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The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are
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solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not
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Churchill said, those who fail to learn from history are
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condemned to repeat it. Kevin Helen n believes that certainly
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applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at
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W four cy Radio. That's W four cy dot com
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and now your host, Kevin.
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Helen Thanks everybody for joining in again today. I'm Kevin
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Hallanan and welcome back to Winning Business TV and radio
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on W four cy dot com. We are streaming live
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on talkfortv dot com. That's the number four, and of
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course we're on Facebook and that's at Winning Business Radio.
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And after the live show, we're available wherever you get
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your podcast content, YouTube by heart Radio, Spotify, Apple, etc.
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The mission of Winning Business radio and TV, as regular
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viewers and listeners know, is to offer insights and advice
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to help people avoid the mistakes of others, right to
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learn best practices. Those are the how tos, the what tows,
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the what not tos. I want you to be challenged
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and hopefully to be inspired by the successes of others.
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Who are those others consultants, coaches, advisors, authors, founders and
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owners and entrepreneurs, people with expertise. But you know, virtually
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every successful person I've ever had a chance to has
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had some form of failure in their lives and careers.
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So while we all have to get our knee skinned
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once in a while, I'm driven to keep those scrapes
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from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history
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so we don't repeat it. I've spent the better part
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of my career equipping businesses to grow from solopreneurs to
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small and medium sized companies all the way up to
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the Fortune fifty. I've seen some of those companies win
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and to varying degrees, I've seen some fail, and I've
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had the opportunity to rub elbows with some of the
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highest performing people around and some who probably should have
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found other professions. In my own businesses, I've had lots
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of success, but some failures too, and I like to
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think I've learned a lot. So yeah, you're going to
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hear from me, but mostly I want to hear from
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I want you to hear from guests. And today my
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guest is Craig Brenner, CEO and co founder of Icognio,
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a legal technology company built exclusively for law firms. Here's
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his bio. Craig Brenner is the CEO and co founder
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of Icognio, a legal technology company delivering secure on premise
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AI solutions. With decades of experience across technology leadership and
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enterprise systems, Craig is helped build and scale multiple companies
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serving high trust, high stakes environments. He founded Icognio to
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address the security, governance, and adoption gaps he saw emerging
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his law firms rushed to adopt cloud based based AI tools.
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He's also the owner of Brenner Brothers and has held
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senior technology and technology leadership positions in well known technology companies.
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He holds a bachelor's in Science and business from Eastern
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Nazarene College in Quinsey, mass where he's the captain of
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the cross country team and an MBA with the concentration
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in e Business from the University of Phoenix, and he
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completed Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Technology Leadership Program. He resides in
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the Nashville, Tennessee metro area. He has three grown kids,
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Colin who's twenty seven, Cameron who's twenty five, and Cassidy
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who's twenty two. And he's got three grandkids. And don't
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forget he's got two Standard Poodles, Mindy Loo and Big
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Wayne Craig. Welcome to Winning Business Radio and TV. Thank
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you very much, Kevin, My pleasure. Glad you could be here.
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So tell us a little bit about your background. You
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grew up in Middletown, New York. Tell folks where that
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is and what it was like to grow up there.
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Yeah, Middletown, New York is out an hour and a
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half north of metropolitan New York City in the Catskills region.
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It's in an area a lot of people would know
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of a Poughkeepsie, New York on the Hudson Valley region.
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Yeah, beautiful up there.
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It's a country area, So I kind of grew up
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in the country even though when people here in New York,
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they always think.
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Of big buildings, and you don't have that New York
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city accent. I don't have that Boston, New Jerseys. My
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parents are from Connecticut. So so were you influenced by
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parents or mentors when choosing a direction or career, either
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you know, directly or indirectly.
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Well, I think my biggest mentor was probably my father.
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My father was the incurable entrepreneur. I remember him coming
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home and always having a new idea about, you know,
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what kind of business he could.
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Do or how he could make money.
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Yeah.
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He owned his own milk route when a milk route
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was a thing.
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Yeah, And he would drag my my one of my
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five older brothers out there and two in the morning
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to distribute milk around the neighborhoods.
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And so.
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He he really gave me that concept that if you
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have a great idea, you can go and you can
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build it to have confidence in yourself.
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And my brothers were also.
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All their own business owners as a result of that leadership,
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I'd say my dad was my biggest influence. And my mom,
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obviously she had six kids, so she showed me how
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to manage adversity.
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She gets the award for having all boys too, one girl,
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one girl. If you guys play sports growing.
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Up, yeah, I was on the cross country team and
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the track team. My brothers had pretty much all runners
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in my family. And then I branched out a little
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bit into cycling and triathlon and ultra marathoning.
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Oh very cool. I'd like to hear about that another time.
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But I when I got turned forty, I wanted to
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get in, you know, better shape. I wasn't in terrible shape,
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but I wasn't in shape either, And that's when I
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found I like to run. I didn't like it before that,
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and I've always been active, but you know, I considered
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running that's what you do when you get ready for football,
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you know, right.
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It was painful, you know.
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So, Yes, my coach used to say that it's not
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fun to run. It's fun to have run.
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That's true. That's true.
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You feel great and it's fun to win too when
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you do win. So what made you choose Eastern Nazarene.
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I know that campus, really small campus. I know it
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well down in Quincy.
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Yeah.
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Eastern Nazarene College, which was later changed to Eastern College,
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was a part of the Nazarene Church, extension of the
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Nazrine Church. They have colleges all over the country and
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Quincy was just one of their campuses. My two boys
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went to Treveca in the Nashville region, which is how
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I ended up the Nashville region visited them. So Treveca
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is another one of the Nazarene college You have Point
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Loma out in California, so they have quite an interesting
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college network related to and associated with the Church of
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the Nazarene International. But I think in the last few
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years the Quincy campus has closed down.
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Yeah, it has, unfortunately, but really good education. I know
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a bunch of kids that have gone there. My kids
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went to a Christian school right in Weymouth and saw
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a lot of their front not a lot, but a
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number of their friends went there. And I know adults
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that have gone there. Had a really good friend got
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his as an adult, got his construction certificate, four year degree,
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you know, his construction degree and certificate there. So really
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good school. And then when and why did you decide
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to get an MBA.
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I decided to get an MBA because I realized that
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there was more I wanted to learn about business. There
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were weaknesses. You know, we all have our strengths and
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our weaknesses. I had some weak areas that I wanted
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to shore up when relating to business, some on the
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financial side, some on the you know, accounting side, some
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on the strategy side, some.
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On the leadership side.
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And so I thought that that was a good way
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for me to, you know, just go go one level
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deeper in terms of how businesses operate, how they run,
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what's important and and go ahead and get that. So
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that's why I went from from my MBA. I did
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it remote remotely through university. And some people might say, oh, well,
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you know, you weren't really on a campus, But getting
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your MBA remotely has its own set of challenges, and
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you have to use technology. Technology is your conduit kind
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of to the professor, and so it brings in a
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whole different sense of community because you're interacting with students
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from all over the country and in some cases.
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All over the world.
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I can imagine, yeah, which you know you sometimes do
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on certain local campuses, but you know, they're all distributed,
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and the concept of teamwork in an online environment changes
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and becomes much more important because that's your lifeline too
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to learning. So University Phoenix. They have a nice teamwork program.
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They break the classes up into teams, project teams, and
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you know, you have some strong team members and you
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know you kind of follow them, and then you have
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some weak team members and you kind of bring them along.
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All these business all these are business concepts, you know. Yeah,
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So I did enjoy that program. It was very it
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was very good for me.
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What was your takeaway from wp i's Techology Leadership Program.
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Well, the WPI Technology Leadership Program was the name is
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kind of and I'll say deceiving, but doesn't hit the mark.
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The WPI Leadership Training Program is a people management program
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which is focused on leading technology leaders. So how to
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lead those groups that are in the technology realm as
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a CIO or a CTO or even a CEO, and
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how to keep motivation, how to keep innovation moving, and
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how to incent and how to know how to lead.
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So it was an outstanding program. It was right on
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the campus there now in Worster. I think it was
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a remote campus. I forget the exact town, but beautiful campus.
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I was in that class, rather small cohort of about
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twenty folks, but all pretty high performing technology leaders in
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their own companies, and so they really pushed you. I
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mean that's what I that's what I liked about it. Yeah,
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there were moments where you were kind.
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Of, wow, this is a this is a push.
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You know, they'd give you some high pressure team assignments
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that were competitive, and that was kind of a core
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of that curriculum was break up into teams, solve this problem,
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come back and tell all these other really smart people
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how you're going to solve it and do it better
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than them. So you know, that's the pressure cooker that
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is innovation. That's how innovation happens.
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Love to hear that, all right, take us through. You know,
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I don't want to spend a lot of time, but
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I want to I want to get a sense. I
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always like audiences to get the sense of kind of
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how you came up. So just like a quick lesson
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from each of these channel sales manager at NTT Data
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Sure I was.
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I was selling dial up back in the day. Not
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to roll back the film that far. I realized that,
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you know, high speed internet access was something that was
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needed by businesses, and so NTT acquired a company I
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worked for called Verio in downtown Boston.
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I was a channel manager there.
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I later rolled that program out to NFL cities twelve
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cities in the United States other channel managers, and it
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was very successful. I enjoyed selling, you know, I really
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enjoyed the process of some.
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It's the dark side.
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Well, you know, selling, selling is not the dark side. No,
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there's a certain feeling you only get when you close business.
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And you know, that's right, that's right, that's really great feeling.
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That's a great feeling.
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So that's how I got interested in really and deep
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into technology. And I just have an affinity for it.
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I always was skilled out in school. So I went
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on to work for a few different startups and then
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I went on to found a few different startups, some
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which made it and some which did not.
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That's the game. That is the game.
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Yeah, And so it is for sting when you start
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something and you have a passion for something and it
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doesn't quite go the way you had planned. But I
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would say that you know, you've heard this before many