good evening everyone so today I’m going
to talk to you about transformation
and why transformation is so important
you know both individually and also for
corporations you know to meet you know
changing needs of the marketplace in the
world so before I talk about
corporations all that I’m going to talk
a little bit about my transformation so
I graduated in 2009 with a degree in
biology if you can believe it and after
graduating not a whole lot of jobs out
there I did some side jobs I did some
volunteering still not sure what I’m
gonna end up doing I was I will tell you
I was this close to submitting my
paperwork to do a fellowship in ceramics
and then someone called me a friend of
mine who said that the Arkansas Symphony
Orchestra was hiring and I said great
let’s do this so I moved to Arkansas
went to work for the Arkansas Symphony
Orchestra and did that for a period of
time and loved it
shortly thereafter I was given the
opportunity to join HP hewlett-packard
and again I said alright both feet in
let’s jump in and do this I went from an
employer of eight people to an employer
of three hundred thousand-plus and it
was definitely overwhelming while I was
at HP I got involved with an
organization called the young employee
Network and yen brought young employees
together from around HP you know all
over the globe concentrated in the sites
to bring them people to talk about
mentoring experiences and help answer
questions like how do I get promoted how
do I advance my career how do I find a
mentor how do I be successful in a
global corporation when you know you
could have a six-digit employee number
and yen became really a passion of mine
and so I became a leader of that
organization and and my goal was to help
other young employees younger than me
find those same answers and and navigate
this corporate machine now through yen I
became involved with an organization
called one young world and one young
world is a uk-based charity that is
similar in mind they bring together
young leaders from around the world
to tackle big global problems like
conflict and peace but corporations send
delegations of employees there and
they’re all young employees right it’s
one young world and so we come together
as groups of people from big
multinational corporations to try to
answer those same questions
how does HP do it versus L’Oreal you
know what are things that we can share
between different companies so that
everyone can ultimately be more
successful so I work for HP for a number
of years and get the opportunity to join
IBM and again I jump at the moment and
the opportunity and so I I come over to
Big Blue once I got there I realized
that I wanted to be a part of an
organization that was like yen I wanted
to be part of an organization that helps
employees find their way young employees
navigate their career and and so on and
so forth and so I became involved with
an organization called the Millennial
core now I’m gonna talk a lot more about
the Millennial core in a little bit so
I’m gonna set that down now as I
transformed and went from biology to
technology and business I want to focus
a little bit more about IBM and IBM’s
transformation so the IBM of nineteen
eleven is very different from the IBM of
2017 iBM has transformed itself over the
years and decades because of
advancements in technology and the
changing face of how people interact
with technology and also changing needs
of corporations and companies that would
use technology from IBM so just two
three points of IBM’s history the first
is 1969 we are using our system/360
mainframes to
NASA performed the computational
analysis tool and man on the moon in the
60s mainframes were the primary method
of community of computation for anyone
mainframes today are still very
important
IBM still makes mainframes and they’re
much more advanced than they were in
1969 I promise you but the world has
moved past mainframes as well you know
we we were able to do things like
miniaturization of technology and so we
went from mainframes to client servers
and then that’s a much smaller device
and then we figure out how to do
something called virtualization and now
we’re able to split that up into smaller
pieces and now we’re in this area called
cloud which is simply an evolution of
where we were in the 1960s with
mainframe computing except now we’ve
evolved to meet the changing business
needs 1981 IBM releases what is called
the 5150 or our first personal computer
and we’re right on the edge of the of
the PC revolution to put it in
perspective a 5150 cost $1500
approximately and can sit on your
tabletop and IBM mainframe costs six or
seven million dollars and requires a
quarter acre of air-conditioned space
PCs fundamentally changed the way that
humans interact with technology because
it made it incredibly accessible we also
started using things like the Internet
and we became very very interconnected
with one another even though we were
separated by huge geographies now we’re
almost in a post PC era because tablets
and smartphones are incredibly powerful
much more powerful than the first
species but as powerful as some pcs
today and IBM correspondingly has
transitioned and-and-and moved away from
the PC market because we are looking at
changing needs so now let’s go forward
30 years to 2011 after a few years of
research IBM Pitts our artificial
intelligence supercomputer Watson and
Watson wins
in jeopardy now Watson at that point was
a supercomputer that was designed to
hear answers and respond with questions
Watson of today is a set of tools and
services that allow computers to
understand information the way humans do
with speech written written word there
spoken word text as opposed to tables
and spreadsheets and things like that
image recognition and furthermore Watson
allows computers to do things like
emotional analysis understanding
sentiment and tone and so we’ve even
moved forward since 2011 to 2017 with
Watson and I want to talk a little bit
more about what Watson is doing and I’ll
cover that here in just a few moments
now iBM has been transitioning as a
corporation to meet the changing needs
of technology and technological
advancements but IBM it’s in addition
needs to advance itself in the way that
it approaches its employees we have a
new generation on the block
the Millennials according to PwC the
millennial generation was set to become
50% of the workforce by 2020 if you
reach out and look at different forms of
research the Pew Research Foundation for
the United States has said that already
happened in 2015 Deloitte prepared a
millennial survey they do one every year
in the Millennial survey of 2016 they
concluded that of those surveyed about
8,000 people 66 percent of them
indicated they would have left their
current employer by 2020
that’s only three years so this new
generation of employees are less loyal
to a degree because they’re interested
in looking for you know other
opportunities if it’s going to advance
their careers and Millennials as well
all through this through the survey were
found to care more about the ethics of a
corporation and and looking at you know
advancements and and achievement past
profits which previous generations
didn’t necessarily value as much so how
do corporations attract people that are
going to be top talent how do they bring
in top talent that think differently
from the generations previous to them
IBM was looking for ways to boost
employee engagement in the millennial
generation and also Generation Z the
generation after Millennials they
brought together a small group of people
to form what is called the Millennial
core the Millennial core is tasked with
two things one is boosting employee
engagement actually three things
employee engagement and then attracting
millennial top talent but more
importantly retaining that top talent
because we need to have people stay if
we want to make the next leaders of IBM
millennial core has been hard at work
doing different activities to both
attract which is over here on one side
but then also retain which is on the
other so now I’d like to focus on just a
few of those things in the world of
fashion not something that is you know
synonymous with IBM we’re really
focusing on areas that aren’t normally
touched by our corporation iBM is very
popular and and we use and work with
other corporations and governments and
we try to solve big problems in
healthcare so we’re trying to attract
different groups and we’re trying to
find people that who’s interested is
piqued by IBM so in the area of fashion
we partnered with Marchesa a designer
Marchesa and we created what’s called
the cognitive dress using Watson
technologies we analyzed all of
Marquesas previous designs to come up
with a color palette
and then we analyzed different textiles
and fabrics to identify what would be
best with LED technologies and this
dress on the screen behind me is
integrated with LEDs and during the Met
Gala at which this dress was introduced
the dresses LEDs would change colors
based on real-time social media
sentiment analysis so as people were
tweeting and posting on Facebook and and
talking about the the ball the dress
would change colors to correspond with
that looking into the area of music we
partnered with the producer and artist
Alex to kit to help him create his next
big song this was this was last year we
used Watson technologies again to
analyze five years worth of cultural
data looking for ubiquitous themes and
emotions and trends we then used Watson
to analyze 20,000 recent popular songs
for tone and again emotions and patterns
and we visualized it in a way that Alex
could use this to his advantage to try
to find ubiquitous emotions and he
ultimately chose heartbreak the
universality of heartbreak and you can
go and listen to his song that where
that was released last year
that’s called it’s not easy in addition
to doing this partnership with Alex to
kid we partnered with day breaker day
breaker is an early morning dance
movement and we partnered with them to
do something called the cognitive dance
party everyone that attended had a
personality assessment completed by
Watson before they arrived and that
personality assessment paired them up
with the workout routine they were going
to do the breakfast that they were going
to have and the outfit that they were
going to wear and they were split up
into three different groups and then
everybody went and attended and after
you do the workout and the breakfast and
everything you have a dance party and
the floor of the dance party was powered
by Watson again looking at the the vibe
and the mood of the room and
correspondingly chain
to meet that now both of these actually
all three of these things here are on
the how do we attract people that
wouldn’t necessarily think of IBM and
how do we make IBM relevant in different
fields that we don’t normally touch
fast forward 2020 on this side is about
IBM looking inward this was a group of
56 Millennials myself included that went
out and met with our cohorts all of us
surveyed are our fellow employees to ask
questions like how do I overcome
bureaucracy how do I advance my career
how can we communicate more effectively
how do we make IBM relevant for the next
generation of consumers all of these
people came together after coming up
with all of the after getting all this
feedback and all of these answers and we
we went through Design Thinking and we
came up with ideas as to how to address
this each team pitched their idea to the
CEO and since June of last year we have
been working on implementing these ideas
Fast ForWord is all about making IBM a
better place to work in an easier place
to work because we ultimately want to
make it someplace where someone can make
a career they’re not someone to work for
two or three years and be gone by 2020
so transformation is very important we
obviously are transforming IBM
transforms to meet the changing face of
technology and also to meet the changing
needs of their employees and the that
changing group I obviously have started
in biology very very far from where I am
now in technology and business
transformation is essential according to
a survey that as it’s actually popular
sentiment that came out in a World
Economic Forum survey called the future
of jobs said that kids entering primary
school
day of them 65% of them will work in
jobs and careers that don’t yet exist
just because it’s true for those kids
entering primary school doesn’t mean
it’s equally as true for everyone that’s
in the workforce now and so we need to
continue to transform ourselves and
learn new skills so that we as employees
and and members of the workforce can
continue to meet the changing needs of
that workforce and of that society
lastly this is my contact information if
anyone would like to reach out to me
more to talk more about this I would be
more than happy to and with that I thank
you
to talk to you about transformation
and why transformation is so important
you know both individually and also for
corporations you know to meet you know
changing needs of the marketplace in the
world so before I talk about
corporations all that I’m going to talk
a little bit about my transformation so
I graduated in 2009 with a degree in
biology if you can believe it and after
graduating not a whole lot of jobs out
there I did some side jobs I did some
volunteering still not sure what I’m
gonna end up doing I was I will tell you
I was this close to submitting my
paperwork to do a fellowship in ceramics
and then someone called me a friend of
mine who said that the Arkansas Symphony
Orchestra was hiring and I said great
let’s do this so I moved to Arkansas
went to work for the Arkansas Symphony
Orchestra and did that for a period of
time and loved it
shortly thereafter I was given the
opportunity to join HP hewlett-packard
and again I said alright both feet in
let’s jump in and do this I went from an
employer of eight people to an employer
of three hundred thousand-plus and it
was definitely overwhelming while I was
at HP I got involved with an
organization called the young employee
Network and yen brought young employees
together from around HP you know all
over the globe concentrated in the sites
to bring them people to talk about
mentoring experiences and help answer
questions like how do I get promoted how
do I advance my career how do I find a
mentor how do I be successful in a
global corporation when you know you
could have a six-digit employee number
and yen became really a passion of mine
and so I became a leader of that
organization and and my goal was to help
other young employees younger than me
find those same answers and and navigate
this corporate machine now through yen I
became involved with an organization
called one young world and one young
world is a uk-based charity that is
similar in mind they bring together
young leaders from around the world
to tackle big global problems like
conflict and peace but corporations send
delegations of employees there and
they’re all young employees right it’s
one young world and so we come together
as groups of people from big
multinational corporations to try to
answer those same questions
how does HP do it versus L’Oreal you
know what are things that we can share
between different companies so that
everyone can ultimately be more
successful so I work for HP for a number
of years and get the opportunity to join
IBM and again I jump at the moment and
the opportunity and so I I come over to
Big Blue once I got there I realized
that I wanted to be a part of an
organization that was like yen I wanted
to be part of an organization that helps
employees find their way young employees
navigate their career and and so on and
so forth and so I became involved with
an organization called the Millennial
core now I’m gonna talk a lot more about
the Millennial core in a little bit so
I’m gonna set that down now as I
transformed and went from biology to
technology and business I want to focus
a little bit more about IBM and IBM’s
transformation so the IBM of nineteen
eleven is very different from the IBM of
2017 iBM has transformed itself over the
years and decades because of
advancements in technology and the
changing face of how people interact
with technology and also changing needs
of corporations and companies that would
use technology from IBM so just two
three points of IBM’s history the first
is 1969 we are using our system/360
mainframes to
NASA performed the computational
analysis tool and man on the moon in the
60s mainframes were the primary method
of community of computation for anyone
mainframes today are still very
important
IBM still makes mainframes and they’re
much more advanced than they were in
1969 I promise you but the world has
moved past mainframes as well you know
we we were able to do things like
miniaturization of technology and so we
went from mainframes to client servers
and then that’s a much smaller device
and then we figure out how to do
something called virtualization and now
we’re able to split that up into smaller
pieces and now we’re in this area called
cloud which is simply an evolution of
where we were in the 1960s with
mainframe computing except now we’ve
evolved to meet the changing business
needs 1981 IBM releases what is called
the 5150 or our first personal computer
and we’re right on the edge of the of
the PC revolution to put it in
perspective a 5150 cost $1500
approximately and can sit on your
tabletop and IBM mainframe costs six or
seven million dollars and requires a
quarter acre of air-conditioned space
PCs fundamentally changed the way that
humans interact with technology because
it made it incredibly accessible we also
started using things like the Internet
and we became very very interconnected
with one another even though we were
separated by huge geographies now we’re
almost in a post PC era because tablets
and smartphones are incredibly powerful
much more powerful than the first
species but as powerful as some pcs
today and IBM correspondingly has
transitioned and-and-and moved away from
the PC market because we are looking at
changing needs so now let’s go forward
30 years to 2011 after a few years of
research IBM Pitts our artificial
intelligence supercomputer Watson and
Watson wins
in jeopardy now Watson at that point was
a supercomputer that was designed to
hear answers and respond with questions
Watson of today is a set of tools and
services that allow computers to
understand information the way humans do
with speech written written word there
spoken word text as opposed to tables
and spreadsheets and things like that
image recognition and furthermore Watson
allows computers to do things like
emotional analysis understanding
sentiment and tone and so we’ve even
moved forward since 2011 to 2017 with
Watson and I want to talk a little bit
more about what Watson is doing and I’ll
cover that here in just a few moments
now iBM has been transitioning as a
corporation to meet the changing needs
of technology and technological
advancements but IBM it’s in addition
needs to advance itself in the way that
it approaches its employees we have a
new generation on the block
the Millennials according to PwC the
millennial generation was set to become
50% of the workforce by 2020 if you
reach out and look at different forms of
research the Pew Research Foundation for
the United States has said that already
happened in 2015 Deloitte prepared a
millennial survey they do one every year
in the Millennial survey of 2016 they
concluded that of those surveyed about
8,000 people 66 percent of them
indicated they would have left their
current employer by 2020
that’s only three years so this new
generation of employees are less loyal
to a degree because they’re interested
in looking for you know other
opportunities if it’s going to advance
their careers and Millennials as well
all through this through the survey were
found to care more about the ethics of a
corporation and and looking at you know
advancements and and achievement past
profits which previous generations
didn’t necessarily value as much so how
do corporations attract people that are
going to be top talent how do they bring
in top talent that think differently
from the generations previous to them
IBM was looking for ways to boost
employee engagement in the millennial
generation and also Generation Z the
generation after Millennials they
brought together a small group of people
to form what is called the Millennial
core the Millennial core is tasked with
two things one is boosting employee
engagement actually three things
employee engagement and then attracting
millennial top talent but more
importantly retaining that top talent
because we need to have people stay if
we want to make the next leaders of IBM
millennial core has been hard at work
doing different activities to both
attract which is over here on one side
but then also retain which is on the
other so now I’d like to focus on just a
few of those things in the world of
fashion not something that is you know
synonymous with IBM we’re really
focusing on areas that aren’t normally
touched by our corporation iBM is very
popular and and we use and work with
other corporations and governments and
we try to solve big problems in
healthcare so we’re trying to attract
different groups and we’re trying to
find people that who’s interested is
piqued by IBM so in the area of fashion
we partnered with Marchesa a designer
Marchesa and we created what’s called
the cognitive dress using Watson
technologies we analyzed all of
Marquesas previous designs to come up
with a color palette
and then we analyzed different textiles
and fabrics to identify what would be
best with LED technologies and this
dress on the screen behind me is
integrated with LEDs and during the Met
Gala at which this dress was introduced
the dresses LEDs would change colors
based on real-time social media
sentiment analysis so as people were
tweeting and posting on Facebook and and
talking about the the ball the dress
would change colors to correspond with
that looking into the area of music we
partnered with the producer and artist
Alex to kit to help him create his next
big song this was this was last year we
used Watson technologies again to
analyze five years worth of cultural
data looking for ubiquitous themes and
emotions and trends we then used Watson
to analyze 20,000 recent popular songs
for tone and again emotions and patterns
and we visualized it in a way that Alex
could use this to his advantage to try
to find ubiquitous emotions and he
ultimately chose heartbreak the
universality of heartbreak and you can
go and listen to his song that where
that was released last year
that’s called it’s not easy in addition
to doing this partnership with Alex to
kid we partnered with day breaker day
breaker is an early morning dance
movement and we partnered with them to
do something called the cognitive dance
party everyone that attended had a
personality assessment completed by
Watson before they arrived and that
personality assessment paired them up
with the workout routine they were going
to do the breakfast that they were going
to have and the outfit that they were
going to wear and they were split up
into three different groups and then
everybody went and attended and after
you do the workout and the breakfast and
everything you have a dance party and
the floor of the dance party was powered
by Watson again looking at the the vibe
and the mood of the room and
correspondingly chain
to meet that now both of these actually
all three of these things here are on
the how do we attract people that
wouldn’t necessarily think of IBM and
how do we make IBM relevant in different
fields that we don’t normally touch
fast forward 2020 on this side is about
IBM looking inward this was a group of
56 Millennials myself included that went
out and met with our cohorts all of us
surveyed are our fellow employees to ask
questions like how do I overcome
bureaucracy how do I advance my career
how can we communicate more effectively
how do we make IBM relevant for the next
generation of consumers all of these
people came together after coming up
with all of the after getting all this
feedback and all of these answers and we
we went through Design Thinking and we
came up with ideas as to how to address
this each team pitched their idea to the
CEO and since June of last year we have
been working on implementing these ideas
Fast ForWord is all about making IBM a
better place to work in an easier place
to work because we ultimately want to
make it someplace where someone can make
a career they’re not someone to work for
two or three years and be gone by 2020
so transformation is very important we
obviously are transforming IBM
transforms to meet the changing face of
technology and also to meet the changing
needs of their employees and the that
changing group I obviously have started
in biology very very far from where I am
now in technology and business
transformation is essential according to
a survey that as it’s actually popular
sentiment that came out in a World
Economic Forum survey called the future
of jobs said that kids entering primary
school
day of them 65% of them will work in
jobs and careers that don’t yet exist
just because it’s true for those kids
entering primary school doesn’t mean
it’s equally as true for everyone that’s
in the workforce now and so we need to
continue to transform ourselves and
learn new skills so that we as employees
and and members of the workforce can
continue to meet the changing needs of
that workforce and of that society
lastly this is my contact information if
anyone would like to reach out to me
more to talk more about this I would be
more than happy to and with that I thank
you
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