From Academic Overachiever to Tech Executive with Dr. Doreen Galli | Ep044

Manuel Martinez: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their career and the way that they’ve been able to manage it over time, to really uncover any lessons or ideas that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I’m pretty excited. I have with me Dr. Doreen Galli. We met at Toastmasters and the conversation has gone well. She had talked a little bit about some of the work that she has done, looked at her profile on LinkedIn. It’s very extensive. We’ve had some conversations since then. There’s no way we’re gonna be able to cover everything she’s done, but there are gonna be a lot of key lessons just in the short time that we’ve talked that I think are gonna be really insightful and important to cover. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Dr. Doreen.

Doreen Galli: Hi, nice to see you. How are you doing?

Manuel Martinez: I’m doing fantastic. Thanks for asking. How about yourself?

Doreen Galli: Good, thanks for having me. Looking forward, hope it’ll help some people.

Manuel Martinez: And that’s ultimately the goal. So if you don’t mind, just as we get started, if you can just tell us what your current role is and just a summary of the roles and responsibilities and then we’ll kind of get in more depth later on.

Doreen Galli: Okay, sure. I’m the chief of research at TBW Advisors. It’s a media company, member of the press and industry analyst. We publish conference whispers and whisper reports along with some other document types as well, but those are the heavy ones we drive out of conferences here in Vegas. The exciting part is there’s many aspects to it. So one is, yes, I’m at the conferences and acting as a member of the press as well as a photojournalist. So I have my camera. I take full video of anything and everything I can and I see and I analyze that and that’s a whole video as well as a document and ask people questions based upon things that people wanna know from the experts at the conference. The other side of it is being an actual expert in technology is when I get to advise people. So it’s different than consulting. It’s more like, you know how you went to college and when you were writing your English paper and you’re like, okay, I gotta keep this GPA up. So I’m gonna stop by the English lab. They’re very good at this stuff. Let me just bounce it off of them, get their sanity check on it. They almost always gave you one or two points that just made it that much better, right? But then what happens when you get to the professional world, right? You’re head of data engineering at your company who around is more knowledgeable about data that you can say, can you give me a sanity check on this? I can’t know everything. I’m busy with my head down in all of this. I have no time to pick up my head to go to talk to all these people and go to all these events and find out about the newest, flashiest things that are going on. The difference is a lot of the big firms and one of which I was trained at, when they are helping people that do the same type of thing when they give advice is they’ve never been there. So like Stephen A. Smith at NAB on stage talked about how he’s the highest paid sports analyst, right? So instead of analyzing tech, he analyzes sports who was never a pro athlete. And that’s like a big thing because if you haven’t been there, done that. But what about technology? Isn’t it the same? Why are all these English majors helping these engineers? Their advice is very similar to chat GPT. It’s never had a team of a few thousand engineers. It’s never designed software. It’s never used an architecture, realized it, lived with it. It’s never done any of those things. And all of that context comes through in their advice. And that’s actually why I left one of the big firms is they were giving advice that was absolutely terrible. I would give them recordings of when people listened to the advice from someone who’s not been there because a vendor suggested it. And then I would tell them what happened and give them the recordings. It’s very common analysts record all of our insights because we’ll listen to it to pick up more nuances, how we can help the person next time. And they didn’t change their advice. This looked like giving the poor advice to people. So from my personal brain’s perspective, yeah, that’s something you always got to protect. No matter what it is, you got to protect your brand. Even in tough environments, you have to find a way to execute and deliver, have something when someone says, “What did you do when you were there?” Then you can say, “I did this.” Ideally, something they can figure out from the outside. So you would say, “This was before and this was after. Remember when this company made this change? Like at Microsoft, remember they had pair of regions. Now they have a data boundary. How did that happen? I designed it.”

Manuel Martinez: And that’s good to know that a lot of kind of what you’re doing, which is, I mean, I’m excited to get to that point. I know you and I have talked a little bit offline about it. So that’s going to be a fantastic conversation I have around that. So now I’m going to ask you if you don’t mind, kind of tell me a little bit more about where you grew up and then eventually kind of what led you down the path towards technology.

Doreen Galli: Yeah, absolutely. So I was a kid in the Chicago Verbs. Youngest of five grew up predominantly most to my childhood. We lived in a three bedroom apartment with seven people. All five of us had one bathroom. I had a lot of influence from my siblings in many ways in terms of I could read and write before I started kindergarten. And I became an All American Runner because I ran with my brother who was in high school when I was in second grade. So that had a lot of effect on me, but fundamentally, and my entry school was pretty much a waste of time. I was at an eighth grade level in second grade, but it was a private school. So they wanted to get all that tuition from my family all those years. And they wouldn’t double promote me. So I did a lot of sports.

Manuel Martinez: Interesting. Yeah. To kind of keep you busy and entertained.

Doreen Galli: So I had something in life that was interesting. Yeah, I read every book in the library more than two times in my elementary school. So there was like, I was trying to gobble up information like I do now with the conferences, but there was just only so much information to gobble. So, but there are sports at least.

Manuel Martinez: So, and that kind of leads into the question of, all right, so obviously it came easy for you at least elementary school. You know, you’re doing sports to kind of keep yourself entertained when eventually you did move on into assuming higher level courses or classes even. Is that something that, was it welcome because of the fact that, oh, now this is a challenge? Or was it kind of the opposite? It’s like, oh, now I have to do work.

Doreen Galli: Oh no, no, not at all. No, no. If you’ve ever seen the movie, Short Circuit, it’s an AI movie from the eighties. And there’s this character of this robot that escaped a military base. And it wanders into the city to meet this quirky lady from the North Pacific Northwest. And it goes into a library at one point and it reads all the books, can relate to that. And it finishes at the end and it has this book in his hand and it looks up and it says, more input. That’s my spirit animal. Okay. (both laughing) If you look at the logo for TVW advisors, they had no idea that was my spirit animal, but you can kind of see with all the books. With all the books. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So no, it was great. It was probably college was the first time I had some type of challenge.

Manuel Martinez: And then when you decided to go to challenge, to exceed that challenge and go to college, like what was that process like? What did you think you were gonna do for a major?

Doreen Galli: Yeah, so this is quite funny. I get teased about this from my husband because I was quoted in the local newspaper that he read before we met about how I was gonna be an attorney. Really? Yeah, so I did math competitions in high school, won the Calculus math league and my state and all that kind of stuff. And I had Calculus in high school along with tons of AP courses. So when I went to college, I was like, nope, not doing any math. I was doing business. And I was given a choice to take intro to computer science or computer methods or some silly course that business students needed as opposed to one that would lead to a minor or a major. Given two choices, this one opens a door, this one only checks the box. I’ll do the one that checks the box and opens the door. So I took an intro to computer science course. We had to write a tic-tac-toe game. This is where the professor kind of called me out. Most people’s tic-tac-toe game, it just played tic-tac-toe. Mine asked you your name, both names of the players, kept score, asked you how many games you wanted to play. Well, that’s how the games I played were. So why–

Manuel Martinez: Why am I just– Why am I just gonna do a simple tic-tac-toe game when in real life, hey, I’m playing against somebody who are keeping score, it’s that competitive nature that probably came out from doing sports.

Doreen Galli: Well, it just seemed how you would actually do a tic-tac-toe game if you just do it and you played one game, but it didn’t say your name and didn’t say good job Jane or good job Joe. And it just seemed incomplete to me. It was kind of obvious to me. And the professor was kind of like, and you’re not a computer science major? And the math department was already after me because they knew I won all these math competitions and my freshman year I signed up for this, many math classes. Oh yeah, they were livid because they were looking forward to this freshman rock star coming in, right? And nothing to do with them. So I took the one course and I was like, well, this is kind of fun. So like, well, at least do a minor and like, well, maybe I’ll do a dual major. But then I was at a liberal arts school and I’m like, a BA in computer science? So I’m like, I need to get a BS. Bachelor of science as opposed to a bachelor of arts. I still had to do all the requirements for the liberal arts degree to BA. So I studied Socrates and Plato and music and philosophy and all those sorts of things you need for BA in addition to having to do everything for a BS. But when I looked at it, I realized, you’re only a couple of courses if you engineered it right. I had all those AP courses, right? So in theory, I could have almost started as a junior. So I was like, well, I can take Intro to Stats for computer science or I can take Statistical Methods for the business degree or I’ve already had calculus, I could take Stats I and it’s a requirement for a math major. So I’m like, I’ll just take Stats I. I already had the pre-req. So I knocked all those three mentions out and I looked at it, I’m like, wow, I think I can do this. But the problem is, technically universities limit the load you can take because they’re trying to protect you. And I ran into this first in middle school where they’re like, you can’t take Honor, Science, Math and History and English. And my mom was like, why can’t you? I wouldn’t be too much for you. I’m like, no, I think I’ll be okay. And I learned not to accept other people’s limits on myself, absolutely not. They don’t apply to me. I think so, I appreciate the warning. My sister-in-law warned me when I wanted to do my MBA as an adult, don’t tell me when you’re working on it just in case you don’t complete it. Like seriously, that’s just not me.

Manuel Martinez: And it’s interesting you mentioned that because I have had a couple of different people that have mentioned the same thing. There’s almost, again, that limiting belief of, oh, what’s too much? And I understand that a lot of times they’re looking at statistics, they’re looking at on average, this is what it is. But finding a way to communicate and say, okay, this could be a lot, like maybe, like you said, give me a warning, but don’t tell me, I don’t think you should do that. And it sounds like you had the type of personality and luckily through your mom to say, no, we’re gonna do this. One, you knew your, the capacity to grow, but then I also wanna say that, and I probably wanna ask it, did you kind of see that as a challenge and say, I’m gonna prove you wrong?

Doreen Galli: I’ve written a poem called “Verbellious Success,” so there’s always an element of that, but that’s just kind of the fun putting on the side. I had no doubt I could do it. But you can’t just take an overload. You had to get permission from the registrar. So how do you get the registrar to believe that you’re gonna sign up for this, which they didn’t completely know the full plan when they got permission. I already had it figured it out that I needed to do a triple major, right? And that would get me my bachelor of science. And so I went, his name was Russell Kennedy at the time, he was our registered Eckerd, and I said, okay, don’t get scared, I gotta ask you something important. Here is the permission slip to allow the overload. I promise you, the last day of drop add, I will bring in a letter from all my professors saying I’ve maintained my A’s. Otherwise, here’s the pre-signed drop sheet. And so he’s like, you better know what you’re doing. And that worked okay until I realized I miscalculated by one course, then I needed to do a double overload my junior year and take a course at the community college two hours away when my parents were in addition to the overload there. And their finals, or their midterms right after my finals and everything. But I said, well, here’s, and just get out of here, I’ll call. So my junior senior year when I had to do the double overload he’s just like, because I was in 17 clubs and committees and an all American athlete, and I was the only person that had two tutoring jobs on campus because two departments both wanted me and the third department, well, you’re only allowed one of them and I had two. Those students would figure out what room I was tutoring on that given day and then show up there and they were last in line. So if I was tutoring math, anyone needing math help got first service. And then anyone who popped in from the computer science department could get help. And then anyone from management after that. But if anyone showed up for whatever the primary I was paid for that day in that lab, they always got to the front of the line. So, yeah.

Manuel Martinez: And I like kind of the idea of, if you’re gonna ask for something, it’s not just, hey, can I get this exception and be able to do that? But you came ahead of time, you planned ahead. And I think that’s a lot of times it took me a little while to kind of learn that lesson is if I’m gonna ask for something, there’s a better chance of success. If you’ve done some sort of research or something that proves that not only do I want this request or do I need this, here’s the backing behind it or the information that says, hey, I can do it. I’ve put in more work than just asking for something.

Doreen Galli: Yeah, make it easy to get the yes. I mean, this is true as anywhere in corporate America too. If you need to meet with someone in the invite, this is who I am, this is who I’m working, what I’m working on, who I’m working on it for, and this is what I need you, make it easy for them to say yes. I had to do that when I did the sabbatical at Microsoft. And as a brand new employee from the outside, I met with 100 plus, maybe several hundred in the first couple months because of all the infiltration throughout the whole Azure engineering. I had to get to get all the information to pull it together. I had to meet with a lot of people. And I didn’t know any though. And I had to get them all efficiently scheduled, get the information and get my deliverable done. Same technique, made it easy for them to say yes, that’s important.

Manuel Martinez: The other question I had around there is, with you doing so much, there has to be an element of, not just efficiency, but even being able to do time management around that. Is that something just because you’re taking on so much, you’re learning this on the fly and just establishing like, okay, you know what, this time I did too much, maybe next time I’ll do less? Like what was that process like?

Doreen Galli: Yeah, good question. So I’ve never felt I bit off too much. I don’t remember having that feeling period. And my life felt strange because I bite off a lot. But yeah, no, when I read all those books in elementary school, one of the people I became a fan of was Benjamin Franklin. And one of Benjamin Franklin’s many brilliant ideas is he uses time blocks. And I use those to this day. It’s in my motivational speech, I talk about them. So time blocks is a way that you can easily get two to three times the amount of time out of time that would normally, right? And it literally, I don’t have to do this. If I have something to do, it goes on my calendar, that’s how it gets done. I have to be there to get it done. I have a time block in the morning, like right now I have a time block in the morning and I have a couple things I have to get done overall. But within though, those little blocks can move. It’s kind of like Legos. So I always have to do my meal prep before I get going with the day I work out and I have to shower just to clean up for the day. Cleanup has to be after the workout.

Manuel Martinez: Yeah, you don’t wanna do that beforehand.

Doreen Galli: But that’s the only order constraint. When I do my meal prep, I can do some of it before the workout, some of it after. I can do it completely after the workout in the shower. So that can move around just so it gets done in the morning and that’s something that I do all the time. Sometimes I’ll have a time block when it was supposed to be intense analysis and maybe I’m not quite in the mood for it, but there’s this time block tomorrow when I was gonna do some ketchup on, I gotta do your shorts, do your workout here, A-B testing, any of that. And I’ll go, you know what? I’m switching these two days because I’m more in the mood for this today and that tomorrow. So everything is, even my vegging, even my relaxation, I schedule that, it’s like, I’m not gonna accidentally be on the couch and oh my God, two hours went by. I’m gonna be, you know what? I’m gonna relax now. And I own it. I like to completely own what I’m doing, even relaxing.

Manuel Martinez: And that method of time blocking, just for some that may not be aware, so I’ve heard it, I’ve tried to implement it, I haven’t always been successful. So then I’m assuming the title of the meeting or whatever you’re blocking is designed for, like you said, when I set that time block, it says meal prep. When I set this one, it’s deep analysis. And you’re just specifying a certain amount of time and even doing the relaxation part, are you at the beginning of the day looking at, here’s everything I have to do for that day or even as the day goes on, do you have the flexibility to kind of move things around? I’m just, it’s something I want to learn to do and it sounds like a perfect place.

Doreen Galli: I tend to have one day a week that is completely non-blocked. Cause I, or you can have two half days. I like non-blocked time. The last hour of every day, it’s like from a work perspective, the four to five PM, never blocked to let day in case there’s an emergency. So you have that flexible dynamicism to book it in. There’s also, you need to be kind and flexible, but still kind of like, what do I have to get done to be realistic? This is gonna take so long. And sometimes time opens up. And so then you look on your calendar like, here’s a 15 minute short you grab and you’re like, oh, got it off, just opened up. So my goal always is to open up the biggest buckets of time I can. It’s kind of like a video game of time, right? So if I can get my meditation done the same time, maybe I’m doing a red light treatment, that’s cool. I don’t have to take two separate time blocks to do my red light treatment and my meditation. So that’s always a win-win, you can do it. But the whole goal always is to open up the largest blocks of time. And it’s not that I’m not comfortable with flexibility or dynamicism, but by the more schedules I have things, the more flexibility I actually achieve.

Manuel Martinez: No, and that makes sense because I’ve, it’s the idea of the more efficient you are, the less you kind of have to do and you have that flexibility. So I think about when I relate to that, it’s at work. I can do, when I first started getting into kind of like, scripting is I can do these manual tasks, I can click on it, or if this is gonna take me an hour, if I can spend additional time and automate that and bring that hour down to 15 minutes, well now I have another 45 minutes to, maybe learn more about scripting, or maybe I pick up another skill and it’s really just understanding how to be more efficient with the time that you’re using to, again, it gives you more flexibility, but you’re not 100% rigid, where okay, from this time to this time, and I have to continue doing whatever amount works.

Doreen Galli: It should never feel horrible. I’m very much in life generally with doing things that explicitly just feel like you’re forcing us off to. I say generally I’m a distance runner, and anyone who knows anything about distance running, especially whenever you’re out there or trying to like do a great pace, it absolutely is horrible. It doesn’t matter if you’re in shape or not, but that’s kind of the fun. It builds your grit. I can’t have enough grit. But the running is when I build my grit. The rest of life I like to, you want it flexible and dynamic, but you still, when you plan it and you’re like, “Okay, I can do this then, this then, this then,” you’d be surprised how much you can get done in a little amount of time.

Manuel Martinez: So I know I took a little bit of a detour here, but now through all this efficiency and everything you’re doing, you end up finishing with a triple major then, and kind of what’s the next steps that happen from there?

Doreen Galli: Yeah, so I was able to get a Rotary Foundation Scholarship, so I was a Goodwill Ambassador to Canada. I actually worked with Rotary all through high school and college. So I was like the top Interact President in high school, and I founded the Rotary Club at my college, as well as helped several colleges around town or around that part of the state form Rotary Club. So I did a lot of work with Rotary.

Manuel Martinez: And Rotary is?

Doreen Galli: An international services organization. Their original mission way back when I was with them, it was before 2000, obviously, because I’m slightly older. So it was to rid the world of polio before 2000, and they get vaccines to people over the world, but they also do these Rotary Foundation Fellowships as where they exchange students to other parts of the world. So my master’s degree at Waterloo was paid for by Rotary. However, their scholarship is for an academic year, which they generally think is nine months. And Waterloo’s academic year is 12 months, which means I could complete my master’s, so I was like, score. And there’s a little confusion on that, so I had to show them the details of what they said they were doing and the details of how that college implemented. And it didn’t quite save up enough to be able to handle my car payments and everything 12 months past the nine, and so they covered the 12 months when they realized they needed to, not just nine months, because I had a backup school just in case this all blew up. And then they also allowed me to work on campus. Nice. So that was a lot of fun.

Manuel Martinez: And then so now through Rotary, you’re going, and obviously you continue your education, and you’re–

Doreen Galli: Yeah, not just any school though. There was a 2% acceptance rate. One of the reasons not only my triple major I got in was because I had a full ride. It makes it easier for them to say yes, because what’s the risk from their part? I was 100% paid for, I was a free customer.

Manuel Martinez: Got it.

Doreen Galli: So that being a free customer helped get into a 2% acceptance rate school. Nice. Yeah, that was incredible, oh my gosh. They had 5,000 students in the entire math faculty. My undergrad school, the entire campus was 1,200.

Manuel Martinez: So that’s a big difference there.

Doreen Galli: Yeah. Oh yeah.

Manuel Martinez: And a lot of this work that you’re doing with this organization and building, sounds like you’re building, one, a personal brand, and then also you’re building relationships. And when I say personal brand, people are starting to know who Doreen is. Oh, obviously you talked about the mentoring, so people are coming through and oh, we’re gonna find out, right? Word is spreading about who you are, what the quality of what you do.

Doreen Galli: Sometimes too fast, just kidding. When I was in high school, I was so well known in my hometown that I couldn’t go on a date without someone. I had no idea who they were walking up to me and going, “Oh, hi, you must be Doreen.” Because I was on the front page of the sports section and everything else, so yeah.

Manuel Martinez: It’s got its drawbacks.

Doreen Galli: It was actually more burdensome. When I went to Canada, it was kind of nice because people didn’t know me. So I could go out somewhere and socialize and somebody wouldn’t walk up to me and go, “You’re Doreen.”

Manuel Martinez: So then from that organization, what led you towards your first, I guess, we’ll say professional job, like corporate position, and then what was that like kind of getting your foot in the door in that realm?

Doreen Galli: Great question. So when I was writing up my thesis, I sometimes when I’m writing like to change environments. When you change environments, you change its review. So if you write something, go with your computer or a printout, took a different seat, different room, and read it again. You will see and pick up different things. So I was writing out my thesis, went to Toronto, had friends in Toronto. My friend worked at IBM, went to visit my friend for lunch at IBM, had my backpack with all the stuff in it, right? New always planning on finish by fall. Of course, had a copy of my resume on me, right? Went into their manager. IBM managers are trained to always be recruiting. Interesting. What are you doing when you finish? Right? Don’t know, right? I had guaranteed funding for three years. I finished it in the residency. So didn’t know, worst case scenario, I could hang out with the university. I had guaranteed funding and my visa was good till the end of the year, then have to get a new one, but I still had guaranteed funding. So if I maybe didn’t turn it in, I could drag it out if I wanted to. And so they took my resume and I had to interview the next day to find out what it might like and they were talking about various different opportunities, possibilities. And there’s this one thing they were starting called the Center for Advanced Studies. It was meant to get technology advancements from all the research they fund at all these universities and all the research they fund at their software labs, get them together, but get it to product immediately to customers, okay? It was called the Consortium of Research and Distributed Systems and I’m like, they brought up different opportunities and like, yeah, kind of like this group. That sounds interesting. So it was the first postdoc in the history of IBM Center for Advanced Studies. They now have 35 centers around the world and they were debating about canceling the center at the time because they didn’t have any project successful.

Manuel Martinez: And what was it that attracted you to that particular position? So to me, it seems like the fact that it’s, you know, like you’re helping develop, it’s the creative aspect of how do we develop something and then eventually make it to product, was that it?

Doreen Galli: It is the bleeding edge on top of getting into customers and all of that, on top of that. Okay, the people on this project, check this out. Paul Larson, the father of SQL. Y. Handy Meedy and Toby Torrey, the people behind X 500 and the directory services standards. I’ve used Silver Shots if you’ve had an operating systems course in undergrad, chances are you wrote your book. Yeah, these are the people I got to work with directly. As a matter of fact, I was the architect for the project that had to get all of these people to listen and collaborate to deliver something and they were failing miserably. So I had to rescue the project basically as this new PhD.

Manuel Martinez: And that has to be a bit of a challenge. So I’m curious how you handled, you know, one, I don’t know at that time, probably more from like an age standard, right? Because you’re one, the new person, you’re younger.

Doreen Galli: I was 25 when I finished.

Manuel Martinez: 25 and having to go ahead and gather these people and you’re starting from scratch as far as who Doreen is. Right, so sure, they see the, they can look at the resume, they can look at all this, but okay, why should we listen to her? What is it that she’s gonna bring about?

Doreen Galli: Yeah, I know it was interesting. It was, there’s two aspects. One is IBM had a dress code at the time, but it didn’t apply to me, let’s just say that, right? I had my Doc Martens, my biker jacket, my jeans on, they were shooting time, right? It was all gonna lie, you know? But like it was John Thompson and John Schwartz, very famous in IT and technology. Oh yeah, those John Thompson and John Schwartz. And I remember the team freaked out when I landed up in the elevator with John Schwartz once with my biker jacket and my Doc Martens and blue jeans. He’s just like, he looked and he’s like, “Oh, you’re Doreen.” So they knew I was the person that was hopefully gonna somehow hold this off. That’s been the landmark of my career. And you’re like, what are we gonna do? This is about to fail epically. It’s usually when people are very open-minded and in terms of, okay, who can actually get this done? And I’ve always been a great candidate for that. That’s the stuff I pull off. That’s my reputation is. I like to go in there and we’re about to cancel this. We have millions into this project, into the Center for Advanced Studies, into Cords Project. We need something to show for or forget it. And these people were very well known. And I’m like, is it the shiny new PhD student? I learned that even if you’re a type A in that scenario, it can’t be a type A. You have to be, it’s the same thing I did at Microsoft, bringing everything together, the same skillset. It’s, I’m just trying to get this together. I understand you know what you’re working on. Tell me what you’re doing. I was just, I’m all ears. So it was all ears with them. But sometimes, I mean, the difficulty in them, the two components wouldn’t integrate because they were using 16-bit grayscale and they’re using eight-bit color. You’re gonna have to put something in the middle, right? I didn’t need a PhD to know that, but that was a lot of it. And the good news though is for the big Caskon in October, the first ever Caskon, they just had their 30-something celebration. It was in LinkedIn. The night before the event, the same night the Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series, and yes, it was in Toronto. Everyone was cheering, yes! Is when we got the final components integrated for the conference the next day. So we came home from getting everything integrated. Everyone is cheering on the streets. It was amazing. We had nothing to do with our accomplishment, but to this day, it felt like it. It was the proof of concept for WebSphere.

Manuel Martinez: Right, and it feels, and it’s easy to remember now. I mean, not that you wouldn’t have remembered it either without the World Series, but again, that just kind of coincides. It makes it just a little bit more impactful.

Doreen Galli: Oh yeah, yeah, no, it was exceptionally exciting. It was, yeah.

Manuel Martinez: So one of the things that you kind of brushed on, and there’s a lot of this, I see a lot of this on LinkedIn, and just in general, you came into a corporate environment, and I understand that part of it is, you know, you have the skillset. You’ve developed that behind you to be able to say, “I can do this,” but you remained at that time yourself. It’s corporate America that suits ties. Like, you could have gone in to try to fit in a little bit towards the mold. Again, maybe not completely go suit and tie, but just–

Doreen Galli: For the conference they did. They were very worried for the conference when I had to present to like, “You can’t go like this.” I’m like, “I actually have suits.” They’re like, “You have suits?” I’m like, “Yeah.” So I had more suits the whole time at the conference when they wanted me to publicly represent them.

Manuel Martinez: But like in that environment, obviously you kind of got the okay to get away from the dress code. What made you have that confidence to say, “I can remain me, but still be able to do this”?

Doreen Galli: Have you ever seen the movie “Real Genius”? Yes. (both laughing) Yeah, yeah.

Manuel Martinez: So it’s really just being comfortable with the fact that I know what I’m doing, and regardless of what’s going on, I–

Doreen Galli: I did a minimum residency PhD at Waterloo, so they figured she’s gonna figure out how to get this too. And I somehow was able to give them that belief in me, and they were seeing the progress, then we did it. So, proofs in the pudding. Right, exactly. Nice. Yeah, yeah.

Manuel Martinez: So then you get this integration, you’re able to do all of this, and how long did you stay there, and what else did you accomplish?

Doreen Galli: Well, it was a year appointment. I was a foreigner on visas. Okay. On a postdoc. And so it’s like, “Okay, where do I go from here?” And PhD, you’re like, “Apply for a professorship.” In the meantime, in January that year, my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer down in Florida, so kind of was interested in finding a way back. However, also in 1993, it was the first year IBM ever had layoffs. The question was, “Are you gonna become a Canadian and landed immigrant?” I’m American. No, I was on year by year visas. I just left my Florida driver’s license, which, if you went to IBM, Canada, now anywhere else, when they’re having the first layoffs in the history of the company, you can’t hire someone new and bring them in, even if they already did that for you. So that became a non-option, unless I was going to change my citizenship. Yeah, yeah. But I was able to get, and it was selected because it was a, it was the, forgot the county, but it was the remote branch of Georgia Tech, and they were heavy in working professionals, and I was able to get an associate professorship, so not an assistant, but an associate leveraging all my industry experience and the degrees. They’re like, “No, she’s amazing.” They put me right in as an associate. So, and at the time, my father had cancer, and then, of course, my husband was in South Florida, so we eventually, I’d take, leverage that opportunity to start my family. So I actually jumped out of the industry, and jumped back in.

Manuel Martinez: Wow. And what, with starting a family, did you encounter any kind of challenges? So I’ve only had one other person that took, from what I remember, actually, I’ve had two people that have kind of taken multiple years off, and then kind of coming back, so I don’t know.

Doreen Galli: Yeah, I technically wasn’t off, because I was working as a professor, an associate professor at that, and I was consulting, I wrote my book, I distributed systems at the time, so I was still doing things. Fortunately, the guy that brought the Olympics to Atlanta, and I had volunteered with the Olympics, it was an IBM thing, that technically was an unpaid job, but because of that, I made the contacts that when my son was able to, after he was two, and went to, you know, was more freedoms, he’d go to school and such, that the guy who brought the Olympics to Atlanta was on the board of directors of the telco company I joined, and they had a big mess, went public, they had to figure out how to stabilize this, because people were complaining now that they’re public, it has to be clean and stable, and they were making live changes to a 24, so it’s one of those cases to where it was a big mess, and they needed something, absolutely, you could just, we need it fixed, period. So that has my name all over it, right?

Manuel Martinez: Yeah, it definitely does, especially based on what you’re doing in the past, and then also, now I’m seeing a little bit more of a theme, is, apart from just doing a good job at your role, you seem to volunteer and kind of help out and make connections, but again, I’ve brought this up in the past, you’re not doing it to meet people to, well, this person’s gonna get me a job in the future, it just happens because they probably thought of you, and he was like, oh, I remember Doreen, we worked on something completely different, this is related to the Olympics, but now we have this problem, so people start to, when they’re thinking through, they’re like, okay, who’s dealt with this type of situation? It may not have even been tech related, it could have been, you know, again, with the Olympics, just some sort of issue there, helping plan that out. Is that accurate?

Doreen Galli: Yes, and one piece of advice I could proceed, which was very important, it does not matter who you know, it matters who knows what you know, so I’m very happy you’re helping get the word out there. I mean, because that was a telco company, what have I done in telco before that? I knew networking, of course, but technically, even when I got my CIO job in a global fortune 10, as the CIO in the biggest logistics company in the world at the time, I hadn’t been in logistics before.

Manuel Martinez: And that comes back to, and I had a previous guest, her name is Estella, where she talks about transferable skills, right? And that’s, in that sense, the different industry, but there’s skills that you can bring across, like you mentioned, networking, okay, it’s not quite telco, but there is that similarity in how they operate.

Doreen Galli: Yeah, there’s not a technology that I’m not comfortable in, so that’s kind of the convenient thing, and I’m perfectly comfortable in business or technology, but there always has to be that geek element to it. But absolutely, the interesting thing is, fundamentally, that job was because I was confident that I’m like, I don’t know what it’s gonna take to solve this, but I got a great toolbox, but I never reuse a plan. You can’t reuse a plan. People reuse plans in consulting all the time, and it’s a disaster because every organization is too unique to completely, you can be inspired by that plan, but to completely reuse it? No, no.

Manuel Martinez: And then in that role, again, just based on conversations, this one, the track record, you helped implement and do what you were hired on to do there at that telco.

Doreen Galli: Yeah, they had bought, well, at the telco company, they didn’t have significant quality in testing before they released, they didn’t have release control. There was, it was all just hey Joe requests going out. There was no product planning or anything. It was just someone would have an idea to go to an engineer, suddenly it appeared in the product. And so they really had to mature. The technology didn’t exist to do backups of websites, especially a functioning website, because we had, if you’re familiar with Google Voice, but this was in 98, right? It was one voice number. You can fax me, page me, email me. You can go to my website associated with my phone number and fax me, email me, page me from there, or on your phone. Originally it was you can do 105 standardized requests, but I knew the two systems were connected. And I’m like, how would you like to be able to do an audio attachment reply to an email that was read to you? It got our CEO five minutes on CNBC. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you know all the components together, you can put them together and go, no, wait a second, here’s an easy win. It was a day of engineering’s being generous, the amount of time it took to accomplish it technically, because we already had the systems connected. Like the voicemail system and the phone system and the internet and the web, all of that was connected already, and all of the transfer up and back between the standards, it was all there. We just had to say, do it.

Manuel Martinez: And it’s really just making sure that you’re understanding fundamentally how different technologies work, how these different systems integrate, and then just to your point, not having something pre-built and taking a step back. Because I’ve had that a lot of times we’re too involved and too close to the situation. As soon as you kind of take a step back and you’re like, okay, okay, well, this works this way, this works that way. Well, it can do a little bit more and maybe add additional functionality just by adding something else.

Doreen Galli: Yeah, yeah, I call it a low-lying fruit, which I used to refer to as watermelons, but watermelons at Microsoft were big problems that you thought was green. It was a big red and a tight. I like watermelons for nice, big, juicy, low-lying fruit. So only if you use it as low-lying, easy fruit, then it’s a watermelon.

Manuel Martinez: Then it’s a watermelon. And now, I don’t know that I kind of need to get going into the next consecutive role, but really from a lot of the places that you’ve kind of worked at, right? You mentioned Microsoft. Again, as you’re moving to these different roles, is it similar to the last one? Are there layoffs happening? Like, what is it that kind of, if you kind of look at the overall theme, how are you able to move around through these different positions? Because one thing that I mean, I meant to talk about at the beginning is, you’ve had a number of significant roles. And some of them, I saw that you moved up, some of you came in, CIO, CTO. So these aren’t just, oh, okay, like, I’m an engineer here, I do this. These are high visibility roles. So what was kind of the process and what made you, I guess, was it skillset? Was it a desire to move into those types of positions?

Doreen Galli: Great question. Interestingly, not at all, I love solving problems, right? I need to get paid enough to live, but my son, when he was two, was anaphylactic to 10 major foods. So I always had a custom make all of his foods. And the one thing you can’t do at the level when it’s not easily outsourced, we outsourced it once for a vacation to Disney, and it took so many hours to set up, it wasn’t even funny, because it’s a life or death thing. So my constraints were always, for my own medical reasons, had to be in a warm climate, because I could not predominantly live in a closed climate, and life had to be achievable. My constraints in life based upon what the company needed. And I don’t think a lot of people have any clue how tough it is, particularly when you get up into more senior positions, which is the only place that great problems exist. So for me, it’s always been, how do you balance that? But I’m also a change agent. A lot of times when you come in and you execute the change, and you finish executing the change, and they’re like, okay, we can see the end is all set up, then you tend to get laid off. Yeah. (laughs) It’s like, we’re good, we can go now, because you came in to do the change. So you always wanna make sure you’re taking care of upfront correctly, because chances are, once you’ve done so much change, like at Microsoft, once I defined and designed everything, they were still absorbing it for years afterwards. Right. And so that’s just, I don’t know, I just, that’s just part of it. It’s never personal, it’s part of the technology industry, and like, okay. (laughs)

Manuel Martinez: And it sounds like it probably fit your personality a little bit more, is understanding that I want that next change, that next challenge, so.

Doreen Galli: I would have been happy if any of them, if I had, because I know what the next challenge is, they just didn’t have the ability to know what the next challenge was, and we didn’t get to have that conversation yet, because it was just coming up, and it would have been too premature to truly list, where we could have gone next. So there’s more vision I had that they could have done, but that’s okay.

Manuel Martinez: It’s just, it’s part of–

Doreen Galli: Like AT&T, they bought Warner Brothers, they needed the money, it wasn’t anything personal. It’s just, okay. Those five years, I was working on something beautiful, but oh well. That’s why you have to make sure you deliver, because as soon as it is not business convenient, particularly in the tech field, you’re gone. It’s not a relationship, it’s not a marriage. As much as I’d like to think so, and a lot of people like to think, and it feels good to want, there’s no relationship between the company and you. I don’t care if you’ve been there 20 years, I don’t know how they tell you this. They’re out for their bottom line, and the one moment, that’s their best interest, even if in the big picture it might not be, they don’t act that way. You will be gone, and a lot of people get shocked when it’s happened, or take it personal, and traditionally they try to make it personal, and then they realize, no, it was just a business decision, and I don’t know where they’re floating now, trying to make it personal. It’s as a personal as it could get. It’s just is how the industry is, so that’s why you have to make sure you execute, you network, and you had brought this up with how you networking, and I said it was important, who knows what you know, but there’s another aspect to those other activities. This was advice I got early in my career. Companies have ups and downs. If your whole life is your job, and your family, but it’s only your job and your family, the ups and downs of the business will affect your whole life. So add something like Toastmasters in, and you always have something else feeding in good energy, and good whatever, and that way it’s like, okay, this part’s a little less than positive, a little less than ideal, but that’s okay. I have this bringing in my good energy now. I can balance that this is a little turmoil that I lay everyone off every 90 days, re-organ every 90 days, that will not affect you as much if you have the rest of your life satisfactory.

Manuel Martinez: I never thought about it that way in the fact that that’s really what it’s doing, because there were points in my career where it was work and family, and as much as we like to think that they’re separate, they’re really not. If work was going great, guess what? You have that energy, I bring that at home, and when it wasn’t going great, guess what? I brought that home. Luckily, I have my wife who is very, she’s very keen to this, very supportive, and she knows that I need that. She’s like, hey, I don’t know what’s going on, but I know there’s something at work. I’m like, well, how? She’s like, because you’re bringing that home. Yeah. Right? The more I started to try to get involved in other things outside of work, maybe it was sports, maybe it’s different activities, volunteering, things that you’re like, I enjoy this, okay, to your point. It becomes less of a seesaw, and now more of a balancing ball where you’re on there. Okay, this is going down, but there’s enough over here to bring me up, and it’s a constant movement.

Doreen Galli: And the fact that brought you up affects you at the workplace where everyone else is down in the gutter, and you’re like, no, we got this. I’m like, wow, that man, he’s got some positive energy. Makes a difference.

Manuel Martinez: It does, and I’ve become that person. I’m always like, hey, how’s it go up? Because there’s so much that I’m like, everything–

Doreen Galli: Happy Friday. Manuel Martinez: Happy Friday.

Doreen Galli: Happy Monday.

Manuel Martinez: Everything’s good.

Doreen Galli: Happy Tuesday.

Manuel Martinez: Sure, there’s times where, again, for moments, I’m like, oh man, and they can tell, I’m really struggling with this part of it, but I don’t become an instant downer for everything.

Doreen Galli: Right, right. It doesn’t magnify neither. It stops the wheel from cascading.

Manuel Martinez: Having these other things that you’re doing outside of work, is that something that you discovered after, or was it consciously something that you’re like, hey, I’m figuring this out as I go, or after you reflect back, like, hey, this is something I’ve learned.

Doreen Galli: You heard the beginning of that elementary school. How do you tolerate an elementary school where they force you to be there every day, all year, for eight years? I performed in eighth grade level and beginning of second grade, and yet I had to endure it.

Manuel Martinez: Got it. So it’s just developing that grit from that early age mark.

Doreen Galli: So I learned that, well, you know, this doesn’t put, I got sports, so I got a good book to read. I can write a great poem, right? So yeah, I had to find ways to, it’s I’ve never been bored, by the way. I always found Bearden to be a self-reflective state. Never been it in my life.

Manuel Martinez: Wow.

Doreen Galli: Yeah.

Manuel Martinez: So, you know, you’ve done things at Microsoft, you’ve done things at all these different places. What are some of the, like the biggest challenges that you think that you’ve had to overcome, throughout that part? So, I mean, I’ve heard a lot of great things that you’ve done. Sure, there was some of the layoffs, but there’s, you know, for as extensive as the careers you’ve had, like I would be naive to think that there weren’t challenges along the way.

Doreen Galli: Oh yeah, lots of challenges. I remember Nancy at IBM said, “When you first get on the phone with someone, “you have to earn the right to say something.” That’s interesting. You’ve never met them before, whatever. You know, so I don’t always, I used to immediately get on the phone, “Hi, I’m this.” I don’t aggressively get down to business as fast anymore. I will do some nice cities and say, “I saw you were working on it, “making about them and what they’re working on.” And then do it. The good news is Nancy took free reschedules before I actually had my first meeting with her. After my first meeting with her, I could get in the meeting anytime within two weeks. That was the standard at IBM, if you’re respected. You shouldn’t be able to get on anyone’s calendar within two weeks. If you don’t, you don’t know what you’re doing with your calendar. And that assumes travel, otherwise it should be within a week, executive to executive, right? If it’s past two weeks and they weren’t out of town, they don’t really care about meeting with you.

Manuel Martinez: And is it really just them understanding, again, the nice city’s not going straight to business because again, it’s just like, is it because you’re overwhelming them right at the get-go or what was that?

Doreen Galli: They’re humans. They’re people. They’re having a crazy day. Maybe their part of the world is going horrible. So first along, and sometimes if I’ve gotten into a meeting where you could tell everyone’s just like whatever, I’m like, “I don’t know about you, but it’s one of those days and I’ll pretend I’m having one of those days. Let’s just do a big deep breath and then we can dive in.” Okay, now I feel better.

Manuel Martinez: So it’s that emotion, so really–

Doreen Galli: It’s getting that connection, that human connection, acknowledging them as a human and doing that first. Maybe that might be more obvious to other people, but–

Manuel Martinez: It might be and it might not, right? Because a lot of times–

Doreen Galli: You don’t want to waste their time.

Manuel Martinez: You don’t want to waste their time. So you want to have, it’s a skill that you’re going to have to learn to develop. It’s that emotional intelligence. It’s understanding, like, read the room. Now it’s hard when you’re on the phone, but again, taking a minute to try and go through and really understand what’s going on. And… Doreen Galli: Being present

Manuel Martinez: And not–

Doreen Galli: Very present.

Manuel Martinez: Straight in with your agenda, like you mentioned before, like with a plan, like, “Okay, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m just going to

Doreen Galli: “Charge, run over.”

Manuel Martinez: Charge, run over and then, and I’m sure with executives that at one point you–

Doreen Galli: That’s a China in a bull shop approach, doesn’t work?

Manuel Martinez: Well, not only that, but you don’t want to waste their time. So I can understand there’s times where I’ve done that, where I’m like, “Okay, I understand they have a limited amount of time, but let me get straight to business.” There’s a difference between, again, charging right in and taking a second, but then being efficient with the time and respectful.

Doreen Galli: Yes, it’s a balancing act. And it depends on the person too. And sometimes, for example, you get on the phone with an executive and I would call it the, you know how chickens in a coop, they go around and go, “Look at my feathers, aren’t they pretty?” A lot of senior executives very much like to do that. And what you want to do is go, “Absolutely, those feathers are so beautiful. Wow, I can only help to have such beautiful feathers.” And by giving them so much respect for the feathers that they are showing you and flopping, they think you’re pretty impressive because you think they’re great.

Manuel Martinez: I’ve read some of those books where it talks about, again, make it about them. You know, even just in that we’re gonna just like, taking the time to ask about them and knowing something about them. Oh man, Doreen’s amazing. Like, she’s just an awesome person. All you probably did was ask me about me. But you’re gonna stand out because that’s not, it’s not the norm. And it sounds like you do a lot.

Doreen Galli: Right, and I didn’t challenge them for flocking their feathers and showing me how beautiful they were. And so I admired them. Because a lot of times I do a lot of change management. And a lot of times you get on the call, fundamentally, they have a magic card behind their pocket. Like when I changed the commission structure at IBM, that person had a magic card in his pocket that is never used. He had the power to change the structure. I had to have a conversation with him and get him to think that this was his idea, and a brilliant idea, right? Because we did the patent program for global services. They only had 15 filings the year before. And I brought it from research and software over to services. But the problem was, and it was embedded in the assets, that the assets people weren’t charging for, they were giving them away.

Manuel Martinez: Okay.

Doreen Galli: And the reason they were giving them away is if they had a million dollar contract and a $200,000 asset, they would only pay the salespeople on the million dollar contract, not the $200,000 asset. The problem is the asset was 100% profit. In addition to the fact they’re still being charged having materials for any adaptation for the asset. So I presented this problem to them like, you know, what can we do? This seems silly. Because I want them to do more of that. But they’re not selling this thing that’s 100% profitability, they’re giving it away. Now I had embedded patents, so I had the care, or the stick, the stick was the patent attorneys I could have gone after to stop that from happening. But I was hoping to get the commission structure changed. And I’m like, no, we could do a program, but that’s short term. What can we possibly do? Talking to the person that changed to the commission structure, right? No idea what could possibly happen, right? And well, you know, we could put a multiplier on it for that part of the sale. Really? So now the million dollar contract with the free $200,000 asset was being sold for 1.2 million because the person that sold the 1.2 million contract was getting paid as if it was 1.4 instead of the 1 million before he made the change. Now those salespeople, client facing, were running to all my engineers going, you got more of these assets? But how do you get the person who changed the commission structure change? That was this magic card. So how to figure out just like Russell in allowing me to do an overload in college, how do you get them to use the power they possess? How can they make it comfortable and easy and within their power and knowledge for them to go, this is what I’m gonna do and to take that step? That’s the art form.

Manuel Martinez: And it’s the art form because it sounds like as much as you could have gone through and challenged them, right? Like, hey, here’s what I’ve done, here’s the reason. You took the ego out of it, right? Like at the end of the day, you’re trying to solve the problem, meet an ego and going through and challenging you isn’t going to, maybe it will make that change, but it’s gonna be a long, hard one. More often than not, it’s not gonna happen. But understanding that, okay, I have to know that in order for this to be successful, I’ve gotta take my step.

Doreen Galli: A bull in a China shop can’t actually do great change management and a lot of people don’t realize that and they will hire the bull in the China shop, if you know what I’m talking about. If you put a big bull on top of it, it’s just broken glass everywhere. You wanna execute smoothly and just, oh yeah, no, I can do it. It was like a month later, the commission structure was changed. It was real easy, yeah.

Manuel Martinez: So as you’ve kind of gotten into all of these roles, at some point, and I know we kind of touched that in the beginning, so I kind of wanna transition towards that part of it is you’ve done all these great things in different areas, different industries. I’m gonna make sure that I have a link to your LinkedIn so that people can go and look and probably reach out to you if they have additional questions.

Doreen Galli: I’m native in every industry, technically.

Manuel Martinez: I mean, I saw it, I mean, you name it. I was like, oh my God, I mean, these are names like DHL, AT&T, Microsoft, so again, there’s a lot of that. And at some point, you kind of, you touched on it a little bit at the beginning as you kind of moved into more of a consulting role and doing that. So what ultimately, apart from what you already mentioned, is you didn’t like that the way that it was being handled? Was that the primary driver?

Doreen Galli: So I’m technically an analyst. Consultants will go offline for weeks at a time. Those weeks at a time, I’m several hundred conversations or several conferences ahead in new information I’ve acquired in terms of what’s going on. But the interesting thing is my entire career, I have rotated between advisory, somewhat of consulting, or an operations role. So I’m used to being in all three, right? And I wear every hat and every role I’m at. So when I’m an operations executive and I’m negotiating with IBM for my services, I know how their contracts operate. So I was able to get 30% off my contract because I was like, “Oh, you’re a big king above my signature authority.” Oops. But we can get it done if you can start next week, if you got the bench time, let us do it if you can do it. And they’re like, “Heck yeah, I got all of it off my contract at least started Monday.” So every hat I’ve ever worn, I’ve learned something about that perspective that I bring in to the other perspectives. And so every position, I’m always wearing every hat. And that affects everything you do because you sit in their chair, you can’t help it, I’ve been in that chair. But I’ve rotated regularly, like even I was doing analyst work, pandemic hit, I went as a radical and I was in the ops deep engineering role, right? Finished executing everything. So it got to where, they gave me four months of work, I finished in four weeks and they’re like, “I can’t help it, of course I’m gonna do it as efficiently and amazing as I can, I’m not gonna take four months for the sake of dragging it out.” So I laid off. Oops, but that’s okay. So rotated back to advising again, but I’ve always done this rotation up and back, which really helped my knowledge set. But it does confuse a lot of people because I don’t fit in a box, which makes it difficult also finding amazing roles because AI picks out average, ordinary, and that’s what they’re using nowadays. So yeah, it doesn’t go for outliers by the way the mathematics underlying works, it wouldn’t.

Manuel Martinez: It wouldn’t. Yeah, because I mean, to your point, you’re not gonna fall within that realm. (both laughing)

Doreen Galli: I never had. It’s just how it is. And it’s okay, but I’ll still run into people today I had a conversation with someone who was convinced that their cloud engineers were more technical than me. No, I can’t tell her this. Well, I don’t have cloud certifications, but I’m a member of the press. And as a member of the press, when you take certifications, you’re becoming inundated with their bias. And I explained this when I was talking to the team at Microsoft, “I’m sorry. Yes, I know AWS inside out. I know Google inside out. I know Azure inside out, but I don’t have the certifications because it’s a member of the press that creates bias. If you want me to, well, and then your operations role, no big deal.” That kind of knowledge acquisition and passing tests is kind of like my thing, no big deal. And their answer was, “We’re asking just find the next generation. So who would test you?” But some people assume since I don’t have cloud certifications that I’m not a cloud engineer, right? Which I just find a comical, you know, but…

Manuel Martinez: And that’s gotta be a challenge. I mean, that’s gotta be quite a big challenge.

Doreen Galli: If someone refuses to see your capabilities, you can’t change their mind. You just work with people who understand what you bring to the table and don’t waste your time. That’s what I do.

Manuel Martinez: Got it. And that’s something that…

Doreen Galli: They’ll eventually figure out, even like when I’m worshiping how beautiful their feathers are that they’re flocking, if they don’t figure out who and what am, it doesn’t matter. It’s nothing to do with the meeting. It’s about getting the gold done. And, you know, if they’re so incapable of understanding or not willing to… Because a basic sentence that you were the platform architect for Azure, anyone who actually listened to that sentence would never say you’re not a cloud engineer. Like, that’s just the most absurd thing, right? No, that means you’re one of the top cloud engineers in the universe. You know, there’s only three major public clouds. I was one of them for one of them during a major transformation, right? But yeah, don’t worry about it. And I think that’s important advice. You know, you can’t please everybody. They’re not gonna like everybody. If for some reason they just have a thing, just don’t feed into it. Just move on. Don’t let it ruin your day. No one can make you feel bad without your permission. It’s a very important lesson.

Manuel Martinez: I mean, it really is. And now, as you’re kind of talking about, I know we had talked about this before with you developing the platform, right? So having those types of challenges, how do we… I know how we do it as an individual, right? You touched on it is really don’t feed into that, but how would someone… What would be your advice for somebody like me? It says, “Okay, I don’t know if I wanna take the certifications or hey, you know, maybe I don’t wanna check that box. I don’t have the restriction of a media press.” One of the things I see a lot now is build publicly, right? Do things out there so that people are aware and talk about it. Now, it might be hard because we’re like, well, you’re talking about that, you’re posting about it. Did AI do that? Did you do that? But there’s ways to demonstrate that.

Doreen Galli: And you can’t always talk about what you did. A lot of what I did at Microsoft still can’t talk about. I talk generically.

Manuel Martinez: But how would I go about, or how do you go about, I guess would be a better question, is relaying that to somebody who is willing to listen.

Doreen Galli: That’s really, it’s important, who knows what you know. And then hopefully one of those people runs into someone who’s looking for you. The person who got me, my global, the recruiter, who hired, placed me for my global Fortune 10 before 40 role, turned me down for the first thing I wanted to do with him. Didn’t burn the bridge, and I’m like, okay, well, I’m kinda bummed that, but that was kinda fun. It is a really cool role he was working on. You’re like, okay, but he knew what I was capable of, right? Lo and behold, he ran into someone that was looking for me and called me. And so it’s why it matters who knows what you know and what you’re capable of, so that when someone runs into anyone who has one of those that, like in my case, what are we gonna do? We have to get this done for our business to survive. Call me, please, call me, love to help you. Yeah, no, I, because when it really has to get done, you have that, that’s huge, because it’s not, it’s about the company’s survival. And so everyone looks at it through their own tears. And when you’re doing one of these massive change management, so you have to talk to people at different dimensions, each dimension has a different conversation, because it’s tailored to their dimension of this huge problem. So some of the people that worked with me when I was going through this, one of the lessons, they would say, they’d go, okay, we just had three conversations with three different people, and they were completely different conversations. I said, well, they were different angles of the same conversation, and they thought about it. Right. Because the person who had this interface with the problem has a completely different agenda. So it had a tailor what was important about the big ball relative to their specific agenda.

Manuel Martinez: And how did you pick that up over time to be able to understand and know the different levels of communication? I know that you’re a part of Toastmaster, and that’s just being able to go ahead with presence, but that’s completely different than understanding how to talk to somebody at different levels and within different purviews.

Doreen Galli: Right, good question. Part of it might have been naivety when I was young that I didn’t know, I knew to be humble when you speak with people you highly respect, and so I did that, but I also didn’t know that maybe I should have been intimidated. And this goes back to, no one in my family ever went to college. My grandma went to third grade. When I interviewed at college, I thought I was evaluating them. If it was someplace I wanted to go, I had no idea they were checking to see if I should be admitted. Oops. And so, yeah, I know. I found out when I was in sophomore in college. And I’m like, oh my gosh. It never occurred to me, so it might have been ignorance and naivety that somehow drove me to it. But also, so I wasn’t intimidated by anyone I met, which was true when I was at IBM, but I think it’s partially just like absolute desire to solve a problem, and that when you’re really focused on the problem, then you know how that person relates to that problem, so why would you cover stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with that? Like sometimes I’ll tell them this is the big goal, but this is what you can do, right? Microsoft, the guy who owned the code for incident response, okay, I needed him to do something that was on his roadmap to show the troubleshooting guide in his application. I found out that at three in the morning when a catastrophe happened, the link to the troubleshooting guide was nowhere to be found, three o’clock in the morning, where’s the directions, nowhere to be found. I found out there was a database field in his application that had the troubleshooting guide for every service. Not only that, it was filled in. This was a filled in database field that existed that wasn’t shown to everyone. I’m like, I know it was not, but hear me out. Three o’clock in the morning, they don’t know where to go for the directions. It’s filled in, is there any way? Could you? Popped up immediately. Production live site, the big Thursday meeting when we go over a massive failure of the platform and what happened. Thank you for putting the troubleshooting guide in the incident system. I mean, people were thinking of us in the systems that it happened to show up in it. But it was within his power, everything was right there. But who’s gonna add something to an application when it’s not in the roadmap? They got 300 features on the roadmap. How do you get them to use that power, that magic card that they have? And that’s when you go highly logical. I mean, if that was your application, wouldn’t you wanna help them find the directions of how to rescue the incident if you’re the incident response system? Right? So if you can find that logic trail, always grab that and never tell someone to do something, I need you to do, (laughs) I’ve never said I need you to do this. Even when I was the CIO in CTO, I’ve never used I need you, do this. No, no, no, no. I work with leaders and leaders are influenced. They’re not followers. I can’t tell them just to do something, even if they report to me. I did get to the point where someone reporting to you or not has absolutely nothing to do with who you’re leading.

Manuel Martinez: Yeah, it really doesn’t.

Doreen Galli: Especially if you’re leading leaders. It’s all about, can you influence them? And influencing them is, you have to be very present. If you’re on a banana peel all the time, because you’re not using time blocks and you’re spinning out of control and you’re going up and down with the moods of what’s going on in your company, then you can’t do that. But if instead you feel kind of being very present on, okay, this is the goal, what I have to get done. This is their dimension to the goal. So what do I need to do? What do I need them to realize? Because at the end of the day, you want to show them that box is bigger than they thought. Not that you’re outside the box. People do not work outside the box. I don’t, everyone will go, “Oh, I think outside the box, oh, you’re outside.” No, no. I show people the boxes bigger than they thought. Big difference. Perspective, just like when people say, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” Ask for advice on how to make it better. Don’t ask for feedback. Feedback is disempowering. It’s, “I’m weak, I don’t know, did I do okay?” Advice is, “How could I have done better with that?” Same fundamental thing, but the energy is very different in the question.

Manuel Martinez: It is, and one of the things that I’ve noticed is, I asked you about how do you communicate, but really what I’ve come to understand is you’re really good at listening and that comes from being present, right? If I’m not listening to what people are saying, to what’s going on, to being aware of all the different things, I can’t communicate that. Or if I am, I might be communicating the incorrect things to you because I’m not paying attention. I’m not present. I could be the best speaker in the world, but if I don’t listen, right, and said it at one point, right, I’ve got two years, I’m a listener, that’s really the fundamental part of this whole thing.

Doreen Galli: Yes, it’s one of the reasons TVW stands for technical business whispers because the answers are always in the whispers. That’s why I say it in every video, it’s one of our sayings and slogans. And the reason being is, it’s true. It’s true. Now in my case, obviously I’m referring to whisper reports, conference whispers, and whisper rankings and whisper studies, but it’s also just fundamentally true in transformations and changes. What are they really saying? And sometimes it’s funny, you’ll be in a room and you’ll say, okay, now, apologies, what you just said, did you mean A or B? And the room says, half yes for A and half yes for B. I’m like, yeah, I thought so, which is it? And so a lot of those, it’s just one of those that, but I also have a strong logic. I will know when something’s illogical, even if I can’t explain it, I’ll go like, I’ll like vibrate, that makes no sense. Can I explain why it makes no sense? With time, let me do a run, get back to you on that. But I will, I have a logic detector. This is a TV show about someone who has a light detector. I have kind of like that logic detector. There was something like, what are the acquisitions we were gonna do? I knew in the beginning, I’m like, this is gonna fail because of that, but I think we need to acquire them because of this. A couple hundred thousand dollars later, they verified that a partnership wasn’t gonna work and the way they were using it wasn’t worked, but yes, we needed to buy them for completely different reasons. It’s like, I saw that upfront, we had to spend the money and verify it, and for everyone else to see it, but that’s okay. You can take that route if you’d like.

Manuel Martinez: So I know I’ve gotten the chance to ask you a lot of questions, share a lot of good information. I really wanna give you now an opportunity to, if there’s a question I didn’t ask, or if you kind of wanna summarize it, or just a parting thought, I wanna give you the opportunity to talk about something that you feel is important.

Doreen Galli: Wow, I didn’t prepare for that one. (both laughing) I think the most important thing is you need to believe in yourself and know what your capabilities are and what you really enjoy, and then dial in on those. When I look at what I love in life now and what I’m doing and what I enjoy, there’s aspects of what I’m doing that I can go all the way back to my childhood. Started running when I was seven years old, a lot. I loved reading, researching, getting information, analyzing, I loved helping people. I was a tutor, still helping people, love helping people. I love helping people do their best self and become their best self. So, but don’t be afraid to look back to your youth or younger self and go, now, what is it that I really like out of life? And go, okay, this is what I want, this is what I want, this is what I want. And then constantly keep fine tuning to try to get more of what you want out of life. Don’t sit there and reflect back 10 years later and go, oh no, what did I do? So you always wanna reflect back on what you’re doing, your life, your day, your week, but reflection to some regard is good, but you also wanna keep looking forward. Find a way to execute because IT can be, it’s not the kindest industry.

Manuel Martinez: It’s definitely not.

Doreen Galli: Full disclosure, it’s not. It’s definitely not, it’s very hardcore.

Manuel Martinez: And I like the way that you kind of frame that, that is definitely something that, as you’re saying, I was thinking back and I’m like, it’s true, the things that I enjoy now, there is, there’s that common thread. Now it’s evolved and there’s bits and pieces of it and you learn new things and you’re like, okay, now this is great, but there is, there’s that common line that–

Doreen Galli: Even writing, I wrote my first book at four. I write a lot now, even though I’m not technically a writer. I do write, yeah.

Manuel Martinez: Well, thank you so much for coming in and sharing the accomplishments, the challenges and the things that you’ve learned out throughout your career. I mean, I’ve learned immense, right? I thought I had known more about what you have done and just different techniques that you had mentioned because at one point you told me about the time blocking. Hey, after a certain time, I don’t do a lot of this and I’m like, oh, okay, that’s interesting. I never thought about this. So I’m excited that we know each other outside of this and I will get to benefit more from a lot of what you know.

Doreen Galli: I hope it helps a lot of people. That’s important.

Manuel Martinez: Yes, definitely. So with that, everyone, thank you for watching or listening. And again, as always, I really appreciate you taking the time to go through and hopefully learn something from all these different people that I bring in and their different experiences. And with that, continue to plug in and download the knowledge. Thank you. (upbeat music)