Ready.....Go!

"You Make Possible"
My first day at Cisco Live was off to a great start with arriving for the opening keynote from Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, Chuck Robbins, to an exciting setup using what else but technology to choreograph music and lights to hype the crowd. Shortly into his address, he made the statement, "technology is at the heart of everything", which is hard to disagree with. A  number of top Cisco leaders spoke on different areas during the keynote presentation including enterprise networking, IoT, innovation in DNA center, and how AI and ML will assist with the complexity in our networks.

"Pace of Change"
As the day has quickly rolled on, the IT Management track fired up and has been filled with thought provoking sessions and speakers. One in particular that I enjoyed was Susan Gueli, SVP/CIO of Infrastructure & Operations and Digital Transformation & Enterprise Applications for Nationwide. She started with discussing the exponential pace of change by using a grain of rice example, which says to take a checkerboard and start with two grains of ride and double every other square and after 64 squares, she threw out a number I can't even pronounce, but let's just say you have lots of rice. It puts into perspective the challenges in front of us as we deal with the rapid pace that technology continues to change our landscape. Another takeaway from Susan's talk that I appreciated was "focus first on what you know, not what you don't know". Her point was to let what you know propel you forward and tackle the "what you don't know" along the way.

Girl Power

A first for Cisco Live was a group of high school girls from Arizona's Paradise Valley School District presenting on cyber security. Their knowledge and wisdom was very evident and one of the girls comments on how it is going to take the perspective from more than just one group of individuals to solve problems was very profound.   

Employee Tenure
The last session I attended today was Leading Talent in the Digital Age, presented by Steve Cadigan, Talent Expert, Collaborated End Users. Steve's a great public speaker and was very engaging in his delivery and content. His shared examples of today's workforce and the challenges with employee tenure were relevant and informative. One of Steve's examples of retaining employees was a company that reversed the bring your child to work day and instead had a bring your parents to work day. Think about that for a moment, he said the companies retention went up.