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As a Chief HR Strategist, Cindy Kay Olson draws on her life changing experience as CHRO of Enron to help Fortune 500 companies build cultures where values aren't just talked about but are on the hearts and minds of all employees. We talk with Cindy about her experience at Enron, how companies can apply what she learned, the role of technology in helping build and transform culture, and more!

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welcome to the inaugural episode of missions matter by disco a show about building and scaling culture in the age of digital transformation I'm Jeremy Vandehey co-founder and CEO of disco disco is an app that helps companies celebrate reinforce and measure their values inside of tools employees use so things like slack Microsoft teams Google Hangouts and we help our customers create values driven org switch which lead to happier more productive people and today for for our first episode I'm really excited to introduce Cindy Olson and Cindy's the the former CHR O of Enron and has has definitely taken that experience to help companies today build cultures where values are more than just things that live on posters inside of the cafeteria and as her role is the the chief 8 HCM strategist at choice strategic alliance I'm really excited to speak with you Cindy about your experience what you've learned and how you're helping companies apply that today so that we have more values driven organizations which we at disco believe that'll lead to happier places as well as more sustainable profits she's also a very distinguished author keynote speaker and a big technology enthusiast so I'm very excited to have Cindy on today thanks Jeremy I'm excited to be here I think what you guys are doing it just though is needed and I'm really pleased that you asked me to participate in what you guys are doing awesome in today's episode we're we're gonna discuss your experience at Enron as well as lessons learned and then get into the importance of values and how to leverage technology to drive cultural transformations now let me start with my background because like I said I really believe that where I came from and the experiences that I had especially at Enron kind of shaped what I really am passionate about today in my current role but when I from Wichita State the company I went to work for was Koch Industries moved to Omaha and went to work for inner doors and enter North End became in line but I had a 23 year career at Enron and I was used across the company as a transformational leader and so I moved around the company leading organizations transforming those organizations side by side with McKenzie and in 1997 I went to in our capital and trade and ran the back office of our new emerging business in Ron capital and trade and we don't risk products around commodities that had been deregulated and so I was involved in really helping build and shake the culture of the newest part of our business the merging part of what Enron became but in 1999 as I was working as the head of the back office and in our capital N Trade Ken Lay asked me to come to corporate and I had been a member or leading our culture committing across the organization I work closely with Ken Lay to help craft kind of our brand what our grand was going to look like and feel like the coming years into that role I wanted to ask for HR because I saw that we were becoming an intellectual capital company but then we really didn't have the HR tools and a strategic leadership to really be bad and so I led a charm we built the first human capital management integrated system the HCM that was totally integrated with employee self-service on an SI p platform and I was working closely with the CHR O's of Goldman Sachs and American Express when we encountered bankruptcy after the bankruptcy filing I actually stayed on Enron until July of 2002 because we felt like there might be an opportunity to emerge from bankruptcy but by July it was pretty clear that we were so far gone in terms of the media and what we had become in the as far as a villain a fraudulent company you know you kind of name all the bad things and and Enron has been you know really became bad and so it was becoming just a liquidation of assets at that point and so I left the company but I always had had the concern why we fail because the culture we had created it Enron was one where everybody came to work every day and we we felt like we're changing the world we had a million resumes in our system when we imploded everybody it seemed in Houston and other parts of the world wanted to work for Enron and quite honestly the leadership of Ken Lay was one of the he was one of the best leaders that I had seen and I knew most the CEOs in Houston and so it haunted me why had we failed part of what's what's interesting to me is is maybe understanding that culture a little bit more and and things that you all did to kind of build up that culture how did you like talk about or think about the culture like what did it what did it feel like named for the sixth year in a row the most innovative company there were like 12 different elements and the the vision of the mission of the company was one of the most important and I think most people don't didn't even realize kind of what Enron did at the time but what we what we were what our mission was and why we had so many people that wanted to work for us as it was a mission that was quite frankly bigger than any of us and it was the mission to deregulate commodities all commodities so that the ultimate income and end-user would pay less and so when reaching work every day we felt like we were changing the world because we had a mission like that that's great yeah I think as you know Disco's is very keen on helping companies actually live and reinforce their values and like on paper and run had you know values that a lot of Fortune 500 companies share so I'm personally interested in maybe understanding that culture a little bit more and and things that you all did to kind of build up that culture I mean I values you're right our values had been authored by Ken Lay and they were respect integrity communication and excellence and many companies today have those same values and Ken Lay wrote those values and live those values but quite frankly as I speak to audiences today that was one of the biggest problems we had with our culture starting and probably the late 90s and into 2000 because as the Enron capital and trade organization became a bigger part of Enron the values that Ken Lay had written and we all had roles right those values were not doing lived by many of the executives in that organization including Jeff and so they became almost hypocritical so it sounds like you had a CEO that not only came up with the values but was somewhat supportive and living them day to day at least at first it was there a turning point you felt or that you could remember when there started to be a disconnect between how people behaved and what the values were and do you have advice that you give to companies who you know are growing really fast and and want to avoid that point of no return back you know here's later and really evaluated what was one of the biggest issues we had was the fact that our culture changed so fast because we've become so successful with our risk management / trading organization that we kind of lost track lost track of where you know we're where we came from and one of things that I talk about when I speak is you know success caused us all to believe that we couldn't fail and you and you become arrogant and you really you really believe that no matter what you know you're not gonna you're not going to sound I think every every company has to have you know that compelling mission that compelling vision or else they would never get started you wouldn't be able to convince employees to leave a cushy job or investors to give you money or customers to trust you with their business I think the real challenge comes when the two inflection points what do you do when things aren't going right how do you act and what do you do when things are going really well and there's a lot of there's different challenges at each place I think an Enron situation you were growing so quickly that you it's really easy to overlook some of the foundational problems because you could just always point to higher stock prices and that also attracts a different type of person so we think a lot of Disko about how do you hire for values over culture because if you're just hiring for culture you might be bringing in a lot of the same people so be curious you know how you thought about that admission it was also based on the fact that we had these values we also made it made it easy for the best and brightest to work at Enron and at the time I always tell people at the time that was because we had a Starbucks know Lobby and we had a fitness center and we had a doctor's office the other thing that we had is everyone was an owner of the company basically because every single person in the company got options and so had created a culture that there are a lot of perks and we also had a culture where it didn't matter how long you've been there what mattered is how much you contributed and based on your contribution that's that's how you got paid and the other thing that that was exciting about Enron is we had an open market for talent people could move all over the world it gave employees an opportunity to build a internal resume and a kind of our philosophy was attract the best and the brightest develop them so that everybody in the world wants them and then keep them and so we didn't have an unbelievable culture from that respect and it's funny because I've connected with a lot of Enron people in the last three years and everyone to almost a tee said has said to me it was the best place that I'll ever work I don't know that there can ever be a place like that again where you had so much energy and you felt so compelled to change the world and so they even say that they should go back and work for Enron for a couple years even if they knew that a neuron was gonna implode they'd do it it was a place where the culture was incredible we had a lot of resumes a lot of people that want to work for Enron well so that's pretty powerful I mean they were so connected to the culture and their work that they would choose to relive a pretty painful experience and I think it's also you know a little scary and that there's people who can be so excited and bought in that we almost kind of blind ourselves to some of the at the outcomes of our actions and I'd be curious like how do you prevent this from happening again when you really dive under the covers and understood kind of where we were in terms of our values we'd run away from those values and that was one of the biggest reason is why we fail because we had become so arrogant that we believed that no matter what we took yeah that makes sense thank you for for sharing that and I think you know part of what's what's fascinating to me about that is you know you're you're surrounded by people who are really bought into this mission and I think it's a strong one of like helping millions of people you know pay less for the things that they use every day like that's that's very compelling and when that's kind of reinforced again this is just my take I'd love to hear your thoughts on it when that's reinforced by you know a stock price that keeps going up and keeps doubling you you feel like you're doing the right things to accomplish that mission so I think at the employee level I definitely understand especially when that's you know reinforced with all of the development opportunities and you're surrounded by people who are just as smart or just as competitive as you that that can be a very exciting environment I am curious you know how because you hear about some of the like the things happening at the top of the organization people who are setting the strategy like the the lays the Skilling's of the world like how how did they kind of fit into that or where was that that disconnect between values and strategy and what is the executives role in in you know building and fostering not just a culture of competition or development but one that you know balances profits with purpose and and sustainability great question okay and and and I think that you've got a look at both laying skilling and understand the contributions that they made to the strategy because they both contributed and I would say that we would never have gotten to a stock price of ninety one dollars a share had we not had both of those those men but then they both had their weaknesses too and so when you look at when you look at Jeff Skilling you what he created Enron capital and trade starting out as an Mackenzie consultant in 1991 and by the time that he was promoted into the CEO role in 2000 that business unit was the majority of our income and we had we've grown to a sixty billion dollar market cap company so without stealing we would never have gone to that incredible innovation but along with that came the arrogance and in 1996 as I was I was sitting next to Ken Lay at a country Vinod diabeetus luncheon and and Ken Lay was was my mentor okay and he asked me how did the traders treat people cuz he knew I was in Enron capital and trade at the time and I said Joe Chan you know they're really rough and I was being nice ok they're really rough and then I said that they make a lot of money for us don't they and I believe that the board and Ken said the same thing about Jeff because I believe they saw that the arrogance now face what they really saw was the innovation because he was why we were innovative but he was also arrogant and and and they saw that but they said yeah but he makes a lot of money for us so it sounds like there was some awareness that you know there was some not-so-great activity happening but when you paired that with you know soaring stock prices and profits it was really easy to look the other way and I'm curious what the interactions were like between Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling and even everyday employees who you know probably could sense that you know not everything was on the up and up but it becomes you know increasingly clear that as soon as it's it's really easy to detach actions from your values it becomes a gray area in terms of you know what's acceptable or or what's not it's very interesting our PR department didn't try to survey our external constituents like our customers and the analyst and our vendors and they ask them to explain or tell them how Enron had minor change from late 2002 mid-2001 a matter of about nine months and they and they found out that we were almost 40% less trustworthy and 40% more arrogant and that was in the course of nine months when Jeff took over the company and the leader of Enron so when I talk to CEOs today I warned them that they don't really pay attention to the leader and the traits that leader has you got to understand that the company's culture will take on the culture over the the traits of the other leader that's in in basically in the CEO position great yeah that makes sense I am interested in just like hearing other other like what were other processes like inside of Enron and like what did you take away from those like how did you for example hire how did you do things like onboarding performance reviews like other HR jobs that kind of explain the culture introduced the culture and kind of you know helped permeate and reinforce the culture like what did what did some of those things look like sure I mean I felt like we were probably best and breed on those things as well we had we recruited from you know all the colleges really around the world I was actually the executive lead for recruiting up Wellesley we brought in about 60 what we called analysts and associates almost every quarter and the the goal of that program was to place those those individuals into roles and move them around the company so that they got a taste of a commercial role maybe a back-office role and they came out of the program well-rounded and with the ability to kind of choose where they wanted to go in the future and then the other thing we did is when they contributed they got paid and and so it was it was a organization or a way that we built our talent or groomed our talent and then we we encouraged them to grow and go out and do great things right one of the things that we we realized was that when you when you as a manager rate someone or or basically talk about their performance a lot of times that's more about you than it is about the person that you're rating yeah I think there's some interesting competitive aspects to it where you may be more or less likely to give open and honest feedback and that's why when we work with companies we try and create first a culture of trust so that people actually feel safe you know giving feedback knowing that it's coming from a good place and it's going to go to a good place I'd be curious like how did you know the managers go about collecting feedback and what did that aggregation process look like we had all of our managers twice a year under the performance management process and then and then when we did is we had them come together and in groups similar jobs and they had to actually talk about their people and they know there were times when it was two days of just trying to figure out where someone really was based on what other people in the room perceived them to be able to do and then we allowed people to basically back their own careers and the thing that I think encouraged innovation in the organization was the fact that we allowed people to go out build things and they didn't have to ask for permission so the same training system that we called Aaron online was built by our training group and Kendra's Kim Lee and Jeff Skilling didn't even know that they were doing that hell it was almost finished and it became the trading platform for the rest of it for the rest of the country basically the rest of the world and then when we built our HCM I didn't ask for permission before we went out and decided to monetize the investment it was something that I just felt like we should do and by the way it was one of our analysts and associates that really came up with that idea yeah that makes a lot of sense and I think something I'm I'm interested in now is is that level of one thing we find it at disco is autonomy is an incredible motivator for people right like not just the ability to move around and change jobs my first job I was actually at a in a rotational program and that was kind of the most transformative two-year period in my professional career so I think being able to do that at scale would be incredibly powerful I think what what I'm interested in is is how do you provide that level of autonomy and risk-taking in an environment that you know doesn't have some of these negative repercussions like how do you work with companies to build up programs like that but in a in a in a space where you know it's it's not success at all costs its success in a in a way that's still in line with what our company is trying to do that you know doesn't have any negative repercussions necessarily the past really set the stage for the learnings that I use today and that I try and share with people and I think that the learn from the innovation lesson is this we always talked about having a culture where we had tight controls from a leading and a risk management standpoint and even Jeff Skilling said that you know we're going to be loose and let people run with ideas but we're going to be tight on our controls our legal controls and our risk management controls and I think as I looked back on where though that the tight controls broke down and this is you know this is another whole discussion around legal versus ethical most of the things that you dig into it Enron we did have tight controls we have every law firm in Houston that blessed everything that we did as well just because something's legal doesn't necessarily mean it's ethical and just a quick example on that okay the point in time or Andy fast out to our board a schedule of the bouncy partnerships that we've done we we'd agreed to and was and that he managed and in the board meeting that day he showed them that if we had not formed those part off-balance-sheet partnerships that our credit rating would be lower than what it was today and as I speak to executive level I I said what would you do if you are a company that your stocks traded on that you know on the on the stock market and you had your CFO come in and show basically what a great job be done by by these off-balance sheet partnerships because now your cost of money was lower what would you say and most companies I think would say oh could be more of that that's great fast out and that's what they said but then when you look back on that was that ethical it was legal because we had it all read at all at blessed but is it ethical I really feel like the learnings from Enron are almost endless and and it's one of those things that I try today to take what I've learned and then help other companies not go down that same path because we're twenty five thousand people lose their jobs and eighty-five thousand Arthur Andersen people lose their jobs and market cap of sixty billion is disintegrated that's not fun for anyone and I just don't want to see any other company I have to go through that right yeah yeah and I think that's it's a great transition point and maybe there's examples where you know we dive back into something you experienced it at Enron but if you want to do like a summary just like the radio version of some of your biggest takeaways from that experience and then we can transition into how you work with companies yeah you know when I I think the summary of the lessons that I've learned is and values have got to be in the hearts and minds of employees and not on the wall that has to be lived and they have to be reinforced just because something's legal doesn't necessarily mean that it's ethical and you've almost got to get into examples for people to understand that leadership is a is a big and the other thing is leadership is a huge responsibility and that's not becomes clear where you see the devastation that leadership or lack of leadership created with Enron and you're right many other companies I mean you know I don't I'm not going to name them but every day there's an issue with culture right and culture is one of a big and the other thing too is culture is the biggest threat business strategy culture is the biggest business strategy that any leadership team can have and yet in many many cases people don't even understand what could work how to create a culture what impacts a culture and and I think from the Enron lesson I learned that it's three more than just talking about it it's everything yeah I think again another thing we find it discos companies are realizing that cultures is a competitive advantage like he said I think ninety percent of companies I'm not sure what the other 10% are thinking but ninety percent of companies surveyed rate culture as critical super important yet it's it is kind of this this abstract thing right and I think it was something like 15 percent actually know how to you know implement cultural changes or or make those types of transformations that that lead to those exciting results of I think it was you know an 8x performance of the S&P average sorry the S&P 500 average so it's it's definitely has real results and I think what's exciting to us at disco is you can have you can have incredible outcomes for leadership for employees but you can do it the right way you can do it in a way that's in line with your original mission with how you think the world should be and how you want your team and employees to act so that's why we're so excited about values as well as you know learning from your experience so I'm curious you know just take a minute how do you work with with companies today and and what what is that what has that been like I started working with the technology company here in Kansas City about four years ago and I really kind of wanted to understand technology infrastructure and that's what our company does it partners with companies that provide the infrastructure of what the erps are based on so that you know like Citrix and Nutanix and vonti and some of those bigger infrastructure companies and it was clear to me as I was working with with all of those partners that the reason the infrastructure was changing and everyone was going to the cloud was because of the way people want to work in the future and and they want to be able to work from anywhere and any from any device and that whole user experience is a big part of culture I mean you cannot get away from that okay technology is a huge part of the culture that you're creating in your organization what I'm trying to do is bring these all class thought leaders that can helps new Charro's and CIOs work together to be able to address the talent issue that they have in their organization of which culture is a piece of it leadership is a piece of it but the technology that you use in your company as a piece of it and it really goes back to the things that I I shared with the CEOs that I want to talk to you in 2001 it's just that making it easier for your best and brightest to work in your company today is really around technology I just I'll have that values that you need used to have a vision and mission you still need to know the market for talent and about the leadership development but instead of the doctors offices and all the stuff that's kind of peripheral now free food and all that the biggest issue is are you allowing your employees to have the best technology that allows them to work from anywhere on any device so that's how I work with companies today who provide these thought leadership groups either there for free of charge age I partner with ADP and building these all over the country we're starting to bring CIOs and CEOs into the mix and we're delivering world-class by leaders that deliver insights to them that help them be better in their organizations that's great yeah that makes a lot of sense what what what are some of the big technological trends do you see that are kind of changing you know how employees interact how with with each other with their tools with their their managers mobile I mean everything really is go into mobile and it talks about the Millennials right but just wait just wait till Gen Z or in our workforce right they went mobile they've grown up having an iPhone or a phone in their hand right since they were little and that's the way they want to work yeah I think mobile kind of paved the way for you know real time you can chat with anybody 24 hours a day you have all the information in your pocket and that's definitely making its way into the workplace as well with absolute slack and Microsoft teams you can chat you can send files in a moment's notice and it definitely it has really accelerated communication but also created challenges of how do you inject culture into those environments and how does IT think about you know deploying it you've gotta be able to deliver an experience that allows employees to be productive like they worked in their consumer life so that's the biggest issues that I see but being able to do that from an IT standpoint is pretty it there's a it's a lot of work and it's very complicated and then the other thing I think is is important is AI and and and the whole thing that Google's had for a long time which is you're going to anticipate what you're going to add right so a is gonna give all that learning to the to the system so that when you start asking questions it's gonna have the answer to you before you even finish your question yeah and one thing that that we find it be curious if you find this in your research or working with companies as well as we see a big shift in you mentioned the youngest generation coming into the workforce just wanting to feel more connected more connected to their co-workers to the work that they're doing and and we ultimately view technology as a way to kind of foster those connections so how does that happen when you know more people are working remotely or working from anywhere and what does it look like to kind of build or inject culture into those tools so I'm curious you know how that overlays with something super important you mentioned earlier around you know how do you build up and and retain the best talent yeah point out something that I think is absolutely critical that I've I'm kind of missed but the connectivity to each other in the company you're right everybody's working from wherever right they're going into the office if you go to most offices you're gonna see Hotelling offices so how do you stay connected I think that is gonna be technology so I think there's emerging technologies that are starting to address the fact that that everyone will be working from different parts of the world and how do you stay connected and how do you keep that culture of the company and build that culture when everybody's not saying building cool yeah that makes sense this some of this stuff is hard to quantify especially in the short term when you know you're chasing a hitting a target or a profit goal for this quarter it can be really easy and even at a company of six people I've felt those trade-offs myself as the CEO to you know do something that's a little bit more short-sighted that might hurt your culture in the longer term so how do you think leadership kind of balances that and then a second part to that is how do you think about ROI of the programs of implementing culture and investing in technology that not just makes it easier to connect but actually helps kind of foster those connections that we talked about yes so you know from an ROI standpoint I get that asked a lot so tell me what's the ROI for a culture a culture of innovation or a culture of employee engagement or whatever and I think it's different from each it for each organization I know from working with Marcus Buckingham they've got some statistics around that and the more English an organization is they have a you know a way to transform that into ROI I guess what I say when I talk to organizations as you can't afford not to do this because in the case of Enron for instance you know there was 60 million dollars with a market cap that was lost there were 85,000 at anderson jobs twenty-five thousand jobs in our jobs and all the customers and vendors of these organizations it was though as a use huge price tag and and I say to people I really believe that getting on resume when off there's still those kind of things happening today and leadership quite frankly I think is one of the most important things to start with because if you don't have leaders that understand the value and I will say this i love i love what Bob Chapman said to me one day when I asked him the question so how do you quantify the work that you do with CEOs and he's working with some some of the biggest CEOs in the country and he says give me a break she goes you just know that this you have a more productive workforce when you when you leave like this and I believe his leadership style is a leadership style that every every organization needs to think about at least and have and this truly human leadership that he describes in his book and he talks to CEOs about it's really simple there their mission a very way miller is to improve the lives of the people they touch that is mission for your company not I mean they want to be the best bottle producer or whatever they want to improve the lives of people they touch and I think if a leader just says I want to improve the lives of the people that work in my organization and then use that filter for everything that they do that's great yeah we actually have a question from one of our customers this is from Esteban at magma labs how and when did Enron leadership communicate difficulties to people and how transparent can or should leaders be as huge example I remember when we were going through our bankruptcy and we hadn't filed for bankruptcy yet that there was a lot of media coverage of what was going on and I kind of took stepped out this was kind of before social media so it was a little easier to do then but I made sure that I talked to everyone on our floor every day about what was going on and published shared with them more than I should have shared from someone else's standpoint I felt like I was sharing exactly what I needed to cause being transparent I wanted them to know exactly what was going on I had several people later say they really appreciated that a great example of this this is again I'm going to talk about Bob Chapman through the financial crisis they never laid off anyone and they knew that they needed to lay people off but they didn't want to do that because they knew they were going to screw up their culture and so what they decided to do is ask for everyone's suggestions and spend all the way down to the employees and they had people come back and say let us pray I mean all these different options we'll go part-time we'll cut our salary for xxx they asked them to help solve the problem not just change their culture it actually made their culture stronger and he said that that was just that he didn't realize that was going to happen but when you start asking employees to be part of the solution instead of doing it to one but asking them what they think should be done that's when you get a lot of loyalty and commitment and I always used to say what you want is commitment you don't want compliance you want commitment yeah and I think that's an incredibly difficult lesson especially for you know less experienced leaders to learn is that there's so many you've spent so much time building a smart team and you're actually doing yourself a disservice if you're not tapping them for ideas and creative solutions so that that makes a ton of sense cool this next question comes from Matthew at lattice engines as companies grow they develop highly specialized functions as well as geographically diverse teams this can lead to subcultures across a company some healthy some perhaps less healthy what's your view on this phenomenon and our subculture is a good thing and how do they come together to make one big culture subcultures or subcultures way back in Enron right you're always gonna have subcultures within a culture so I don't think you're ever gonna get away from it it probably becomes even more prevalent in in this world of working from anywhere everything's really done in teams right and so creating a team culture you're gonna be involved in a team culture every time you move to a new team are you you're involved in in multiple teams and the Marcus Buckingham a solution to that and I'm not saying it's the only one I'm just saying that I believe that you've got to have really strong team leaders they show for a retail environment where they looked at the performance a group of teams all over the country and the high-performing teams had great team leaders and what does a great team leader do they do all the things we've been talking about today they communicate they're transparent they're honest and open they motivate people they let people make decisions and so when you've got great team leaders then you're creating a culture that you want in every single team that's formed and so I think that's what you've got to focus on I mean everybody always says as people don't leave a company they leave a manager or a team leader and so if you've got team leaders that aren't really doing that the kind of leader that you you want to foster your corporate culture remember the culture is a is a reflection of the leader I mean you've got to either train those those leaders or you've got to do something different and I know the problem that every company has is a fact that a lot of times they use the team leader or the manager title to promote technically strong people that don't necessarily like to lead people and I think that's something that every organization needs to look at because leading people is one of the most important things that you have when you're building a culture you've got to have great team leaders great this kind of ties to you know some of the discussion we were having earlier around you know there are companies that you know have the potential to do great things but could also you know ultimately end up as a new Enron and I think the new currency is is data and I'm curious you know how you advise as CIOs and chr OS are coming together data is incredibly important and complex right like there's now new regulations that you know prevent how much data companies can collect about their users as well as their employees and when you pair that with a new generation who is very digitally competent and also very aware of you know how some companies have been using their data I'm curious you know how CIOs see a charros should should think about that as as new tools emerge for them to you know better understand and and you know make better decisions for the good actors but also you know the inverse of that is maybe there's you know some not-so-great decisions being made because companies have so much data at their disposal yeah their end drives one of the biggest reasons why you've got to have the CIO and CH ro working together and now I've been saying this kind of for three years if you're gonna have a you're going to make sure that you're using the right data okay that's the biggest question are you using data that's accurate what data is the right day they don't give you an example you don't want to use data like with our time to hire I mean that to me that's a that's a measure that's about the past right you want to be using data to drive predictability you want to drive use data to drive the future and I think the CHR o and the CIO have got to work together to figure that out especially for the talent they're driving the talent and the culture in their organization I really believe that you've got to look at your organization one of the things that you really want to drive and then what's the day that you have to get to be able to drive those results and I think it's there's a lot of things that are similar but I think there's some differences and I think that's why leadership teams have to really look at data and figure out what's the most accurate data that you can get and what exactly do you want to measure and what kind of dated you do you really want to use to drive your future that's great do you have any kind of parting thoughts or messages you feel like you didn't get out that you want to that you want to share the last parting thought is this is a great time to be a leader in your organization there's so many things that are happening from a technology standpoint from a talent standpoint it gives me chills to think about the kind of impact that great leaders and technology can can have on an organization right now and so that's what drives me and I would be more than happy to sit down with you and talk more about any of these subjects because I'm passionate about the leadership teams and companies really figuring out how to how to really maximize the utilization of their talent in their organizations awesome well Cindy I think this has been an incredibly insightful conversation for me so I want to thank you Cindy for being our first guest and working through some some technical challenges but it was a true pleasure to to chat with you today thank you thank you so much this podcast is a production of disco we recorded this episode in the world class donatello studios at all turtles in San Francisco California I want to thank Cindy Olson for joining us on this episode and if you have any questions comments or suggestions for future episodes send us an email at Jeremy at just disco comm I read every single message on behalf of Justin Vandehey joseph estrada myself and the entire disco team thanks for listening