Key Takeaways

• “The human deal has totally changed! Work from home is an actual demand for radical flexibility and inclusion.”

• “Over 82% of people desire to work for organizations that support their personal growth and creativity, and yet 45% of employees believe their organization actually sees all of who they are as a person.”

• “The human deal has shifted in order to be creative, engaged and innovative people who want to be heard, be seen and display unique expression.”

• There are four steps that can help leaders improve diversity of thought and innovation within their organization:

1. Become a Conscious Leader through curiosity, asking more questions, expand your knowledge of different people and viewpoints, challenge your beliefs.

2. Include the 3 E’s that Drive Diversity of Thought: Elevate, extend and expand diversity of thought by adding in diversity competencies to skills, working with partners and removing location bias.

3. Create an Actionable Diversity and Inclusion Plan: Create learning loops and incremental agile plans versus long powerpoint promises. 

4.  Develop and Execute a Continuous, Iterative One Page Plan: Put it on one page and commit to it.

“Organizations that focus on unhiding the full potential of people by harnessing employees’ different viewpoints and opinions will set the stage for market differentiation and business growth.”

Key Takeaways

• “The reasons for cloud failures often take I&O leaders by surprise, because they’re not really the same reasons for failure that typically occur with infrastructure running in on-premises data centers.”

• “You must anticipate service failures because the most common way that a cloud can fail is in the partial outage or degraded state of a particular service or element of service functionality.” 

• “Your focus for your own resilience should be on how your applications respond to failed service dependencies.” 

• Improve your application resilience by: 

  • Understanding that your goal is for your system to continue to operate when bad things are going on. 

  • Maintaining your most critical business functionality. 

  • Recovering within a business-acceptable timeframe.

• “Implement fast failover instead of traditional disaster recovery.”

• “Adopt site reliability engineering principles -- and consider chaos testing to ensure that you’re as resilient as you hope to be.”

• “Consider building lightweight application alternatives rather than attempting the tremendous complexity of a multicloud architecture.”

Key Takeaways

• “Generational issues are among CIOs’ top-of-mind concerns.”

• “Managing a multigenerational workforce brings a new set of challenges. Organizations must walk a fine line between creating opportunities for young people to advance (or risk losing them) while also enduring veterans, whose skills are needed in tight labor markets.”

• “Generational stereotypes hinder collaboration.”

• There are four methods that will help organizations ensure generational harmony and resilience:

1. “Use CARE when working with employees, especially when seeking to change behavior:

   • Communicate transparently

   • Actively listen

   • Relationship first

   • Empathetic engagement

2. Assure equitable and personalized development.

3. Employ reverse-mentoring programs.

4. Inclusively hire.” 

• “Be highly intentional in the type of change you seek to make - aim for one at a time.”