Doug Camin: Welcome back to today’s episode of dissecting popular IT nerds. I’m your host, Doug Camin, and today I’m talking with Troy Penny, the global vice president of information technology at Harsco Rail. Welcome to the show, Troy.
Troy Penny: Thank you, Doug, and I appreciate you having me on.
Doug Camin: So, Troy, before we got on the podcast here, we were familiarizing ourselves with some of our backgrounds and stuff like that. And you work for this place called Harsco Rail. It’s an interesting company. And this is one of those things where it’s a niche business for something specialized that you’d be like, “I can’t believe somebody made a whole business out of this.” But of course, when you think about it, you’re like, “Of course there has to be a business for somebody doing it.” But it’s a company that specializes in, I think you described it as rail safety. I’ll say a little bit and then let you elaborate, but in the rail safety space. So these machines that you see crawling along the tracks, maintaining things like pulling out rail ties and fixing the rock and all this other stuff like that. And this is what this company does.
Troy Penny: Yeah. In the old days, Doug, as you know, you had whole crews out there working the track and laying track and repairing track and replacing ties and replacing spikes, etc. And Harsco Rail has actually been in business for over 100 years. We’ve been building machines and technologies that automate most of that stuff. There are still humans that need to be involved to read the machine telemetry and the track geometries and validate solutions and things like that. But primarily the machine will do everything for you. It’ll measure the track. It’ll determine if the track is even as it should be, if ties are missing, if spikes are missing, if the ballast under the track needs to be adjusted to support it better, etc. So, it’s really ensuring safety of transportation, not just in North America, but globally. We have customers all over the world.
Doug Camin: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. So if you think about this, I think this is probably a truism of American manufacturing in a generalized sense. This is a very technologically heavy business when you get right down to it.
Troy Penny: It is. And it’s becoming more so. We we’ve had track technologies for a long time. But at first those were safety technologies, things like making sure that rail crossings didn’t interfere with each other, that the gates came down when they’re supposed to come down, that sort of thing. Collision avoidance things. But it’s really with the advent of artificial intelligence and in particularly machine intelligence, our engineers have developed some really clever technologies that can actually video the track as the machine’s going down the track and detect if something is misaligned or if it can recognize a broken tie, can recognize a piece of debris on the track, and it will tell the machine exactly what it needs to do. So by the time the back end of the machine gets there, it can correct the issue.
Doug Camin: That’s like I just think about all the engineering that we have to put into these products in order to, like you mentioned, there used to be a whole work crew that did this. Now it’s probably a team of a handful of people. And between the handful of people and the machine in question, they almost certainly can accomplish more in a single day than that entire team could have done in probably multiple days.
Troy Penny: They can accomplish more, and they can do it more safely. It’s an inherently dangerous business, obviously dealing with big machines and railroad tracks. And a lot of times the topography around the tracks can be dangerous. So the fewer human interventions you have in that process, the easier it is to protect their workforces also.
Doug Camin: So now how long have you been in this, well, at Harsco Rail, I should say, is probably the best way.
Troy Penny: It’s a new area for me in my career. I’ve been here for the last six years. Prior to that, my background was largely in the healthcare space, not in the provider space, but in the payer space and benefits. And then I did a great deal of consulting in the early part of this century. That always makes me feel old when I say that or refer to it as the early part of the century. And then prior to that, did various manufacturing jobs as well, in plants that made polyester and plants that built refrigeration units, etc. So really a variety of things. I think spending some time, at least as a consultant, is a really a good move for young IT people because you see so many different things, so many different angles of business. And while it’s so important to become an expert, or at least to be very conversational in what your company does, seeing it from different angles gives you sometimes outside perspectives that give you fresh looks on things. So that time I spent as a solutions consultant I think was invaluable.
Doug Camin: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I too have a background in, mine was maybe a little different than yours in terms of the scope of what I was working on, because I was in the small-medium business consulting space, so geographically working with businesses, but still, from manufacturers to healthcare to legal services and all this stuff. So you get to see all these different things where you’re like, “Okay, I have this exposure. I get some level of understanding. I have to know a little bit about their business in order to do the consulting work that goes with it.” So, the breadth of knowledge that you pick up as you go along is really super helpful.
Troy Penny: And you learn to listen, because you have to understand the landscape of that organization. And I think that’s a critical segue into leadership is learning to be a listener, learning that the less you talk, the more you listen, the more prepared you’re going to be to assist the stakeholder and to develop the best solutions. So if nothing else, it helped me learn to keep my mouth shut and listen a little bit.
Doug Camin: Yeah. So now just as you explore your leadership journey out here on the podcast, going back, you didn’t start in IT, or did you? How did you get into it?
Troy Penny: Well, I got into it almost by default. I was in the United States Air Force. I was an electronic warfare systems programmer. So, electronic warfare is our capability to command the electromagnetic space in the air, meaning radar and all that sort of thing. So we could employ technologies which would jam or deceive enemy radar so they couldn’t track our aircraft. And those machines, devices that we use to do that, had to be programmed for different mission profiles, different scenarios, different enemies, etc. So, maintaining and programming those machines gave me a set of skills that was really useless in terms of the mission as a civilian when I got out, because no one in the civilian world wants to jam radar.
Doug Camin: That’s right.
Troy Penny: But I could use the programming piece. So at the time, and this is back in the late 80s, early 90s, it was still pretty tied up with engineering in most places. It had only just begun to become its own thing, and the whole IT evolution revolution that occurred in the 90s leading up to Y2K and all of that fun we had was really just picking up. So I caught the curve at just the right time, getting out after the Gulf War when I did.
Doug Camin: Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for your service, by the way. And even through war service too, like, it’s a lot there.
Troy Penny: My pleasure to serve. Thank you.
Doug Camin: So I think that’s a really great thing to explore a little bit here, and you touched on it a bit, which is what are the translatable skills as you come in from a military background? In the military, certainly tons of important and interesting stuff you learn, but a lot of it doesn’t necessarily translate out directly into the private sector and the commercial space. So I’ll let you elaborate more there.
Troy Penny: You learn, as well as the technical skills, you also obviously learn a lot of soft skills in terms of leadership, personnel development, teamwork, all that sort of good stuff. But it’s different because you can’t issue an order under constraint of law in the civilian world. You have to shake hands and kiss babies a little bit to get people on board. So learning stakeholder management, and I even hate to say management, it’s stakeholder engagement, really. You never manage a stakeholder. But learning that skill took a lot of effort. And it was trial by fire. I made a lot of mistakes early on because of that directive mindset that the military gives you. You have to learn to be a little more of a politician and a much better communicator and persuader in the civilian world.
Doug Camin: Yeah. I think about, I know with other guests on the podcast I’ve shared this thought before, but I share it as 46-year-old me looks back on 26-year-old me as a leader and I’m like, “Ooh, what were you thinking?”
Troy Penny: Yeah. I tell you, Doug, I have the same thoughts. And I know everyone in our place probably does. But I have some stories from my early years in IT that are just cautionary tales that I even relay to my team, even to this day. Here’s what I did, and I don’t want you to make that same mistake.
Doug Camin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think about, you talk about the power of how persuasion works, as opposed to the hierarchical, “You will do it because I told you you’ll do it.” So in my first one of my first leadership jobs, this is when I was 26. I remember sitting in a meeting, and I had my team and I had sort of fallen into the leadership role. I’ll toot my own horn and say I had some natural leadership skills, but they were unpolished. And I’m sitting here in a room with people on my team. Some people are older than me because I’m in my mid-20s, and this one guy, he just decides he wants to challenge me. He doesn’t like what I have to say or something like that. And he’s like, “Oh, well, what if I don’t want to do that?” And I’m like, “Oh, well, you’ll do it because I’m in charge.” And that’s the answer here. So this back and forth ensues. And eventually it didn’t really amount to anything. He just kind of frustratingly left, parted ways, if you will, and moved on. But I think about how much differently I would have responded to that type of situation today, and the framing that I would use about, “No, you’re not going to do it because I said so. You’re going to do it because, look, I occupy this role in the organization and you occupy this role. My role is to be the one making these decisions. And your role is to carry out the things that we’ve decided on.” I’m not doing this to be, this isn’t a personal thing. This isn’t anything else. My job is to make the decision. And I welcome your input and you can be heard. But you have to realize that just because you’re heard doesn’t mean I’m going to make the decision you want.
Troy Penny: Absolutely right. It’s difficult. And especially, again, early in my career, a lot of the people I had to influence were at a much higher level than I was. And you can’t live off an eternal path of escalation through your boss and across to his boss. That wears everyone out, and you’re not being effective, and you’re wasting people’s time if you’re constantly doing that. You become the boy that cried wolf, and no one pays attention to you. So you really have to learn early on how to navigate stakeholders, how to categorize them, and get some sort of method as to how you’re going to approach different types of stakeholders. The example you gave of this sort of devil’s advocate that wants to challenge everything, and there’s always a reason it won’t work. We learn over time that you can use that person when you’re doing risk identification and categorization. That guy is going to tell you everything that could possibly go wrong.
Doug Camin: I love having a good contrarian on the team. That’s always pretty useful.
Troy Penny: You need that. You need that. There’s value there as long as they understand that once we’ve identified the risk and we have a good response to it, and we’ve planned for that with some contingency budget or time, that it’s time to step away and worry about the next one. We monitor and control that. But you don’t have to keep talking about it. We’ve got it documented, so document the concerns and move on. But even the ones that seem like they’re hindering you are really helping you. And once you, I guess you mature enough as a leader, you start seeing that and even seeking those people out. You want to hear the contrarian.
Doug Camin: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I have a couple of boards that I serve on. And so one of them, I’m the chair of the audit committee for a large credit union. And the group is very congenial, which is great, but I always want—and if we get one, I’m like, people will be like, “Oh, so-and-so challenges, asking all these extra questions and all this stuff.” And I’m like, “No, no, I want that guy or that woman. I want that person on this team because I don’t want all of us to just get in universal agreement.” And essentially we lose perspective because we’re all vigorously agreeing. Like, “Oh, this doesn’t sound like a problem at all.” I want somebody in the room that’s like, “Are you sure about that, man?”
Troy Penny: Like, yeah. I mean, I’m sure you’re familiar with a lot of the generative AI technologies like ChatGPT. And they had made a change to that programming at some point. I’m sure you’ve heard about this, to make it more affable and agreeable and even flattering to you, so that no matter what idea you suggested to it, looking for input, it would just make you think it was the best idea in the world. So it really became a useless tool. I was trying to figure out a configuration for some music equipment for putting a native microphone receiver in line with a compressor and a mixer and a power amplifier and all the ins and outs and various connections, and asked ChatGPT to help me put these things together. And literally, no matter what configuration I suggested, it just kept telling me it was brilliant and that would work just great.
Doug Camin: And so, yes-men become useless at some point. ChatGPT was giving you a participation trophy.
Troy Penny: Exactly right. And I don’t want that. I want the guy you talked about that’ll tell me I’m crazy. If I do that, I’m going to blow the system up. So I need that feedback. And I need it from my team, too, and certainly from external stakeholders that know more about what they do than I do.
Doug Camin: So I’d love to hear more about some of the things that you engage with to where you are a leader. I know you’ve been with Harsco for a number of years. Just because I have stared at your LinkedIn profile, you did some work with the state of South Carolina and some big work there. But you have some other private sector stuff. But volunteering is what I was looking for, work that you do as well. I’d love to hear, and I think our listeners would love to hear a little about how you engage as a leader in those spaces to provide leadership, even outside of the IT space too.
Troy Penny: Yeah, well, I have done, I enjoy doing volunteer work. It’s the thing that allows me to touch grass and connect with what’s real. Because we sometimes get in our towers in business and forget about the things that are more tangible to a lot of people. We’re very involved with our church, and I’m with a group called the Knights of Columbus. I’m sure you’ve heard of that group, a charitable organization. And my involvement in that group, it’s everything literally from cooking pancakes at the pancake breakfast to doing things where I can exhibit more of a leadership capacity, like organizing a Catholic men’s conference. We actually organized the first Catholic men’s conference in the Diocese of Charleston, and it was every bit as complex as some of the IT projects we do. I mean, you had stakeholders and you had deliverables that you had to figure out a way to create. You had schedules. And I actually built the day of the conference just like I would an implementation plan for a go-live weekend where we had every 15 minutes, something had to happen. Somebody had to lead someone at a parking lot or move some chairs around or something. So, I try to guide people when I do activities like that the same way that I do at work. And I mentioned it before, it starts with listening and understanding from the stakeholder’s perspective, seeing it through their eyes. What are their jobs? What are their objectives? What’s important to them so that I can speak to them in their language because I couldn’t go in there like a vice president of IT and start talking lingo and PMP terms and stuff like that. I really had to understand it from the perspective of a priest or a deacon or a facilities manager, and know what their concerns were and their constraints were. It’s all the same skills just applied to a different set of problems.
Doug Camin: So one thing I was just thinking about, I actually have two notes here, but I’m going to focus on this one first, and then I’ll come back to the other one. I was thinking about how volunteering, I asked you about how you do leadership and how some of your skills are translating into there and what you pick up from there. But I think an important part of this, and you touched on this, is the idea about how even though you’re a leader, you show up with humility when you’re not the leader. So that’s a really important concept that as you get older and more mature in your leadership. I feel this way about it. I guess I’ll ask if you share this. But the best leaders also typically are good followers because they understand what you need to do in order to be a follower and to enable a leader. So it’s almost like leading from behind. Like I’m going to enable somebody else to be a great leader, even when I’m not the one leading.
Troy Penny: I think you’re 100% spot on there, Doug. I believe very much in servant leadership to begin with. That a leader’s job is not to stand out. The best leader, you don’t even know they’re there. You build your team, you empower your team. You clear the path for your team. You help your team make key decisions. And as you said earlier, sometimes you have to make the call, make the decision, even sometimes when it’s unpopular. But for the most part, make sure the team is shining. The team is standing up to get the recognition, etc. And that same mindset, I think the self-awareness and humbleness that comes from that type of leadership makes it very easy to empower other leaders that you’re serving under or that you’re working on a team with because you’ve been there. You know how difficult it is for them. And you want to certainly support them. And it’s okay. I don’t mind being number two or number three. It’s like playing parts in a play. I may know how to play Macbeth. But I also know how to play Horatio. I can just switch parts and play a different actor. And now this other guy, now he’s Macbeth. And I know what Macbeth’s role is like, and I know what his lines are and what my lines are and how I fit into that. So, I think that’s very important. A great leader is a great follower. And they understand how to help empower the people leading them by playing the right role on the team.
Doug Camin: Yeah, absolutely. So now I’ve come back to the other thing because you mentioned Knights of Columbus, the Catholic American pope, man.
Troy Penny: Like we got an American pope. We do. We’ll see how that goes. It’s interesting. The Catholic Church is such a large organization that it can’t help but become a little political at times. And you have different groups of Catholics that liked this Pope or didn’t like that pope. And a lot of Catholics are wondering now what’s going to happen. Is this guy going to be more liberal or more conservative? Is he going to reinstitute the Latin Mass or stay with the Novus Ordo? So, there’s a lot of, I guess, uncertainty or wait and see, sort of to see what sort of pontificate this is going to be. But yeah, it’s an American pope, and that’s a first. It’s interesting at the least.
Doug Camin: Yeah. It was pretty crazy. And so just for full disclosure, I, while I’m not a deeply religious person, I am also come from a Catholic family as well. And so this will be our rabbit hole for this episode, I guess. But you think about how going into the papal conclave, I cannot remember the gentleman’s name before he was Pope at the moment, but the gentleman there was like the fifth string on, if people were calling who was potentially going to be Pope or something. They’re like, “They’ll never pick an American, they’ll never do this.” And then afterwards there’s some folks, I saw some various analysis and they were like, “Well, the herd mentality about the consensus, ‘they’ll never choose an American,’ caused a lot of those folks who were looking from the outside to overlook what seemed like, if you look in retrospect and you look back, you’re like, that guy was actually set up in a way to really be, he was the most likely candidate if you looked at it objectively.”
Troy Penny: Right. We spent weeks prior to the conclave, and everyone was throwing names out there and debating this person over that one. And it almost became like a, I’m sure some casino out in Las Vegas probably had…
Doug Camin: Oh, there’s definitely betting on that. Oh, for sure. 100% betting.
Troy Penny: And I saw the movie Conclave recently, which is, if you suspend the fact that the Catholic Church is not nearly as mysterious and diabolical as some of these movies make it out to be, if you suspend that and just look at it as a drama, it’s an entertaining movie. And it, I think at least gives some insight to how the coalitions are kind of formed during the conclave, and it’s almost a microcosm of a larger election, like the American election, where you can’t just be this kind of candidate. You’ve got to form broad coalitions and appeal to enough people to get a majority. Which that’s probably a good thing because it keeps fringe candidates and maybe even extremist candidates at bay, because they have to appeal to a broader group to have a chance to be elected. And I’m sure there’s a lot of that going on, even in the College of Cardinals. It’s either the least objectionable person or everyone’s number two vote or whatever it is that that person bubbles up as the right person at the right time. So I’m sure there’s divine guidance pushing all of this, so I’ll leave that to them. But it is interesting how all that comes together.
Doug Camin: Yeah, I think the things you highlighted are really like almost the microcosm of some of the leadership skills that we talked about. How do you build coalitions? How do you get people to, you can’t be the extreme person here. You can’t do this. So these leadership lessons that we talk about and we share apply almost universally across so many different things. Just because we’re in an IT leadership space and we’re working in a corporation doesn’t mean that the skills that we have aren’t the same skills that are used by the individuals angling to be the pope of the Catholic Church or any other number of things in this world.
Troy Penny: The core of all of it is communication and listening and understanding and seeing problems through others’ eyes. And I know you’ve talked a great deal about this in your writings and philosophies, and I agree with you wholeheartedly that leaders have to be solution makers that they have to to be politicians in a way. And I don’t mean that in a negative context, but in the Aristotelian context of being political and understanding how to negotiate and develop the not always the perfect solution, but the best solution across the board.
Doug Camin: We’ll call that small ‘p’ politics, not big ‘P’ politics.
Troy Penny: Right. That’s right.
Doug Camin: So, to a slightly different subject. But one of the things I always ask guests on the show is to, well, there’s a couple of different topics that I always pick from my grab bag, if you will. But I’d love to know, to share with listeners something about you that people might not know. And I almost have a couple things. I’m interested to hear what you bring up without me prompting, but I have two things that I just heard you say as we were talking. And I wanted to ask you a little bit more about those, but I’ll wait for you to share. If you were share with listeners something that would be something about you, whether it’s your history, something like that. For instance, I DJ’d a wedding before, I’m not a DJ, but I’ve DJ’d a wedding.
Troy Penny: Yeah, well, I guess the thing that people wouldn’t immediately know about me probably would be that when I started college a hundred years ago, I actually went to college on a music scholarship. I had very little to do with IT. But a year or two into college, I had the epiphany that with a degree in music, if that’s my focus of study, I’m either going to be Eddie Van Halen or a high school choir director. And there’s very little in between there. And I probably wasn’t going to be Eddie Van Halen. So I made the decision that there’s not a huge future in this, at least not one that I felt comfortable navigating. So when I left the music department, I lost my scholarship. And that’s what led me directly to join the Air Force to complete my college. And of course, I went into more technical studies at that point. But I still to this day enjoy music. I enjoy playing. I play a little piano and I play the guitar. I used to sing, but those days are probably gone. Your voice, I think, deteriorates with age. But it’s interesting how music theory in particular, when you play music well, when you study music, it’s not so different than programming than IT. There are a set of rules, and if you look at a set of musical notation, it’s a programming language. A note on the first open bar of the treble clef means you play an F, and you have to be able to translate that the same way a computer translates a one or a zero. Just as humans, we’re not binary. We’ve got a little more capacity. So we can look at eight different semitones in the major scale, but it’s still programming. When you write music, when you read music, you have to have, at least for me, an almost mathematical approach to it. I’m not talented or creative enough to play by ear and to write music just because I hear it in my head. I have to think in terms of whole tones and half tones. And this is the perfect fourth, and this is the perfect fifth. And that’s why it sounds that way. And this is why this harmonizes and this doesn’t. I have to go back to the math of music. So it actually maybe in some strange way even prepared me to get into programming at some point.
Doug Camin: And I think a lot of IT people, if you talk to them, probably have some musical leanings. I think a plurality of IT people seem to, at least in my experience, play an instrument. I played trumpet in high school in band and stuff like that. I didn’t carry it beyond that. But I did do that. And on my teams, it’s not uncommon for me to have, like, the last couple places I’ve worked, there’ll be one person who’s like, “Oh, yeah, I’m in a band that plays weekends at the bar.” And so that was it. You touched on one of the things because you were mentioning asking ChatGPT about all the musical stuff, and I was like, “Okay, I bet you you’re into music things.” The other thing was you mentioned, you dropped a Shakespeare reference in there. So I wasn’t sure if that’s a hobby, a passion or something, or was that just…
Troy Penny: I guess not Shakespeare specifically, but I love reading classics. I studied philosophy in college, and I’ve never regretted doing it because I think it gives you a foundation of thinking that translates to so many different parts of your life. It gives you a way of structuring your understanding of your own values, of how logic and reasoning work. And because of that, I think I’ve just always enjoyed reading classics. Plato’s allegories and Aristotle’s ethics. Works by Homer. Obviously everyone’s read The Iliad and The Odyssey, I guess. But even a lot of the social contract theorists, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, I’ve just enjoyed reading it. And it’s my own intellectual curiosity, I guess. I just want to know about it. So, yeah, I like to read and I like to read not the latest pop stuff, but I like to read the old stuff.
Doug Camin: Nice, nice. Well, I appreciate you sharing that background. And, of course, that aligns with somebody who came from a philosophy degree, in some ways too. So I wanted to ask you a little bit, going back to your, I guess I would call it your career and how you’ve come up. And one of the questions I sometimes ask folks, especially folks who’ve got a really long career in leadership, is when a lot of us can usually put our finger on that time when we realized that I was transitioning from being the team member to being the leader and the profoundness of it and how I responded to that moment. So I was curious how that, what if you could put your finger on that and how you responded to it?
Troy Penny: Yeah, that’s a great question. And honestly, I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about it, but it’s probably not too hard to isolate. I was working on an ERP solution for Nortel back in the 90s. It was the old Baan software at the time. Now it’s owned by Infor. It’s called LN now. But it was sort of the little sister of the Oracles and SAPs of the world, a full-blown ERP system. And I was the system administrator. I was doing all of the field updates and the updating, the trim on the screens, and setting up all of the master data, setting up all of the hierarchies within the system, etc., what typical system administrators do. And we lost the project manager. And this was actually before the days, really, of a professional project manager. The project manager was normally just the lead developer. Or sometimes it was someone from the business side. And when that person left the company, I sort of got thrust into that role. I think simply because I had the most technical knowledge of the system, but I had to then go back and lean on skills I learned again in the military about team building and leading teams. The team we had at that point wasn’t very mature, either in the technology or in how to work together. And we kind of had to learn as a group the classic forming, storming, norming, performing progression of team building. And we spent a whole lot of time storming to get there. But by the end of that project, I think I understood much better how team dynamics work, that you have to set ground rules for teams within a project, just as you would in an organization. They’re all teams. They’re just teams focused on different things. So it really it helped me understand it’s not about the technology, it’s about the people. That if you have good people and a good culture, technology is just a tool. And a carpenter can use one tool as well as another tool. But you have to be a good carpenter. You have to have that engine of people and that interaction and communication and engagement of the people to make any technology successful. And I learned that the hard way. School of hard knocks, if you will.
Doug Camin: It’s a great school, but the tuition is pretty steep.
Troy Penny: It can be higher. Right.
Doug Camin: So we’re coming up to the end of this episode on the podcast. One of the things I always make sure I ask our guests is, what advice do you have for folks that are maybe earlier in their careers, whether they’re in leadership or not. But if they’re coming up, let’s say they’re either coming up and looking for that first leadership opportunity or they’re just in it and they now need to, they’re starting off in leadership. What advice do you have for them?
Troy Penny: Well, I would say, first of all, if you’re a technologist and you want to become a true leader, learn to be a business person. Learn the “why” of your business. So, if you think about why are we in business at Harsco? And the easy answer is to make money. But that’s not really it. That’s a side effect, right? The real why we’re in business is to provide safe infrastructure for for transportation of people and goods and services. The why of a restaurant is to provide nutritional meals at an affordable price. So understand your company’s “why” and make that your North Star. Start seeing the business through the lens of your stakeholders, understand what’s important to them, and understand that everything you do as a technologist, every deliverable you create is only there to create some sort of new function which provides a new capability, which provides new functional abilities for the company, which ultimately support some objective, either tactical or strategic, and learn to connect that chain that you’re not working in a vacuum. And if what you do doesn’t trace back up to that strategic objective, then you have to question if you’re aligned, and you can only understand that alignment by learning to engage the business and see it through their eyes. Be a business person. Don’t think of yourself as a technologist.
Doug Camin: Yeah. I love the part of this where you’re talking about the very early on. I appreciate all the things you said. I 100% agree with it. Early on you mentioned about the business. It’s a side effect that we make money, if you will. And in a lot of ways, the goal of a business, I would maybe even add slightly to your statement about, take Harsco, your job is to create this rail safety equipment, but internally, if you will, the job is to provide a meaningful output or a meaningful connection for all the people that are there that you need to do the work to. That’s the other side of the why.
Troy Penny: Yeah. There’s an internal why and an external why.
Doug Camin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but both of those are the opposite of we’re here to make money, right? Now a lot of the stockholders may disagree or the board members, absolutely, for sure. And they have a different perspective. And that perspective is welcomed and understood as it helps make your work meaningful. It helps you understand again the “why” we’re doing what we’re doing.
Troy Penny: Yeah, for sure, for sure, for sure.
Doug Camin: So Troy, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.
Troy Penny: It’s been a pleasure, Doug. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you and hearing your perspective back on some of these things. Great questions and definitely thought-provoking. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.
Doug Camin: Thank you. So that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Dissecting popular IT nerds. I’m Doug Camin, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.
