It's an honor working for a team of amazing women, on topics that are near and dear to our hearts. 1) I bring resources that inspire the women, the research papers, articles, videos, movies, books. 2) I encourage the women to come to our townhall style quarterly discussion. Women want to help women elevate our presence, contribution, and accomplishments in workplace. 3) Also, last year we invited all associate, women, and men, to come and learn about pay equality. We are exploring new ideas this year, such as women networking, volunteer to help the women in the local community and collaborate with the D&I council to learn about the hidden bias. It's going to be a journey and we are just at the beginning of it.
2. Q1 All Associate Survey 60 seconds
All associate survey is the most important report card on org effectiveness. Here are the high level read out of the Q1 survey -
- 9 responses on the team, that is 100% participation
- Engagement score - are you bringing the 100% of yourself to work; we are at 100%
- People index score - are we providing inclusion, empowering, learning and development opportunities; we are at 80-100%
- Enablement - do we have the right tools, do we take out the barriers and things are easy to get done ... the mid-70s, a noticeable lift from the prior quarter, still lots of room to get to the highest level of work functionality
- Brand new insights on where the team wants to work on, mid 60s score 1) volunteering, several of our bank finance councils have expressed interests, we will want to walk the walk this year, set a target and put the plan together 2) workplace solution, the 1750 slack channel to put in our recommendations
3. Bitcoin? 45 seconds
It's a dark coaster ride if you follow the news of the market crash or the trading platfrom breaching of trust for even Jamie Dimon saying bitcoin is a complete fraud. I, on the other hand, focuses on reading the blockchain technology itself, particularly interested in some of the use cases for the financial service industry 1) distributed ledger that tracks financial transactions a lot more efficiently 2) smart contract to protect the privacy of b2b, b2c, and c2c obligations 3) supporting digital asset. They should all lead to instantaneous trading and payment, less fraud and AML burdens, basically cheaper financial services. Tons of blogs, news on the wild wild web of the internet, they are really fun to read.
4. Bias
We’re all biased, but there’s hope. Eradicating our biases is just about impossible. And that’s likely for the best. We use assumptions based on previous experience to get through our lives efficiently. But, if left unchecked, biases can go too far. While we can’t eliminate our biases, we can keep them under control. One way to start? Spend time with lots of different people and things, Chamorro-Premuzic suggests. The more diverse our experiences, the greater the range of assumptions we can make.
Global Finance bias ambassador program was implemented at the 2018 year-end performance management calibration discussions. The ambassador calls out where the same behavior, eg. direct communication style, was presented with different connotations or when a certain assumption was applied to the competencies without actual behavioral demonstrations. The ambassadors help the people managers to focus on presenting the behavioral examples to getting to whether they contribute to results or whether they are opportunities.
5. Career decision and change moment and learning (life event story #1)
There were two important capital one career change moments. Both times I re-programmed my work and life routines to learn new skills for the new jobs.
1) in 2007, I started supporting the credit card acquisition business and felt a lot of pressure for not being able to have a fluent business conversation. People are so smart, they effortlessly talk about the financial market, competitive products, credit turns. Will I ever become one of them? At one time, I finally started paying cable TV because I want to watch CNBC and Bloomberg. I'm also cutting back on my redundant routines so that I could read more books of the Americal political and financial structures, history and etc, that's how I trained myself to be jumpy and intellectual in conversing business and financial topics.
2) fast forward into 2012, I took a new job supporting the bank business, and immediately the pressure was mounting as I met with people with diverse backgrounds, eg. the card legacy vs the bank culture. Analytics drive business decisions, but business results require motivating people at their heart to take actions. Will I ever be seen as a people leader? I prioritized my times towards understanding humans and adjusting my problem-solving approach with more context, more storytelling, more inspirational conversations, more empowering. I cut back on the desire of knowing the tactics or the details of from A to B or simply knowing everything.
As human beings, we learn in our lifetime. When there is a will, there is a way to learn. At times, they require some hard work, trade-offs, awkwardness, getting out of the comfort zone. The efforts always pay off. It's always the brighter side that is waiting for us.
6. Learning new technology (life event story #2)
My story of learning technology is not that glory one, I am not an early adopter, and often times, I am forced into a certain new thing out of necessity. 1) Cathy called me to make several copies for her 9am meeting 2) operate the consoles for video conferencing, VGA, HDMI ... 3) more recently, teams post priorities in confluence, Gantt chart becomes JIRA, models moved to GitHub, vintage cube discontinued ... they are in CAP so you need Teradata or snowflakes, HR dashboard goes to snowflakes.
What keeps me going with positive thinking 1) I recognize all good things may come to the end of life so 2) I trust that human beings are smart animals, we have to see the brighter side before we jump in there 3) I am a curious person, I ask a lot of questions, I am also willing to try new things to have my own judgment for its potentials 4) I want to look like a contemporary person and that means I have to keep up with the new things in society.
7. Farmers market (life event story #3 or what do you do at the weekend)
Farmer's market is always an abundance of joy. 1) fresh produce brings nature back to human beings in its original form 2) display art demonstrates the design creatives from the farm owners/workers 3) casual/random conversations with people who love food, cooking, and simple way of life.
This is also a place that I pay attention to the kind of payment method the micro vendors use over time, it's becoming more diversified these days, both cash and the mobile swipes are quite popular.
8. Take calculated risks (life event story #4)
Winter is the least favorite season of mine. Snow days are especially tricky. I figure these would be the best of times for the forecasters, they have big beaming smiles on television, you hear about the US model vs the European model, you see the color blocks marking the lines between 1-2 inches and 3-4 inches, school closures, branch misison control, code red status ... almost always at the end of their elaborate analysis, they will say, your own assessment, safety is the most important thing and you should do your own assessment and make decisions.
This is very similar to the NPMIGs you often hear me talking about. Before change enters into the system, you have all the subject matter experts opine on the potential change management process requirements, operational readiness, reputation risks, compliance risks, legal claims etc. It's risk all over everything.
In reality, we are all masters of analyzing information and making decisions with some risks. The part of the calculation is very important, it always feels better when you know the people who know risks, consult for ranges of the outcome, mitigation strategies. "What do you worry about the most, what's the worst thing that can happen to me ..., and take actions on mitigating, monitoring, maybe also preparing a way out, an alternative.
9. Imagination
Banking re-imagined, that's a trademark that is worth something, it's interesting why we would entertain ourselves and rewarding ourselves to be imagining things. Without imagination what will happen ...
This week I read the article of how the dell business model died over the last ten years. Once upon a time, I was myself a Dell customer, desktop and laptop. These are machines of value, but only mediocre value, three years of battery life. These are machines with minimal design or innovation thinking, I now read that their R&D budget was less than 1% of its annual revenue. While the world is imagining new consumer technology devices, tablet, mobile, wearables, smart home, cloud based offering proliferations, etc. The early PC growth obscured the fact that Dell was and remains a follower. Without its own imagination of how the mass consumer tech goes to, makes it a perennial follower and even following slower than what the market wants it to be.
It's important that we spend the time to reflect, to imagine and to plan for the future. It's important that we invest financial resources and human resources to get us there to the future.
10. Space X, the Future
- Looking to the future
“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great - and that's what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It's about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”
- Publicity, selling the idea and getting the investors, sponsors
SpaceX has pulled off a couple of generally impressive achievements very publicly. Furthermore, Elon Musk is very good at managing hype as marketing, so SpaceX has a lot of excitement around it.
- From an engineering standpoint, SpaceX has so far been pretty impressive when it comes to tech- reusability of the rocket itself is new and they've managed to get it to work; furthermore, it's somewhat cheaper compared to other vehicles with similar payload capacities. For instance, the russians are charging some 80M to lift up the US astronauts to the ISS.
A private company, successfully automatically connected to the ISS docking station.
