring in other clients Creating and building business with the right economy within various parts of the business
• Going forward, people running businesses everyday have the best idea of how to exploit markets If client-focused and outwardly-focused, should come up with great ideas together and to push forward
• Exploration is hard or unnatural - high-energy, client-driven and solving in a creative way
• Creative and quiet thoughts - leaders need time away, but people have to be exploratory to consider new plans
• Example for tech and how to have the right conversations based on seeing what other companies are doing
• She says that with how fast tech is growing, they need to work together and partner
• Accelerate as trying to push new ideas Committal vs part-time - allowed them to fund and go with their idea, or keep them head of board
• Belief in fintech for a huge opportunity - have tended to build things on their own, but have pivoted to not do everything
• What should we buy? What should we build? Want fintech to come and partner with Goldman.
• Most of life is on phone and it's almost seamless - but not financial life for mobile
• Ruth Zukerman, Co-founder of FlyWheel Sports and SoulCycle (Wharton XM)
• Creative director