Speaker 0 | 00:02.584

Welcome back, everyone, to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m your host, Doug Kameen, and today I’m talking with Carlos Soriano, the Director of IT for Applications and Business Intelligence at RectorSeal. Welcome, Carlos.

Speaker 1 | 00:17.590

Thank you. Thank you for having me, Douglas.

Speaker 0 | 00:20.331

So, it’s great to have you on the show and get a chance to talk to you about your leadership journey. But before we got on the recorded part of our discussion, you’re telling me you’ve got a big week coming up here.

Speaker 1 | 00:34.113

A lot of stuff going on. Yeah, we have a couple of big initiatives coming live this week. So we have today on Monday a change in the way we ingest our EDI signals for orders that will let us process and massage data much better than we currently do. So it’s been a big initiative testing almost 60 different business partners that we work with, Amazon, Home Depot, all these big guys. And on Friday, we have a change in the way we interface with CH Robinson, which is our fleet management tool. Also, a lot of testing. We started with this almost December last year. So big, big projects this week. Hopefully, by the end of the week, we can still receive orders and ship stuff to places.

Speaker 0 | 01:20.962

You’re affecting both ends of your supply chain this week.

Speaker 1 | 01:26.684

right you know yeah you get them coming and you get them going here unfortunately you know uh we haven’t been able to we have to get this done since we have so many other projects coming up so we just cannot we have to go live same week with both so that’s

Speaker 0 | 01:42.937

the story of it like sometimes it’s just it’s just got to get done there was there was a gentleman i uh he was on the podcast a couple of maybe a month ago and he his One of his pieces of advice was, he was like, he’s like, my grandfather told me the best way to go through something, a tough time, is to go do it at 90 miles an hour. So, like, if it’s rough, you just go through it as fast as you can. And that’s actually the fastest and shortest way through it.

Speaker 1 | 02:06.562

Yeah, I know. But, yeah, we try to minimize risk, obviously, trying to do some verifications over the weekend to help us make sure we are there. But I’m confident they’re going to go really well.

Speaker 0 | 02:19.830

That’s right. Well, you got. You’re leading a great team, right? So your team, you and the team have this in hand.

Speaker 1 | 02:27.736

No, I’m really lucky because I have a fantastic team. Really experienced team members. They test things really thoroughly. They’ve been in the business for a while. So as I said, really lucky to have that team. Amazing team. Nice.

Speaker 0 | 02:48.911

So just. getting into it a little bit here uh just start where you’re at right now so you’re working for rector seal in in houston uh houston texas and uh you’ve been there a little while not not too long i think you’re you’re i would call you new you’ve been there over a year it looks like but yeah one year yeah so you know i guess it’s a great time to ask you’ve been there a year in a place tell us a little first of all i guess tell us two things one if you tell us a little more about what it is you’re doing there And, too, tell us a little bit about some of the team that you’re leading and the kind of team you’re trying to build there.

Speaker 1 | 03:25.804

Yeah. So I joined a year ago. I was really tempted by after knowing all the leadership team, you know, I really love them. I really love my conversations with them. This is a really high growth company. We have a big appetite. for M&A operations, so we are buying either new products for our portfolio or new companies kind of within the same segment, more or less, or industry, but that complements our portfolio somehow. But I like that growth. I mean, it’s something also I have in my prior company, and I always enjoy, I think, for IT in order to… do interesting stuff and be able to handle that growth of a company and how to scale things so that it works once you have grow five ten times the size or the number of employees or the customers etc so i like that and i’m basically leading the applications team we have our main erp which is gd edwards but we have many different interfaces with many many other applications and also lead the business intelligence thing which is basically reporting power bi reporting all the data warehouse management etc and kind of the data transfer in all these interfaces. So I’m leading that team. And as I said, we have a fantastic team in both teams. There are really skilled people, really senior people. We have, I would say, six or seven people above the 50 years old. So a really experienced team. And what we’ve changed a little bit is the way we work. we’ve switched to agile methodology which i was working before in edp and i think that really helped us be more quick on delivering and kind of have a much faster interaction with business teams as to are we working in the right thing and the right priority of things and is this the product you were expecting and answer those questions more quickly and and adjust as needed and i think overall both business teams and

Speaker 0 | 05:54.304

and even my team are really liking working on this methodology and really value it so i’m gonna jump in a little bit on you mentioned about an agile you know you brought in an agile methodology to where you’re at and in in my so i’m a a cio for a a non-profit myself and i just hired a a director of pmo uh you know so a project manager’s office who works at attached it during the during one of the early discussions with this individual we’re having a conversation about the difference between agile and you know waterfall methodologies for implementation and and i i made the kind of generalized statement that i feel like agile was agile agile du jour for quite like the last like 10 years or so everybody’s like we need to get to agile we need to get to agile but uh agile doesn’t always fit with every type of product implementation and you know so like you get in this like buzzy thing where people are like The buzzword is we must do agile, but realistically, you probably still need some of the other methodologies, too, or you need a modified piece. And she had mentioned she calls it a wadgile waterfall. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 07:09.261

I do agree. For instance, like I think when you have like a big project, like let’s say a big M&A operation, there’s also a lot of business decisions that need to take place. and you don’t have them. So you really cannot work on a file as a solution on some aspects. So we do work sometimes in these projects with this waterfall methodology, but then when we have the kind of the full scope of things we need to do, then we start putting in sprints and doing more iterative interactions with the business teams to show them, demo them, where are we, and how does it work. so that they realize and they can provide feedback sooner. So it’s kind of a combination, yeah, for big projects too. But at the end of the day, what I have in my sprint, I can see what I’m working with every big project, any different initiative, any incident day to day. I have all the view of what my team is working on all combined during the sprint. And I appreciate that because I can answer questions easily to my boss as to what are we doing and all that.

Speaker 0 | 08:21.556

That’s really half the battle of being answered to your boss, right? As long as it looks, even if it’s a mess behind the scenes, if it looks like it’s all good, you’re like, I have the answer. Hold on just a second. And you can look that up like you’re good, generally. No,

Speaker 1 | 08:37.509

but not only in terms of leadership, because we have the transparency to everyone on every business team as to what are we working and what are the planarities that we are setting for the next sprints. so that they can tell us hey i’m not seeing the thing that i really need yeah can you put this on next spring this kind of interaction we have with them but it’s the transparency that we’ve provided the business the different business teams as to this is the plan if you don’t agree please tell us what we need to adjust um obviously we are always open to suggestions so yeah so just dive in a little backwards in your your history here can you tell us a little bit about how you how you got you know some of the roles you’ve had in the past and the leadership that you’ve done in those yeah so my prior company in edp uh i was also kind of leading the applications team there for north america which included canada mexico and us but just to give you an idea of the growth and i was there for six years or so when i arrived we had like 150 legal entities within our applications when i left we have 700 legal answers almost multiplied by five the scope of work we have to a point where we were doing I would say one of the the projects i’m i would say most proud of of that time we bought a company of distributed generation the ones that they put like solar panels within rooftop or like walmart big warehouses things like that we bought a company in new york called c2 omega and then we integrated 200 legal entities with item migration new bank interface new billing interface within like four months it was during pandemic I had like a team of, I would say, seven team members in Lisbon. We were obviously working with the people in New York office, some people in Houston office. I had a data migration guy in San Diego. I was working with Waldorf team, SAP team in Germany. So it was like a kind of all online pandemic project, you know, short deadlines. things spread around and we were able to go live and i think that it was a huge accomplishment so that that’s one of the yeah it was like 200 legal entities at the same time so instead of configuring manually we went with we work with sap in germany because i knew a product they have called ld which you cannot kind of clone companies and then remap things so it worked really well uh but yeah with some other projects warehousing projects where I was traveling to the deep America, little places in Indianapolis or in Oklahoma and kind of getting them to use scanners and control inventory levels and all these things. So I really learned a lot in my time in EDP. Great company to work with, to work for, but I just happened to have this opportunity. But I really appreciate all the time being there.

Speaker 0 | 11:59.596

uh and i learned a lot too really with people i still do this day i’m in contact with with a lot of them so yeah yeah so and and what before like going back further like how did you get you know what were your first roles in kind of the i.t space and how did you come to how

Speaker 1 | 12:16.749

did you come to an it so i really studied mechanical engineering so it was not that it related but you know industry in spain unfortunately is not on the levels that it was maybe on the past so you know a lot of manufacturing obviously moved to eastern europe or china so there’s not that much industry anymore so i think it’s in general that there’s people that ends up or either in finance or it and things like that so that was kind of my step i started in deloitte consulting and And EDP was really my first client, my first customer. We did rollouts in France, in Romania, and then I did the US implementation as well. So I was in Houston already back in 2009, 2010 for half a year. And then I moved to other customers, big ones with Deloitte. That was really good thing about Deloitte. I got to work for really top companies in Spain. And some other client was Telefonica, which then also hired me. I was there working three years as a consultant with Deloitte and then two internal hires. And then I was in an SAP event in Madrid and I met this former client from EDP and they were like looking for somebody to go to Houston and it just worked out. And then, yeah, I was one year kind of… coming back and forth until i kind of said the language is uh approved one of these things and then i i moved here with my wife so yeah so so for the listeners here the listeners of the podcast just to lay

Speaker 0 | 14:06.137

out the the timeline slightly for them uh you’re from spain and so you went to college in spain and you worked all over europe you worked for deloitte you know so so very uh uh you know great opportunities to get exposed to all this stuff you didn’t really have spain’s kind of de-industrialized it’s mostly services businesses and that type of stuff and uh you you know so you’re you got this opportunity to come to houston when when was that like i know you said you came to you for a half year first but like when when did you fully kind of come to houston yeah

Speaker 1 | 14:38.722

so it all started 2016 2017 i i was already moving here by september or so Okay. But yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, really good opportunities with Deloitte as well. Just to kind of point out something like first, the international exposure that I had, I had like projects in 12 different countries, traveled all over Europe. And then just made my career out of Deloitte customers. Like really, because EDP hired me, Telefonica hired me, they were my… clients at Deloitte so I’ve really made my whole career around this. I think it also speaks good about myself you know because if they hire you and they know you and they work with you and they hire you it means

Speaker 0 | 15:26.989

something positive for me right like yeah oh for sure yeah so i’m gonna i’m gonna turn this a little bit to some leadership questions about about that history so you’ve got this this great track you know track record history your career history i guess i should say is the way to put it your career history has you working all over all over europe uh you know in multiple places in north america um I think the question that I have is, what do you see or notice that’s different? Like some key differences in how you have to lead and how business is conducted as you move between these different countries. Because even in Europe, like business can, you know, kind of like the way business gets conducted, like Great Britain is different than the way they want to do it in Germany, you know? Yeah. So, so like, is there any insights that you have about like some things you learned in your travels around where you’re like, oh man, you know.

Speaker 1 | 16:25.621

they do it crazy over here compared to like the way i see it in the united states or whatever the case may be yeah no i think um you know in in it’s also about the size of the companies as well maybe where i work telefonica is huge like 120 000 employees you know 365 million customers all over the world yes huge and edp is also really big so i think it’s a little bit because of the size but I think also because of the European culture, they tend to be more bureaucratic companies. Like where there’s a lot of approval layers to get something done and there’s, in general, less autonomy on the people to take decisions by themselves. And also, I would say another kind of difference is timings. Timings are completely different. You know, in Spain, anyone arriving 9.30 a.m. to the office is completely normal. Leaving two hours for lunch is normal. And then you end up staying late in the office and not having that work balance. So I kind of rather like more the American timelines. where you are kind of probably earlier in the in the office but then and you try to be very intense the hours you work but then you have that worldwide balance where you can still stay with the kids a couple hours or whatever before they go to bed and also you know that bureaucracy i understand the point sometimes but sometimes it’s just too much and you know things that now i can do within the same day would take me 20 days to get two three approvals because in fact one of the approvals he’s on holiday for like the whole july and then it’s like things get stuck and it’s difficult to to to work like that sometimes so i would say yeah i think america american way of working is more pragmatic more direct and more object you know result oriented more like than process oriented i would say yeah so how do you think

Speaker 0 | 18:46.725

that difference has changed your leadership style? Like when you operated in Europe, did you have kind of a different mentality about how you had to approach leading people and being a leader of projects and a leader of folks than you do now?

Speaker 1 | 19:01.672

I wouldn’t think that my style has changed in that sense when it comes to lead people or lead teams. Yeah. I think, you know, I’ve had… I was very lucky since the beginning of my career, even when I was like, I don’t know, 25, 26, I’ve been leading teams. And teams of people typically older than me, I’ve dealt with situations like that almost all my life. And I’ve got to a point where I know how to read kind of my team, what everyone needs and all that. But I think, I mean, I’m just… because of the feedback I received, let’s say in this last year from my team, that I create an atmosphere where everybody feels comfortable of, you know, expressing their opinions, have their point of views and kind of agree and come with like a final plan and I think I also kind of provide support for everyone to do that. the thing they need to do or the jobs for their initiatives and that it goes and runs smoothly. I mean, I help them in that sense to provide the support or to give that other point of view, have you thought about this, but At the end of the day, it’s really the great team that I have that really helps me be successful on my role. But I wouldn’t say I’ve changed that much. I would say more or less the same.

Speaker 0 | 20:34.833

Yeah, I was thinking more on just tactics, like if you had different tactics that you might employ to achieve leadership. Because sometimes leadership can be, I guess, I’ll pontificate myself slightly here. The leadership… Each time you walk into a room, you’ve got a different group of people. And so while, you know, your intrinsic leadership values may not change, the tactics that you need to achieve getting those people on board with you or getting them to understand and getting them to want to be a part of that team can change. You know, it doesn’t always change, but it can, you know, like each each group of people might have different things that they value or that they find the most important in that moment. And, you know, so there’s. I think for me, like I found that that when you talk about the best, some of the best leaders that I found have an innate ability to, you know, it’s just like you mentioned, read the room a bit to understand what the needs are of the people that you’re standing in front of and to to meet them where they are so that you’re not, you know, each room you come into. It’s not just, hey, this is the way this stuff happens. And this is what I was taught or this is what I. how I want to see it. Like, you adapt a bit as you step into that space.

Speaker 1 | 21:54.319

Yeah, no, completely true. I mean, I think that there’s people, for instance, that might need kind of a daily interaction of some kind, even if it’s like five-minute chat, but they just, you know, like to feel being part of the team and have more direct contact with me. And then there’s some others that… would like just to be more autonomous but then that you know they like to that you give them the voice when they need to talk about the specific topic and kind of feel that their their opinion is appreciated and listened so yeah all this kind but i think what is more important in my role is that i’m very uh there was a kind of a disconnect between business teams and the application team before I got here. And I think that I’ve been very helpful to kind of, you know, create those bridges back. Now we are all in the same boat. We work very closely with them. We have very good relationships with them. And I think the fact that they see that good relation with me, it’s also helping them to open more and be more close to their teams too. So I think that’s been really important.

Speaker 0 | 23:15.544

in this particular situation yeah so i’m going way back here you you grew up in madrid spain yeah correct yeah so i have two questions one one is more general uh just just uh you know i was just curious uh what was what was it like growing up in madrid uh for for folks here in the united states madrid is this you know it’s this beautiful foreign city that you know A number of us get to visit, but it’s, you know, it’s, I mean, it’s a, it’s a very old city and, you know, but just, I guess I’ll leave it at that. You have to share a little bit about what, what that was like.

Speaker 1 | 23:56.507

Yeah, I mean, it’s, I still think Madrid is a great city to live. I think in general and in Spain, but Madrid in particular, just because of the cultural offer, you know, you have. huge cities in terms of tourism surrounding madrid you have like the north part of the city with all the mountains and snow you have different lakes like it’s really beautiful uh you know transportation is awesome like you can move everywhere without you know by public transport which is very different here in houston oh yeah in houston like everybody it’s an hour to get everywhere in houston right like that’s the joke hey i’m gonna go here how long it take an hour i mean it’s just like i would say the network of buses and metro is just not uh near where it should be probably but but you know it was a a really really good uh childhood there and we didn’t have all my family because the rest of my family is from valencia which you can see here on the picture but uh yeah it’s uh it was a picture

Speaker 0 | 25:10.488

for the listeners of the podcast, there’s a beautiful picture of some buildings in Valencia back behind you. So I’ll just say they’re beautiful so that you all can imagine exactly what that means.

Speaker 1 | 25:25.414

Yeah. And then, you know, it’s curious because there’s a lot of life in the city. Like, you go out, you know, 8, 9 p.m., 10 p.m., and streets are crowded. Everyone is out. People are more condensed with it, kind of more like New York, Manhattan, where everything is kind of there in the city. So there’s more people walking around and all that. Whereas in Houston, everything is distributed and all that. And then nightlife, I’m not even going to comment on that. A lot of parties.

Speaker 0 | 26:01.357

So the second question I had is. This goes back to leadership, but it’s also going back into your past. And so you’re a you know, you’re you’re from Spain here working in the US. So I’m curious if you feel there’s some skills or skill or kind of like cultural piece to how you were brought up that you’ve brought into your work and what that is kind of this different like, you know, this is a special thing or this is, you know, we we care about this thing. And. in Spanish culture. And this is a thing that I bring this every day to what I do.

Speaker 1 | 26:39.607

I’m not sure if it’s Spanish or maybe more like family values.

Speaker 0 | 26:43.991

Or family culture.

Speaker 1 | 26:45.552

Yeah. So I think I’m really calm when it comes to dealing with tense or critical situations. I think that I trust me to my team and my team feels better about it. I mean, we might have, and especially in IT, I mean, there’s always some kind of issue or incident or whatever. So, be able to have that calm and think through it in a calm way, it’s really important. And I think that’s something that I brought kind of like, I don’t know if it’s family genetics or Spain thing, but I think that’s one of the things. The other is listening, listening all the time. I listen to the people, really understand the problem. really understand what they want. And maybe I would say also that people reading ability. I think that, well, I’ve been in Madrid, but I’ve been in Valencia and there’s like very, very many different ranges of people I met through my life in Spain. So you always kind of have to have that people reading ability to make sure you don’t get into trouble. And I think that’s also something I brought to.

Speaker 0 | 27:58.662

to hear you know make sure you read people yeah so i’m just thinking here so in the podcast we also one of the things we talk to guests about is um other kind of other like i call it we call them humorous childhood discussions uh and this involves things like like what was your first computer or what you know like video game systems would you have played as a kid and stuff like that so i want to ask you and i’m really curious to hear what some of this stuff was like So when you were young and you were, you know, you’re like, hey, well, you bet you went to electrical engineering as your primary.

Speaker 1 | 28:35.003

Mechanical engineering.

Speaker 0 | 28:35.824

Mechanical engineering, I’m sorry. So when you were a kid, where were you exposed to technology first? Like, how did you, you know, where was that?

Speaker 1 | 28:45.911

Yeah, I remember exactly it was, I had a neighborhood that used to have these NASA videos of like. projects to the moon and all the technology behind it and all that and i kind of that kind of started me wanting to be uh at that time an astronomer’s engineering then i changed slightly but yeah i mean since i was like five six years old i was watching these videos and wanted to so i i’m now close to nasa yeah

Speaker 0 | 29:17.411

you’re not working right i’m close There was another gentleman who was on the podcast. I interviewed him a couple of months ago. He works for a space startup that works with SpaceX. So, you know, maybe I could connect you with him and then you two can talk. And then, you know, who knows, you know, at some point in the future, maybe you’ll be like, hey, you want to come work to fly rockets? Cool,

Speaker 1 | 29:41.528

cool. Yeah, that was really my first thing with technology.

Speaker 0 | 29:45.651

Yeah. So now your first computer computer, like what? I mean computers are somewhat the same across the world it’s not like this is somehow going to be some crazy difference but I’m just curious what uh what like when you plunked down that first computer in your house or the one you had what was it yeah I mean I think it was 485 I think it was color 482 46 46 the 46 yeah 46 my dad I remember had these discs like the to

Speaker 1 | 30:12.921

save information uh-huh

Speaker 0 | 30:15.534

so were they were they still now now i’m working on dating what era you’re coming from here were they the the floppy disks that you could you could still bend them yeah yeah well those those were my first person and then i mean at the school we had also we

Speaker 1 | 30:31.046

did some practice on the school on some stuff but yeah i think that was the first one at home and i would say we mainly used it to i think download movies and songs and all that i mean It wasn’t that bad, I would say, at that time. It was just starting and everybody had Napster and all these things.

Speaker 0 | 30:51.701

I remember the Napster era. The Napster era was, I have a lot of music from that period of time that I downloaded online. And the funny thing was that eventually it all became so cheap that you could go subscribe to a service, which you still do. I still subscribe to it. And it would take your library. and it would match it to to apple’s library and then you could re-download the higher quality versions of the socks um so so eventually eventually your your efforts on apps are paid off and it took like 15 years but if you hung on to those like those low quality rips of mp3s that you got in 2002 you were later in like 2013 able to download the cd quality versions of them uh yeah in the end oh that’s cool you

Speaker 1 | 31:38.294

And also I did a lot of gaming too at that time, but I’ve never been like huge in gaming. I’ve been more like a sport guy, kind of out in the park playing soccer kind of guy, but also some gaming too.

Speaker 0 | 31:51.657

Nice. So can you tell us, tell us something that somebody might find interesting or wouldn’t know about you? So like, I usually I’ll share some details so that, you know, so that you have a little something to go on. But the. let’s see so for me i think i shared this before oh um let’s see i once dj’d a wedding i was hired to dj a wedding so i was a wedding dj not professionally i dj idea you do dj you actually dj there you go all right i’m sure my dj was incredibly subpar compared to the dj that you do if you do it no no believe

Speaker 1 | 32:30.020

me i i don’t do it that often I’m not that professional either. But yeah, I mean, I have a couple hobbies, kind of curious. One of them is I would like to write a movie script. I’ve been thinking on it for years. I have most of my script in my head, but I just never sit down to write it. And this year I felt like, well, I’m going to do it. So I have that on my objectives for the year. Another one is I like algorithm trading. I, you know. gone through some books to kind of go through python code and download the stock number prices history and run some back testing and algorithms i like that i i spend some time especially during pandemic that i had more time i spent a lot of time in that unfortunately now with my kids i don’t do that often now but yeah

Speaker 0 | 33:23.622

they they they those the kids do take a lot of additional time okay they suck up your free time pretty rapidly

Speaker 1 | 33:31.066

Yeah, almost close to zero these days. They are 2-1-4, so the time where you have to be really on top of them, playing with them.

Speaker 0 | 33:43.209

Yeah, I got news for you. It gets worse. You think you have no time, you still have no time later once they start sports and all the other things like that. Mine are currently just about 7 and 10. We just finished Little League baseball season. Then in the fall, soccer will start and all the things.

Speaker 1 | 34:06.728

That’s curious. I was the assistant coach on the T-Ball team. I had literally no idea of baseball. But they haven’t anyone. So I said, OK, I’ll do it. I’ll help. I mean, this age doesn’t really… It’s not important that you have that knowledge. It’s just…

Speaker 0 | 34:26.014

make sure they hit the ball and run first base so it was fun oh yeah yeah yeah t-ball is super super simple because like all they’re really doing is conditioning them to understand that you know there’s a ball you swing yay we hit yeah run to this base please

Speaker 1 | 34:42.227

don’t dig in the you know dig in the outfield you know pay attention there’s a ball coming especially the atmosphere in general was really good so

Speaker 0 | 34:54.966

Yeah, I did. I did assisted coach. My younger one is the next level up from T-ball this year. He’s I think it’s called modified. So they do like the pitching machine and stuff like that. And yeah, but man, they are squirrelly, like eight squirrelly, squirrelly, you know, eight, seven, eight year old boys, you know, ask you, hey, stand and look at this thing. Look, watch the ball. And of course, the you know, because the risk here is that in baseball, you know, you. If you stop paying attention, if somebody hits a ball, you don’t know where it’s coming. You’ll get hit. It’s almost like there’s a lesson to be learned there. Not that they should get hit, but if they don’t pay attention, they learn quickly that they need to pay attention. If they get beaned once.

Speaker 1 | 35:41.702

No,

Speaker 0 | 35:42.002

it’s interesting. You mentioned your bucket list is writing a movie script. You said you’ve got that on your list for this year. It’s June. Have you started?

Speaker 1 | 35:53.766

No, because I wasn’t on the list, but it was this was literally one month ago. I was thinking about it and it’s like,

Speaker 0 | 36:02.255

oh, OK,

Speaker 1 | 36:03.256

it’s become the time I’m going to do it. i hope to start within the next couple weeks but yeah i mean as i said i have almost everything in my mind just with this this kind of like snatch movies or local stuff guy richie movies kind of several mafia gangs you

Speaker 0 | 36:22.010

know how they interact between them and all that you’re drawn drawing some level of you know personal personal like experience knowledge so We’re coming up towards the end of our interview here. And I always make sure to ask our guests, there’s really a couple of questions about leadership that I ask at the end. But one of them is, what advice do you have to share with folks? So let’s say somebody is new coming up in the ranks. And so they listen to our podcast being like, I want some tips from people who have been in this business for a while. And we have a pretty wide range of folks. I mean, there’s folks who are… IT directors in the infrastructure sense. You’re much more in the applications and business intelligence development work. So yours is a little, I would call it project based almost, software project based in a lot of ways. What advice would you have for somebody, leadership advice for them?

Speaker 1 | 37:24.245

I would say two of them. One is take care of your team. you know, be on top of their team needs and make sure they are comfortable and happy working on the projects they are, because that really is what gets things done. And then second, I think, think strategically in a way that things can scale and work in the future. Don’t try to put a band-aid today, because as you grow as an organization or the business team needs more speed or better posts. that bandai is not going to work so think strategically as to how to get to a product that is scalable or a roadmap that is scalable over the time i think this with these two companies that i’ve worked in the past with that high growth it’s

Speaker 0 | 38:15.717

really really important like it makes a difference nice thank you the other is i would say i call this the the maybe the lesson the leader the personal lessons question. You went back, you mentioned you’ve been a manager since you were younger. You were a young manager, 26, you said. If you were to go back, today you, look back at 26-year-old you, what would you give yourself advice about? What did you maybe do? You look back and you’re like, I can share a small anecdote. I also was a manager at 26 as well. I was managing some consulting teams. And, you know, I could think about some of the times I didn’t I didn’t always understand how to exercise leadership and what the what the how to handle the authority of the mantle of leadership in the same way. So, like, if you go back and it’s what you should be and somebody was like, I don’t want to do this. You tell me what what it is. You know, why should I do this? And I’ll be like, well, it’s because I told you to. And I’m the boss, you know, like like, oh, yeah, because, you know, I’m the boss. Right. But that’s not really the best. effective way to execute as a leader. And I recognize that now, 20 years later. You know, I mean, it’s so over time, I’ve learned that lesson. So I was just curious, like, what would you give the 26-year-old self, Carlos, and say, hey, don’t do that?

Speaker 1 | 39:42.906

Yeah, no, I mean, I would say I would have had a better college life if I would have better organization at that time. I wouldn’t have organized. And that led me to have to spend summers studying, whereas some other of my colleagues were doing internships in like a bank or in an oil and gas company. And after five years of doing these internships, they were in a better position than I was when going out to the market after college. And I think kind of being focused, and it’s difficult, right, because it’s the time you are 18, you want to go out. you know know some girls whatever and it’s just like it’s the perfect time for also you to be focused on your career and start developing that career from that moment on and do those kind of internships etc so i think that’s one of the things that i always have thought i would have done better but

Speaker 0 | 40:43.671

you know it is what it is yeah no i mean our life you In a lot of ways, the path that we followed is what leads us to today. It’s not worth it, if you will, most of the time, to go back and change it or to wish that. But there’s always that thing. I’d tell somebody who was a young manager, I’d be like, you can’t execute like this. I always find it’s useful to…

Speaker 1 | 41:11.958

reminisce a little bit sometimes yeah yeah i mean i think in terms of management i do i did also have some experiences back then where you know people kind of were i would say really saying it but kind of trying to pretend oh yeah i’m older so i know what i’m doing but i was always really good of selling them why you see that we were gonna do it that way and kind of getting them on the boat so i was i was lucky to to have that ability of bringing them in um and gaining their respect.

Speaker 0 | 41:43.802

Yeah. We’ll be going back. I would touch that back to, uh, that sounds like your skills of being able to read people that, you know, you were talking about from growing up, like having to read people on the, on the, on the street, if you will, to know like, what do I got to do in this situation?

Speaker 1 | 42:00.970

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 42:01.510

All right. Carlos, uh, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.

Speaker 1 | 42:08.013

Yeah. Thank you so much. Douglas. It’s been a pleasure.

Speaker 0 | 42:11.282

So that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m Doug Kavine, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.