All right, good morning. Good afternoon to you, Sri and I are delighted to be here today to learn from each other. This will be really an interactive session from where you can raise your hand, stop us from asking any questions.And the idea of the talk is to provide a venue to hear from each other. Let's get you started with your introduction. Re

thank you. Thank you, Padma. Hi, ladies and allies. So happy to be with you. My name is Shri Ratna Singha. I'm based out of Raleigh, North Carolina and my experience is a leadership executive in cloud and emerging technologies. The way I think about my background, if you think of a Venn diagram with three intersecting circles, the first circle is all about customers obsessed with making those customers successful with their business outcomes. The second is about cloud architecture and artificial intelligence.

I'm a deep technologist at heart like many of you and the third is all about the team building diverse inclusive teams and empowering those teams to be successful. Uh I was at IBM for over 20 years and recently joined Amazon website, be the size technical business back to you Padma,

amazing journey as always. Right. Let me introduce myself a bit differently. Uh Ladies, not so long ago, I had a need to change from comfort to exploration mode. I fought with my father to get out of the country to figure out what I can do. I still, I'm still figuring it out. Um I landed at mass College, married before graduation and joined IBM. That's where I met Shui. I had the note to ask my manager uh why he even offered the job and learned that he saw the potential and propensity to learn. Rest is history. While blessed with two girls, I held various leadership roles and decided to go for an MB A while raising a toddler and integrating IB M's largest acquisition. I strolled through six continents, went to Punta INAs um the city at the end of the world and longingly looked at the seventh continent knowing that one day I'll get there right. I love to compete with myself. I'm a prodigy mentor and not afraid to call myself a feminist. Now, I'm leading the world's first financial services cloud ecosystem in IBM. There is a reason why I have introduced myself a bit differently to see if you can catch my superpower. That's one of the topic for today's conversation through my story. Every person is a natural leader. Cloud cognitive data.

A I, no matter what in technology are, are in a day to day life, we are leaders, you are a leader and we are designing and leading our lives uh with some superpowers knowingly or unknowingly. I didn't know the right words to describe my superpower until I interviewed a person to become my executive coach. He asked me a series of questions like who is my hero in real life? A hero from a book. What would I tell my best friend? My biggest accomplishment was almost after an hour and tell me I'll tell you II, I was a little bit frustrated as well. He asked me if I can summarize in one word with uh what my uh superpower is. I still couldn't, which is OK. The reason why I'm saying is I still couldn't, which is OK. But you are using it. Some of us don't even know what that is. But believe me, we use it all the time to solve anything that comes in our path. Then he said what the word is? Um a loving warrior energy. He repeated what I said uh from my own words, Mother Teresa Katniss ever don't ask. My best accomplishment was laid off 10,000 people but created 100,000 jobs and gave the life to the company. And I said I can kill in the battle while picking up my fellow uh wounded warrior. I guess that was right. That was right. And both my heart and mind my, my mind agreed with that word and I have been using it as my superpower from day one.

Now you can see my superpower through my whole my story. I hope um I said, let's turn the table and take a minute. Uh write down at least three words that comes to your mind which describe you and see if any one of them is your superpower and that you are consistently using. Well, if you are comfortable, we love to hear from you through the chat type away. Let us know what your superpower is, but we would want you to think about it, your superpower in a minute. If that's ok with you. Let's go type it. My superpower is loving warrior, nog intuition, being motivated. Grade one empathy. That's right. Curious. There you go is what it is always looking to learn. That's right. That's right. That's

tuition. Mhm

Dora the explorer. That's right. That's right. Monique.

Strong,

right. Dora. There you go. The explorer. All right, good, good love hearing you guys uh from you guys. So Shui, why don't you give us your story? How do you use your superpower? You change it from one company to another company. Completely different culture, et cetera. But tell us your story, please.

Yes. So my superpower and it sometimes figure out what this was. It didn't come doesn't come to you right away. That's OK. My as uh a few years ago was empathy and the ability to really build a meaningful connection with people. I think we're all or mostly technologists here work closely with technologists and I used to think technologies were technologists, developers were code, code, code project project project running like a machine. After some time, my team members really wanted to build a human connection.

And after that, I started every discussion with my team members as how is your family? What can I do to support you and your family? What is difficult for you as a human being right now before going into the project status, how are you et cetera? And for COVID and the pandemic, I was amazed at what difference that makes and even through last year, it made even more of a difference. So that's empathy for team members so that we can address and help them bring their whole self to work. Then comes the empathy for customers. I am in a customer service profession. Oh Whether we have internal facing engineer roles, external roles, we all have some customers and stakeholders really working to earn their trust, connecting with them, understanding their stories, their superpowers, what they are going through has helped me build better relationships.

And that's when I realized that is my superpower. So, empathy for the woman who is juggling, you can tell sometimes that she's juggling kids or things outside of work and her day to day job, empathy for the woman who got passed over for a promotion, just see your arm on her and seeing you. And that drives me to improve my team's products and services. So even in my new role, it is understanding my team, understanding my customers trying to

three empathy I can vouch for about that uh empathy, team, um team friends, ladies, uh whatever way you call, she's my mentor. She is my mentor. She's my friend. She's the one who I can latch on the day. She called me when my father is not feeling well. She said you better uh buy the tickets right now right now. At what, 11 in the night

and hold on? I need to interject you. You why you didn't want to go? You didn't? I said, why are you not going? Your father is on his deathbed in India. And you said, I'm worried what my manager is going to think about me asking for time off.

Exactly. Exactly. So I 22 things happen. I'm changing the job. So I don't want to tell my new manager because I'm changing the job. I wanted to make sure my, my team, my current manager knows that I'm handing off properly. So that's where I'm, I'm crying and I'm not a human, superhuman. So I did cry, I'm crying and I don't know what to do. And this lady calls me at 11 in the night and said, you're booking the ticket right now I don't want to hear. So it's a pressure. It's a pressure with empathy saying that you better get out if I hadn't. I booked that ticket. I would not have seen my father. I went to the India. Um 30 minutes later, he passed away literally 30 minutes later. So be there for each other. Empathy is the most important superpower. One can not not before the pandemic, not be now pandemic anytime the empathy is the most superpower back to you.

All right, you a quick story. Uh Ladies and this is around the things that helped last year where I had a problem where a new business initiative and build a team around it in the middle of a pandemic proposal, launch a munition. You tell him last year, that meant a real, it meant new hiring. It meant training the team for new skills and then boom, we all know what happened globally in March of last year. So we were in start up mode and we had to turn around what we were doing, how we engaged with customers and make it completely virtual. So there were a few things that really, really anchored this transformation. So number one is empathy for people, the team members a we're going through a situation where the roles the structures are completely changing. So over communication about our during that time of change was so important. Second, empathy for what they were going through as human beings saying it's OK, flexible work arrangements and helping to a your reality. The second as I set out to figure out what kind of team that I want to develop diversity. So when you think about a diverse inclusive, sometimes we tend to think, ok, that's men, women balance. But diversity is can be found in many forms.

So think about this diversity in the form of different generations, somebody who has just joined the workforce as an intern out of college, just somebody who has been working for 30 40 years and the different experience and perspectives this spring diversity can of course be gender minorities, how people identify returners coming back to the workforce and thinking about all these elements, including bringing in dif different geographical perspective, bring in a diverse team and then we empowered people who had different learning styles to develop their own training mechanisms.

Think about how they want to learn and what is the learning style that works best for them? Mhm I'm thinking when I think about skills beyond skills that are critical for launching something new and understanding your customers, understanding people who will use your products, think about design because that is something that can really help to empathize with your end user and stakeholders and see the world from those perspectives.

And then when we launched this new business, we had to move fast. So that meant empowering people, sharing the data, the metrics and priorities and then sharing this out with people so that we could quickly refine, see our progress and iterate and the last ingredient for success and perhaps the most important was mentors, helping everyone on the team.

Both they feel empowered to be a mentor and then establish a set of mentors who could to help them get out of their comfort zone. So it's a discovery of how to build a diverse, inclusive empowered team, acquiring new skills, sharing openly the data and the learnings and then taking risks so we could be successful.

There you go through resiliency, right? Do everything and anything in, in your hands and learn and uh create those teams to move forward. So that definitely resonates with me, right? While it is fresh in my mind, let me describe the role that I'm doing right now. The day I was tagged to lead, there is nothing, literally nothing, everything need to be started at square one total, start up, total start up mode in the pandemic is another word that I wanted to add and um to add to the complexity, I know nothing about the financial services cloud.

I fall back on my superpower, the warrior energy mobilize the IBM village to achieve what needs to be achieved. I learned that's the word uh uh sh rus skills. I learned what the financial services cloud is. It's not a simple one to learn because as you know, this is a regulated environment and I have been mentored by the best wartime leader who said break the glass and I got your back. Literally, those are the two words that I heard and once I heard it, I mean, what's going to stop the warrior? Right? So nothing stopped me from achieving what we are set to achieve. I had to create the diverse team for the perspective that she mentioned, right? Diverse teams brings different perspectives, different skills and I'm not the smart one in the room. As I said, I don't know nothing about this uh financial services cloud. So the diversity brought the new opinions, new ideas that where, where we uh where we change the trajectory, we pivoted, we failed fast at the onset to learn and innovate knowing that only success and winning should be our end game. We don't have a choice because we got to begin with the end in our mind, right? Winning is the only choice to create the market that IBM said to create. The wounds are still rough and the growing pains are real.

What kept us going is picking up each other when there was a constraint presented to us. So we ignored the constraints. The only question we kept asking is how might we solve it and we solved it and still solving it. Uh We are resourceful and every step of the way with the skills as an AMN nation, diversity, as an AMN nation mentors, superpowers as an AMN nation to be the innovative uh problem solvers that you and we are, we have to, we are the builders, right? Be resilient under stress. Keep going. No matter what. So we have a couple of more minutes left here. We would love, love, love to hear. If anybody has any story that they would like to share with us, don't mean to put it on your uh on the spot, but we love to hear from you. Anybody would love to speak. Please take the stage. Um Kalani, I think you asked the question, how can you draw like, yeah, go ahead,

go ahead Padma

and being empathetic and not being taken seriously. That's a great, really great question as we already mentioned, right? It's, it's uh have you heard the um Radical Candor? So radical Candor is the word that I would use. You have to know, you have to let them know that you care. But at the same time, you have to be able to let them understand what is required. That's where the line you need to draw. That's the Radical Candor is the one you should. But at the same time, you have to show them that you care when you are able to speak in that language. The ver the verbosity is very uh important. If you do that, you are able to uh they, they, they know that you care, they know that you care. So I think we have one more minute left straight

and I would say when you, when you give a direction, be clear about it, share, share it with both anecdotes and data. This is the data that supports this decision supports the strategy and these are the exact simple customer feedback, team feedback that we have received that really lends weight to the why behind what you're telling people to do. Great Mi Le has a link to it. There

you go. There you go. Thank you, Mi Le. All right. I think we need to wrap up here. Re um we thank you. We sincerely thank you. You could have chosen to be somewhere else, but you chose to be with us and to spend time with us. We appreciate this. Um Let us leave you all with one quote from Maryborough. We were thinking what could be you, uh What could we leave you with? Right? Call to action, whatever you decided to do, do it with passion and all of the energy that you have a small story to tell. I was a chief of staff one day. Um I, I leave the home at four in the morning to get to a place and in some days, I may have to just clip the paper knowing what needs to be done. And II, I took the papers with that connection and, and clip it with the same energy that I solved the problem with the a a client. So do it with that energy, do it with the passion and you can conquer the world. Go get it. So what, what would you like to add

and growth relentlessly connect us on linkedin, give us feedback. We'd love to stay in touch, take care. Thank you. Bye bye.