A Geek Leader Podcast

September 20, 2019

AGL 122: Building Better Teams

Building Better Teams Today I’m doing a solo show talking about building better teams. In this episode I talk about the following: Foundation Interior Refinements Exterior FIRE is the acronym I use when describing building in this talk. Under each heading I discuss things I feel are important. Foundation Leadership. Pulling vs. Pushing Cultural Norms (IT Code) We Act Like an Owner We Have Each Other’s Back We Choose People over Process We Question our Assumptions We Think Big and Start Small We Don’t Create Waves, We Ride Them We Are Intentional About Our Work We Fail Fast and Recover […]

September 13, 2019

AGL 121: Vennard Wright, CIO of Iron Bow

About Vennard Vennard Wright (PMP, ITIL v3 Practitioner) is currently the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Vice President (VP) of Operations for Iron Bow Technologies. As CIO/VP of Operations, he provides leadership and oversight for the information technology (IT), order operations and manufacturing functions. In this capacity, it is his responsibility to transform the management of business technology capabilities and client services to support Iron Bow’s operations by ensuring that service delivery is in full alignment with senior leadership’s strategic goals and objectives. Prior to joining Iron Bow, his professional IT experience was comprised of multiple senior leadership roles which […]

September 6, 2019

AGL 120: Christopher O’Donnell from HubSpot

About Christopher Christopher O’Donnell is a technologist, musician and public speaker who has built dozens of web and mobile products. His product portfolio ranges from language learning products for the U.S. military to the most popular free CRM product in the world. Today, Christopher serves as Senior Vice President of Hubspot Product, which he led from startup ($50M in revenue) to successful publicly-traded company ($600M in revenue). Christopher has become a staple in the product management community, and was recently named one of the Best Product Leaders of 2019 (via Comparably). As an experienced leader, he is passionate about leading […]

August 30, 2019

AGL 119: President Martha D. Saunders

About Dr. Saunders Martha Dunagin Saunders is the sixth President of the University of West Florida. In her 30-plus years in higher education, she has served as in academic and leadership roles at universities in Florida, Georgia, Wisconsin and Mississippi. Her area of academic expertise is in public relations and crisis communication for which she has won numerous awards, including two Public Relations Society of America’s coveted Silver Anvils. Saunders led the University of West Florida to its status as a top-performing public universities with the third-highest score in the Florida Board of Governors performance metrics. She established the UWF […]

August 23, 2019

AGL 118: The role of CISO with Sean Walls

About Sean Sean Walls is currently Vice President of the Cyber Security division for a multi-billion-dollar international standards, QA, digital testing and cybersecurity corporation. He has 19 years of experience in cybersecurity and information technology and is a frequent keynote speaker and advocate for cyber security. Today We Talked About: The importance of influence and relationship building as a CISO Qualities to develop if you want to be a CISO Aligning security with business priorities Risk Management fundamentals Finding and retaining good talent Give a Career Path Give Praise Have Humility Have Empathy The expanding attack surface and changing threat […]

August 16, 2019

AGL 117: From Right to Left with Mike Burrows

About Mike Burrows Agendashift founder Mike Burrows is known to the Agile and Lean-Agile communities as the author of Kanban from the Inside (2014) and Agendashift (2018), the creator of the Featureban and Changeban simulation games, a keynote speaker at conferences around the world, and as a consultant, coach, and trainer. His new book Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile is published August 15th, 2019. Today We Talked About Our Last Episode The new book! How it relates to previous books Definition of Done Express in outcome oriented terms What it means for Agile (“My kind of Agile”: people collaborating over the rapid evolution […]