In this episode we discuss: how to be a COO in today's complex world. We are joined by Jennifer Geary, Seasoned C-Suite executive across multiple industries and roles from fractional COO to Managing Director. Author of bestselling books How To Be a COO, CRO, CPO and CSO.

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We chat about the following with Jennifer Geary: 

• The role of a COO involves being the second-in-command and bridging the gap between strategy and operations.
• Can AI enhance the efficiency and creativity of the COO role, with human judgement and decision-making remaining essential?
• Should COOs prioritise efficiency and creativity when implementing AI, while also considering sustainability and ESG metrics?
• Why should we consider suppliers, supply chain, software suppliers, facilities, power consumption, and social context in sustainability efforts?
• How important are flexibility, choice, in-person collaboration, and open communication in creating a positive work environment?

References 

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-geary-8419082a/
• www.coo-author.com
• https://gosupercritical.com/carbon-removal/biochar
• https://www.socraticarts.com/thought-leadership/exploring-ai-and-learning-with-ethan-mollicks-cointelligence

Biography 

Jennifer Geary is a former MD, COO and CRO with over 25 years of experience in finance, technology, risk and legal, across diverse industries from financial services to not-for-profit. 

She is also an author, speaker, board advisor and mentor to emerging businesses. She has attained qualification as a chartered accountant, PRINCE 2 practitioner, CISA and CISSP, with recent certifications in Sustainable Finance and ESG Investing and Ethical AI.

To learn more about Beth and Brandon or to find out about sponsorship opportunities click here. 

Summary

00:00 Introduction and Overview

01:02 Defining the Role of a COO

07:28 Implementing AI: Efficiency and Creativity

12:25 Prioritising Sustainability and ESG Metrics

16:30 Considering Suppliers and Supply Chain

18:00 Creating a Positive Work Environment

20:50 Respecting Privacy in the Workplace

22:53 The Next Step: CEO or COO?

29:15 What CEOs are concerned about now

31:38 Post IPO resources

32:44 Wrap up

Unknown Speaker 0:00

Music.

Brandon 0:05

All right, so we are back and we are ready to roll with the operations room. I'm here, as always, with my lovely, amazing co host, Bethany. How are things going? Bethany, I'm excited to be back here at September, my goodness,

Bethany 0:17

and we just have to say it's season two. I am delighted and excited to be back. I went to the doctor a couple weeks ago because it took me six weeks to get a doctor's appointment, because that's where we're at right now. And I had a long list of things I need to talk to the doctor about. And then I sat down with the doctor, and I was like, I have a long list. I know we don't have a lot of time. He's like, Yeah, we don't have a lot of time. We're not going to get through all of this. And I said, this. And I said, well, let's just stop talking. Then we'll go through the list quickly. So look at my toe. I had him look at my back, all of these things, and they were all fine. They weren't cancer. Spoil it alert. I have started estrogen one squirts worth, and I think it's made a difference. I'm feeling less anxious and I'm sleeping better. Maybe placebo effect, or maybe it really started working from day one. So I was having lots of anxiety, difficulty sleeping and brain fog, and it feels better. I also I can't remember I've mentioned this, but I have developed tinnitus. That was what finally prompted me to go to the doctor, because apparently it's another perimenopause symptom. Okay,

Brandon 1:25

sorry, is this like the ear thing, like tinnitus or

Bethany 1:27

Yeah, so just ringing, right? It varies towards the end of the day. It's worse than the start of the day. But you know that ringing sound after you've been to a concert? Yeah, pretty much all the time. There was a period where for about four weeks it was constant, and I felt very claustrophobic about the idea that I was never going to experience silence again, and had never appreciated or was grateful for it. And now I've had moments of silence that I've been very, very grateful for. And so therefore I feel like when I no longer experience it, I'm okay, because I have spent the period of being grateful rather than punishing myself and kicking myself for having never been grateful for it before, if that makes any sense. So I thought today I would have a bit of a departure. I've mentioned my writing class loads, and so I thought I would combine a piece of writing with my medical anxiety and share it with the world. And so this one, I am so embarrassed, and suddenly I'm thinking, this is a horrible idea, but I'll take a deep breath and do it anyhow, you're

Brandon 2:38

Bethany 2:43

There we go. So it's called what I think about when I think about dying. I know I'm going to die. I know we're all going to die. I know my children are going to die. I know my friends are going to die. I know my enemies are going to die. I know everyone I know is going to die. I know everyone I don't know is going to die. I know all the people who are yet to be born are going to die. I know my parents are already dead, and so are their parents and their parents and their parents and theirs, pretty much everyone, everything, every being that ever was is dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. And soon, all of us who are lucky enough to breathe and think and love and laugh and dance and sing and cry and bleed will also be gone, gone to the other side, gone to a better place, gone for good, gone, gone, gone. Death may be inevitable, but it will not be my fault. It will not. It will not. It will not. It will not be my fault, not my fault, not my fault, not my fault. It will not, it will not be my fault. It will not and so I wake up and think about death. I stretch and think about death. I eat chia seed porridge and think about death. I write and think about death. I work and think about death. I eat roasted broccoli, roasted beetroot, roasted butternut squash, and think about death. I sit too long and think about death. I search for lumps and think about death. I look at my stomach and think about death. I do squats and think about death. I go for a run and think about death. I eat hummus and hazelnuts and haraco beans and think about death. I take my pulse and think about death. I hunt for moles and think about death. I go for a walk and I think about death. I take my blood pressure and think about death. I eat one square of 75% dark chocolate and almond, almond, almond, almond, almond, and think about death. I do lunches and think about death. I track my glucose and think about death. I go to sleep and dream about death. I wake up alive, alive, alive, alive, alive, and think about death. And that is my example of my writing.

Brandon 5:28

Wow, yeah, that's a lot of death,

Bethany 5:32

but now you just get an idea of what's going on. It's like a door into my mind. And if you ever wonder what I'm doing in any part of the day,

Brandon 5:41

I'll be thinking about you having your chia seed yogurt and doing a lung or two thinking about death, I think is what I'll be considering. We've got a wonderful topic today, which is how to be a CEO in today's complex world. We have a stellar guest for this. Her name is Jennifer Geary. She's the author of the best selling book, How to be a chief operating officer, and most recently, has published her new book, How to be a chief sustainability officer. So quite a unique guest that we have and Jennifer. So before we chat with Jennifer, I just wanted to talk through a couple things that she had brought up. The first one was she talked about the three pillars of the CO role, one of which was keen awareness of culture in the organization. And I really started to think about this, which is that keen awareness part, which is, as a CEO, how do you do that? How do you have a keen awareness of the pulse of the organization? How do you achieve that? And how do you plug into that

Bethany 6:35

all my little birdies going for the Game of Thrones, reference. But really it's having connections and confidence and people throughout the organization, in lots of different levels of hierarchy and departments where at least I understand the true vibe of what's going on. What about for you?

Brandon 7:00

I think that is absolutely the right way to plug into the organization, having trusted confidence that you have a wonderful relationship with, where you can be truly honest and straightforward about the status of the business, and they are happy in confidence to really give you a sense of what's going on, why it's happening, who's concerned with what and what the issues are, and really trying to Get a real not even this pulse, but just like what actually matters to people right now. What are people concerned about, and how do I best kind of chart that course, as a CEO, the other role type that I really enjoy once you get to a certain stage of company that has been highly effective is when you start hiring people partners. And the people partners are really in place to partner with the line managers across the organization and have wonderful relationships at that functional level. And those people partners, if they're doing a good job, they're also getting quite a clear, crisp view of those line managers that they interact with in terms of their situations, their concerns, and how they're working with their employee base, people, partners, at more of a scale level, it's quite helpful to have good relationships across those folks as well.

Bethany 8:04

It is and also helping elevate their voices, because at least, I find that the people partners, not all the time, but tend to not have the same sway or as loud a voice as others, and so being able to hear them and champion them, or what they're saying and add some heft behind it is very helpful.

Brandon 8:26

You know, I used to always kick myself a little bit because I'm not the most approachable person. That's the feedback that I've been given in the past. And you know, I've gotten better at this over the years, and my attempts to show humility, to show empathy, to demonstrate psychological safety and the conditions around that has made a big improvement, I think, to my lot in life. But anyway, you slice it, like you said, what I rely upon is not so much me in this case, as I rely upon my trusted confidants across the organization and the people of barter is to really help me to see what I can't see, as opposed to Brandon having to be the most personable, empathetic guy on the planet, I just

Bethany 9:03

want to share with you, Brandon, that I also have that same feedback, that I'm very intimidating and scary until you get to know me. Oh, there we go. And so I think I'm definitely Marmite in most organizations, and some of those birdies help other people be less afraid of me and willing to approach me. How much is it us and how much is it our

Brandon 9:22

title? The truth is probably somewhere in between. And then the other thing that she talked about coming off the back of her sustainability drive and writing that book was this now being a priority for CEOs, given all the regulatory requirements that are now happening. And mostly speaking, this applies to companies where they're either a FTSE, 250 company, where there's actual compliance and regulation, or if you have supply chain and assets and movement of goods and so on, where, again, there are supply chain issues and therefore regulatory requirements that are coming in for scale ups that don't have that, where there is no regulation and no anticipated regulation anytime soon. What? Is it that you think scale up should do that are asset light, as it were, pure software, and when it comes to sustainability, what do you think should be done here? I

think this is an interesting one, and one where we are letting ourselves off lightly because technology is not particularly sustainable AI is definitely not. I'm not sure if you saw that Google article that came out a few weeks ago that Google has doubled its energy consumption this year because of AI, and yet, we don't look at it or think about it or talk about it, because it's just our computer and the dirt is somewhere else. It's like there's not smog that we're breathing in. And I don't have an answer for it, but I think it's something that we should be thinking about, talking about researching, and how can we as smaller organizations band together around sustainability, it's kind of like, well, we're on AWS, whatever, whatever Amazon's doing, Amazon's doing. We can't control that, but we're all on AWS. So as consumers, all together, we can force a change in their policies. And I'm not saying that should be the raison d'etre, that all of us exist and that we spend 90% of our time talking to AWS, but I think that we need to start to consider how we band together to have sustainability that matters beyond setting up recycling bins, which, as far as I can tell, is the extent of most tech companies, sustainability thoughts,

because scale ups are driven by mission and purpose and vision, sustainability seems to easily fall into the values of most scale ups, I would say. And to your point, what scale ups are doing today, generally, is very little. So when it comes to software supply chain, we're preferring, or at least recognizing, that there's an attribute of interest when we actually contract out to other SaaS companies. Are they serious about sustainability in terms of our software supply chain? So if you look at HubSpot, for example, this is just me checking this this morning, but they have a whole area dedicated to sustainability within HubSpot that is very clear that they're using to almost like give themselves a stamp of approval, saying we are concerned about sustainability. We're actively doing A, B and C. So it feels like just more broadly within the SaaS industry, looking at vendors, do they actually have sustainability policies? Are they actually doing something useful and taking that criteria into your consideration, set for when you license software seems to be a sensible thing to do, and none of this stuff costs any money. It's really just doing things that are really an extension of what you would do as a consumer, but it's more at the corporate level.

So it's not just environmental sustainability that we're talking about, but looking at sustainability more widely, looking at the social issues as well, then you can start to choose who your caterer is, not just whether or not they're environmentally sound, but are they owned by women or people of color? The US government? I don't know if they still do, but when I was growing up, had an entire set of the budget set aside specifically for minority owned businesses, what it was called, you can use your business money in the same way that you use your personal money to support the causes that you believe in and actually create change in society. Last

question, Jennifer talked about this idea that CEOs roles are primarily a human one, which is, how do you align an organization to a strategy and to execute? And that is a human led endeavor, and AI is never going to replace that. But I think something that she highlighted that I think doesn't get a lot of credence where probably should as a tool to be used within the organization and for the CEO themselves, which is using chatgpt, not for efficiency in this case, although that might be an outcome of it, but more of this generative kind of creative aspect, which is to help yourself think through issues with greater clarity and perhaps a broader set of criteria than you otherwise would have. And AI is a great tool to make that happen. And I'm just curious what you think of that.

First, I just think I'm smiling about on the one hand, Google's energy has doubled, and I'm saying we need to think about the energy consumption, and then, on the other hand, use it. I quite like it, and I use it all the time. So I am really enjoying exploring chat GPT. Just personally, I recently wrote a page for my board course, and needed a page on promoting the discount, etc, and so I put that into chat GBT, and then it created a page that I pretty much was able to use. And it created my email content, my follow up email content, etc. Maybe it's problem solving rather than. Creative like that is I really know what it is. I'm giving it very clear instructions, and it is writing things better than I could write because I cannot write anything. Salesy, it makes me uncomfortable, and yet, chat, G, P, T is like guaranteed 100% optimize, maximize, you know, exclamation point, and I had to tell it to be a little bit less salesy, a little bit less cringe. But what I haven't done, and this is what Jennifer talks about, is what are my top 10 priorities I should think about this year? What are the things that I'm not thinking about and I've never used it for that. So let's

go on a quick break, and when we come back, we will have our conversation with Jennifer Geary. You M, so you have 60 core competencies for the CO. What do you think are the most important for CO? And has it changed at all since he originally wrote the book? There

are some fundamental pillars I think that don't change. And in fact, for all C suite roles, where I believe you really need to start. So there are some things like you have to understand and align with the strategy of the organization. Obviously, what its USP is, what its competitive mode is, what it does best. So situating everything that you do within that strategy for success of the organization, so that stays the same. You also have to have a keen awareness of the culture of your organization, from the point of view of great, I can work within this. I need to understand the culture, and I can optimize for that culture, or actually, there's something holding us back here, and I need to try and make some changes. So culture is something that endures regardless, and you have to know how to execute. So I start with those really three fundamental pillars. And by execution, I mean joining up that vision and that strategy with the day to day workings of the organization, so that it really lands. But then after that, we go into some more sort of detailed technical areas. And a lot of it endured, and has endured really well over the last seven or so years. But there was a couple where, obviously things have changed quite a lot. I think facilities and office space has changed massively. I mean, we forget all of the massive, massive culture movements that have just changed how we think and how we operate with one another. The pandemic happened, Black Lives Matter happened, me too, happened. Five generations in the workplace, and then for those that have supply chains, there's been an awful lot of change there as well. And then, of course, finally, AI, and what that might do for the role of the COO,

in particular, when you think about this AI transformation, what does that mean for the COO? Because we've talked about AI impacting all sorts of things, but I'm very curious specifically to the CO role itself. What do you see there, and what do you think will change for the CEO going forward in terms of thinking about AI and how to use AI within an organization?

What I did was I went back into those 16 disciplines, and I used chat GPT to identify the threats and the opportunities that were going to impact each of those disciplines from Ai, with all of the caveats that come with using chat GPT, right? And I was very clear about that, but actually I emerged quite optimistic about the role of the COO, because I think we're going to get a lot more data points. I think we're going to get a lot more insight and analysis, but the essence of the COO which is looking at all of that data, parsing it, deciding what to focus on, what not to focus on, deciding what to worry about, what not to worry about, that to me, remains an inherently human attribute, that judgment, that's what you're there in the role to do, to help navigate a course for the organization. Choose the right things to do, discard the things that are less important. I see the COO as more being helped than threatened by AI.

So if we talk about the role of the COO and what we're great at, one is being the right hand person, a second in command, and I think the second one is being that bridge between the strategy and the operations. So basically, I describe it as operational strategy, and that's the world that I'd like to sit in and think through. And what you're talking about in terms of prioritization and translation does seem to be fundamentally a human need, because you can use chat, G, P, T, like you did, to help you think through and synthesize information, but then you as a person, need to be able to deliver that vision and that translation and all of the different reasons why people are going to get behind you

100% we have to be that filter. We have to be that lens that says, Okay, wow. You know, we've got all these data points, we've got all these potential uses. We've got all these positive and not so positive ways in which, in which AI can impact us. We now need to forge a path through that, and that's proper, connected, human thinking, I believe,

and then at the same time, really documenting all of our processes and figuring out the ones we. And automate. And there are so many people who hate their jobs because they do stuff that is mind numbingly stupid 90% of the time and never get to the things that actually matter. And I think that's part of what we can do as CEOs.

There is a danger with all this technology that we dehumanize things. And so, for example, if you take a look at sort of the recruitment space right now, it's very easy to feel like, oh my goodness, if I haven't got the right keyword on my resume or whatever, you know, I'm just not going to pop up. And it feels a little bit extrapolated and a bit model LED. There's a danger of dehumanizing, but if we get it right, as you say, Beth of getting rid of some of that work, getting rid of some of that process based work, and actually bringing humanity back and having the time to interact more with our people, to coach, to have more value added discussions. And that's where the skill is, I think. So

on the AI front, is there any practical things you would help a CEO think about so let's say the CEO is working in an organization that is a scale up. It's roughly 100 individuals to 300 in that zone. What is it that person should think about over the next 12 to 18 months, specifically in terms of, okay, what should I do as the CEO of this company right now? Should I spend time and effort doing something or not? And if I do, what is it that should be thinking about?

I would think along two main lines of thought. One is obviously efficiency right there is the capability of this technology to streamline and automate and do things for us that we would otherwise spend time doing, and that's obviously a very interesting theme for us to mine and to go down and to have discussions with the heads of those operational functions, whether it's augmenting your customer services line, and, you know, taking some of those common FAQs away, helping customers self serve and that kind of thing. That's obviously an attractive area for efficiency. I think the other area, if anyone hasn't read it already, I highly recommend Ethan Malik's book called co intelligence, which is just this phenomenal book on AI. But what he points out, and we think of this less, is the creativity that is coming with some of the AI solutions right now. So in some ways, llms and chat GPT. The downside is they can be a little unreliable. They can hallucinate. They can try to please you with their answers sometimes. But the upside of that is actually they can be enormously creative, you know, you can ask it quite complex, nuanced questions. You know, I operate in this space. Give me 10 ideas for how I might do this with that, or come up with something else, and you'll get some really crazy stuff, but you also might get a little bit of gold in there as well that you can work on. So I think efficiency and creativity. Don't forget the creativity side, but also leverage your smart people as well. Try to carve out time to talk to the people who are closest to the processes, who are doing the work, they will have ideas as well. They will be experimenting with this technology. And again, sometimes it's just about creating the space for people to explore some of those ideas. And, you know, fail at a couple, but maybe find a couple of really useful ones

too. So we had IDC on as a guest several weeks ago, and IDC had a report that they published, whereby they had said that one of the key priorities for CEOs in 2024 was all around sustainability, and the metrics related to ESG and being responsible for that, and in particular on the supply chain side with organizations that have kind of logistics and actual shipments, goods and so on. So I'm just curious what your view is here,

in terms of the COO sustainability, the CSO. You know how those roles work? Obviously, again, it will depend on your organization. If you're large enough, you may actually have a CSO. If you're not, it may well fall to you as a responsibility, as someone with oversight for a lot of the operations of the organization. It's an area Brandon, as you point out, there is a ton of new regulation, particularly in Europe. So there is something called csdd, the corporate sustainability due diligence directive, and CSRD, a corporate sustainability reporting directive. And they put enormous obligations, actually, on anybody who has any kind of a supply chain to understand their whole supply chain, where it's coming from. Are there human rights abuses in it? Are there environmental abuses in it? And to be able to, in the case of material goods, to actually tag XML, tag every single thing coming through your supply chain. So that's a massive commitment if you have a supply chain. In that sense, if you are more of a tech company, what you probably want to think about is the suppliers with whom you integrate the software that you rely on, and looking at establishing some standards for yourself in terms of environmental, social and governance, and then applying and asking those questions of your suppliers further down the chain as well,

just from a top line accountability perspective for A CEO. So let's say it's a tech company, so there's not a supply chain logistics issue related to the company, it's more just pure software. So in that case, if we want to hold the CEO accountable to a set of ESG metrics, what would those metrics be?

You should be thinking about your software supplier, so your tech stack and the software that you're using. Thing, and are they ethical? Are they upholding privacy? Are they signing up to, you know, a set of principles that mirror and reflect your own? And I think with some of the legislation coming that will, I hope, start to harmonize a little bit, because I think right now, people are having to just come up with lists of things, and I think that we see harmonization happening in that space, and a lot of the regulation has taken place in Europe, but I think as you find with things like GDPR, because software is just inherently International, it kind of raises everybody to a certain standard. But beyond that, I would look at everything from I would look at your facilities and your offices. I would look at your power consumption, where that power is being sourced from, and if there's the possibility of sourcing it from greener sources. And then I would absolutely look at things like your people, your social context, pay, overtime, zero hours contracts, maternity pay, sick pay, dei, you know, all of those things in terms of being a good employer and bettering the lives of your employees. And then looking at your customer base, looking at what your software does, I think that's really important, you know, looking at the core, fundamental reason of why, why you're there, and how you're hopefully improving people's lives, making something easier, giving some insight, making something possible that wasn't otherwise possible, and then, of course, protecting and looking after your customer base and keeping their interests at heart in everything that you do.

And let's talk about people, because we've talked about it a little bit into the context of s social, not s sustainability. And also know that this is you mentioned Black Lives Matter. You mentioned metoo movement. They happened about what, four years ago now, and we're already in the midst of a backlash. So talk a bit about that story and where you've landed in the book when you've updated this.

Yeah, and I think in my chief people officer book. So I've had two collaborations. One was sustainability. One was people, when we thought about things like the context of something like hybrid working, we came up with five principles. So one was give as much choice as the job allows, recognize that there are some activities that are better done in person, and call those things out and pull people in together for those things that are just better together, and build in an amount of time both work oriented and social. You know, we forget the need for mentoring on the job, learning, you know, people coming up into the workplace for the first time, and just seeing how we all work together. So, you know, build in and factor in that time so that that knowledge transfer happens. Technology helps, of course, you know, and continue to leverage and foster technology to make that experience as seamless as possible. And then really dial up your internal comms on the matter you know, have the conversations, have the dialogs, both the speaking out and the listening and the feedback loops and that sort of thing. You know, a vibrant dialog back and forth with your people is probably one of the best ways of ensuring against going too far in one direction or another.

How do you do the feedback Well, or the receiving of feedback? Well,

people observe, don't they? And when you're in a leadership position, when you're in a COO type position, people observe your response. So they observe how welcoming you are of feedback. And if they see somebody raise their hands and get shot down, you can be sure they're going to think twice about doing it. So, I would say, offer a multitude of ways in which that feedback can happen. Some people prefer it face to face in person. Some people prefer it a little more anonymized. Some people prefer slack or a chat forum. So make those options available to the different personality types that you have in your office, I would say, show some vulnerability. For example, I in one of my organizations, I chose to be the mental health ambassador, and I spoke out about times in my career when I felt really challenged and really low and stressed and anxious. And, you know, to reassure people that everyone gets those feelings. Everybody suffers from imposter syndrome from time to time, everyone you know, and to make it okay to express that. So you've got to be open, and you've got to be receiving and stay curious as well. You know, it's so easy to become kind of blinkered, and of course, we've got to execute. We've got to keep moving forward. But if you can try and stay curious and open to that feedback the whole time. So

just to slightly pivot to a different topic, when you reflect back on all the conversations you've had with CEOs over the years in terms of reading your book, giving you feedback, expressing their concerns and challenges. What is it that CEOs are concerned about now? And with those concerns, what direction should CEOs be pushed in, I guess, generically, as we move off into the next several years? So it's a bit of a trend line question combined with what you see or what you have heard, rather, from CEOs at large, what you

get is a lot of gratitude from early stage or new to real CEOs who say, you know, thank you. You've created a space for me, you've created a peer group for me. You've created content and support that I really needed. It can be a really lonely job by definitely. Question, there's only one of you. When you're facing your employees, people are looking to you to have the answers. So it's really important to have the supports. In terms of things like my books, podcasts, like yours and network is really, really powerful. So in terms of what CEOs need to focus on now and where we need to push ourselves as a community, the world has become ever more complex, the amount of regulation is changing exponentially, and it's not enough to survive on your wits anymore. You actually need tools and you need professional help to navigate, you know, our increasingly complex geopolitical environment as you think about, you know, the world and where your customers are and what's going on there as you think about regulation, as you think about risk, and I think it's a huge area of opportunity if you're in the reg tech space, because I just don't think you can keep track of all the requirements now and map them to your own situation without the help of technology if you're in a complex organization, of course. So I think that's where we need to push ourselves. We are naturally as coos. We are hard working, we're resourceful. We'll go and, like, consume a regulation overnight to try and understand what we need to do and put it into practice, like that's what we're good at. But I think there's just too much of it now to not rely on some professional supports and tools. Makes

it sound like a not very fun job. I like, like solving the problems.

It's a demanding job, and it is also it's a mental challenge the whole time. You know, it's a juggling act that you do. You're taking in new information, you're thinking about how it applies to your situation. You're looking for risks around the corner. It's not easy, but it's great. So

I happened to speak to one of our listeners the other day, and she works in a FinTech that is post IPO. And I'm just wondering, are there any specific resources areas to think about that you can share with our listeners to just kind of broaden where they might be getting information from what

I would say to anybody going through an IPO and being on the other side of the IPO, the job really, really changes. Everything became more formal. Everything became more serious. Everything had bigger implications. So you know, things like from on and off Channel Communications, like how your employees talk to one another. You know, it's not okay to be doing that on off channel texts and WhatsApps anymore, for example, especially, you know, if you're dealing with any kind of company or customer issues, training needs to be absolutely watertight. Compliance needs to be watertight. So it definitely takes a step up in formality and requirement. When you're post IPO and as a COO, you will find yourself thinking about that an awful lot.

The other thing that I took away from that conversation with her was how universal our problems are, regardless of size of company, which I guess was a bit surprised by, which lends itself a bit to what Cameron Harold was talking about when he was on our podcast that he doesn't think that the next natural step for a COO is to become a CEO. He thinks it's to become a COO in a bigger organization. I found that surprising, and then also surprising because the IDG analyst said that, like very large number of CEOs are ex CEOs, and so it's interesting, like there's now a debate, is the next logical step, CEO or COO at a bigger company? What do you think?

I think it depends on you as a person. I absolutely get what Cameron is saying. I think some of the personality traits of the COO were logical, were pragmatic, were execution focused, we're operations focused. It's not a job that you go into if you want the limelight, you know, as a COO, you know, you're often backstage, making things happen while your CEO is, you know, out on TV or campaigning or strategizing and that kind of thing. And so there is a certain personality type that often lends themselves to a COO that's not the same as a CEO. That being said, I tested myself a couple of years ago in a role that was more it was managing director of a region, it had a revenue line to it and so on, just to see how I would fare. And actually, I loved it like I thrived on, you know, having the challenge of making targets and that kind of thing and closing that off so that is not a career path that I would close myself off to in time. But I think it depends on the person. And you know your personality better than anyone

before we go, if our listeners can only remember one thing or take one thing away from today, what would it

be? Strategic clarity and operational excellence, strategic clarity. Be clear on what your organization is doing and not doing, and keep that as tight and as focused as possible, and then execute that over and over again.

Lovely. So thank you, Jennifer for joining us on the operations room. If you like what you hear, please leave us a comment or subscribe, and we will see you next week. You.