142 – Leaders Series – Helping All Workers Get Access to Modern Tools to Thrive.

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Leaders Series spotlights amazing leaders as part of Ultimate Guide to Partnering’s Fifth Year Celebration.

Former Microsoft Executive and Woman CEO Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®

Helping ALL workers get access to modern tools to thrive in this transformational time,  I’ve often said that we in the tech sector have an opportunity and an obligation to help lead during this time. My next guest for the Ultimate Guide to Partnering Leaders Series is one of those leaders. Jennifer Byrne, a former Microsoft executive is the CEO of Arrived Workforce Solutions. Jennifer is building a Workforce Empower Platform to give access to the majority of workers not served today by platforms many of us have grown to love such as Linked In.

As a veteran of the tech industry, Jennifer is leading the empowerment of the majority of the workforce not currently served with enablement and career tools we all take for granted. She also advises startups, coaches emerging leaders, and drives broad conversations on topics related to making the most of today’s tech-infused world.

I met Jennifer when she was Chief Security Officer for Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector Division. She went on to become CTO of Microsoft’s US division, where she led many well-publicized digital transformation projects with top global companies, as well as 15 innovation hubs across the country. Before Microsoft, Jennifer was a leader in Cybersecurity at companies such as Intel, McAfee, and Symantec.  She began her career in technology as an Information Security Analyst serving US Government clients. 

Jennifer joins for a timely discussion related to the future of work. This “great resignation” or “great reshuffling” we all have been seeing and her mission and platform to help workers at all societal, socio and economic levels thrive during this time.

In this episode, we have a far-reaching conversation that includes her startup work, platform, and partnering, but also a meaningful discussion about her mission to serve those that currently don’t have access to tools most of us take for granted.

I so enjoyed my discussion with this forward-leaning business leader – I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed welcoming Jenifer Byrne

What You’ll Learn

  • How her “Digital Staffing Platform solves the friction between people and work. (3:11)
  • Why Arrived is really a “Workforce Empowerment Platform” (6:06)
  • Her Career at Microsoft (11:16)
  • The Future of Work (17:06)
  • Her “Just Cause” is to help all workers achieve their greatest results during this time.
  • Why partnerships are so critical to the success of this innovative startup. (24:56)
  • Advice to listeners looking to get to this spot in their careers. (28:05)

I so enjoyed getting to better know Jennifer. Her mission to empower the majority of workers in shift-based work is so important as we look to serve all workers, how she is applying grit, and determination to lead this startup, why partners are important and why this platform is so important now.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed learning, sharing, and getting to better know Jennifer Byrne.

Why Listen?

This episode is for leaders aspiring to follow their passion and calling. In this episode, you will learn about this leader’s passion to help those not served by the platforms we all take for granted and how she got to this point, rising to CTO at Microsoft and then following her passion to empower the workforce through her platform.

Listen on your favorite platform

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Other Great Episodes with Women Leaders in Technology.

For 2022, I am excited to announce PartnerTap as the Founding Sponsor of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. PartnerTap is the only Partner Ecosystem Platform designed for the Enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align Channel Teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine. I’m so excited to have them on board and for our exciting year ahead!

My organization, Ultimate Partnerships, is also a sponsor of this episode. Ultimate Partnerships helps you get the most results from your partnerships. Get Partnerships Right – Optimize for Success – Deliver Results – Ultimate Partnerships.

Ultimate Guide to Partnering Transcription, provided by Otter.ai

Please Note – there will be grammatical errors!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

partnering, jobs, people, platform, microsoft, problem, workers, jennifer, big, career, building, industries, skills, workforce, technology, linkedin, company, work, happening, programs

SPEAKERS

Announcer, Jennifer Byrne, Vince Menzione

Jennifer Byrne  00:00

What the platform aspires to do is when she says, but I also have a degree in Fine Arts. And I’ve shown my work in this gallery and I’ve done these things and I’m taking this training course, can I look at jobs? Can you match me with the jobs, not just that I’m qualified for today, but that I am seeking to be qualified for tomorrow. And that’s the level of empowerment that essentially lets her grow her career through the app.

Announcer  00:24

Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering in this podcast Vince Menzione, a proven industry sales and partner executive brings together technology leaders to discuss transformational trends and to deconstruct successful strategies to thrive and survive in the rapid age of cloud transformation. And now, your host, Vince Menzione.

Vince Menzione  00:47

Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering where technology leaders come to optimize results through successful partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and my mission is to help leaders like you unlock the leadership principles and learnings of the best in the business to get partnerships right, optimize for success and deliver your greatest results. Helping all workers get access to modern tools to thrive during this time. I’ve often said that we in the tech sector have an opportunity and perhaps an obligation to lead at this time. My next guest for ultimate guide to partnering as leaders series is Jennifer Byrne, a former Microsoft executive and CEO of arrived workforce connections. Jennifer’s organization is building a workforce empowerment platform to give access to the majority of workers not served today by tools and platforms that we all take for granted. Jennifer joins for a timely discussion related to the future of work, and her mission to help workers at all societal levels achieve their greatest results during this time. I so enjoyed my discussion with this forward leaning business leader. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed welcoming Jennifer Byrne. Before we dive into the interview, I’m happy to announce that partner tap has become a founding sponsor of ultimate guide to partnering. I’ve been friends with the founders of partner tap for many years. And partner tap is the only partner ecosystem platform designed for the enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align channel teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine. Jennifer, welcome to the podcast. Well, Vince,

Jennifer Byrne  02:39

thanks for having me.

Vince Menzione  02:41

I am excited, I am so excited to welcome you to ultimate guide to Partnering for our leaders series, you have a fascinating history as a woman executive at Microsoft, and now CEO of an innovative startup, looking to change the future of work for many classes of workers. So welcome.

Jennifer Byrne  02:58

I’m excited to be here events. I love what you’re doing. And I love talking about what I’ve been up to

Vince Menzione  03:03

lately. So for our listeners, can you tell us a little bit about your company and platform arrived, workforce connections,

Jennifer Byrne  03:11

sure arrived, workforce connections, plays in the digital staffing platform space. And I know that’s not intuitive for people who don’t live in that particular ecosystem. But what we are doing effectively is trying to solve the friction solve for the friction that exists between people and work. So employers, when they’re looking for workers are solving for a certain set of problems, they’re trying to get expand reach to a lot of different candidates. They’re trying to fill jobs. There’s, as we all know, a chronic labor shortage, which is bigger than the pandemic and not going away soon. And on the side of people or workers or employees, however you call them. It’s really hard to find work that’s meaningful. That’s impactful, and that for many people pays a living wage. So in spite of a lot of efforts on all sides of that problem, it’s really hard to connect a good people do good work. And I think technology has a place in that solution. So a digital staffing platform is really that it’s if you think about platforms, from a tech perspective, there’s a big, effectively a big matching engine, which is the core of the platform AI enabled all that good stuff. And on the worker side, there’s a mobile app for agencies and employers, there’s a portal, and it really tries to solve for all of the issues that keep people from getting the jobs that they want. And there are lots of issues. We can talk about this forever. But most of if you’re a worker, what you normally see is an indeed job board with a bunch of listings. It’s hard to tell if you read a job description. If you’re qualified for that job. If you decide that you are it’s an application process if you want applied to 10 jobs, you fill out 10 different applications, really hard to get feedback, and hard to grow your career. It’s also really hard if you’re somebody who is trying to move up in the world, and you haven’t taken a traditional path to know what kinds of skills you need in order to get the jobs that you want. There’s a lack of transparency for workers that we saw for on our platform, if you are an employer, and particularly in a very dynamic shift based industry, which would be retail or events or health care, light, industrial manufacturing, it’s very, very hard to get workers to show up on time and infill the shifts that you need to fill. And so there’s a lot of problems on both sides. And a digital staffing platform seeks to eliminate a lot of the friction in between. So that’s what we do. We’ve been in market since July, and are selling currently to staffing agencies and eventually moving into the employer space. And I am super excited about it.

Vince Menzione  05:55

And I think you described this in an earlier conversation to me as sort of the LinkedIn for the rest of the world, or I don’t want to use the word underserved, but the the other communities that are not served by LinkedIn,

Jennifer Byrne  06:06

yes, thank you. Yeah, it’s a tough, it’s a tough term underserved certain industries, however you characterize a big portion of our economy is filled with workers who don’t have the network effects available on the LinkedIn platform. So LinkedIn serves as you know, what I’m sure your listeners know, a certain number of industries, often tech off in corporate America. And if you’re on that platform, you can build a really nice profile for free. And every time you do something, you finish a job, you get a skill, you earn a degree, you can just add to your profile. And that platform effectively advertises you out to the rest of the world, or at least your network and your network can be as big as you want it to be. And it becomes a really nice ecosystem, for you to figure out how to get to the next thing you want to do, either because you’ve got a network of people that you can reach out to or because you can see on the platform, what other people did in order to get the job that you want. But it has all that the benefits of the ecosystem, which does not exist for people who make on average, less than $75,000 a year or are in industries like light industrial retail events, certain portions of healthcare, who may want to figure out how to get to the next job, maybe they make $20 an hour, and they’d like to make $24 an hour, maybe they’d like to be a salaried employee, maybe they’d like to be in a more dynamic work environment, maybe they want to change industries very, very hard if you don’t have that kind of LinkedIn capability to figure out what to do next. And that’s a problem that a lot of people have at an individual level, I would argue on a macro economic level, it’s also a problem that we have a shared interest in solving, because so much of the nature of work is changing. So the people who are in jobs in those industries have their own imperative to move up in the world. But I would say the industries themselves have an imperative to make sure everybody is being retrained and seeking higher level jobs, because the nature of those jobs is actually changing. And so the idea, the aspiration for our company, is that if we can connect people to the work that they want, we can ultimately build a platform that creates a LinkedIn like capability for those workers where they can add their profile on their mobile app, just like you might add to your profile on LinkedIn, and add skills, maybe it’s an advanced certification for a skilled trade, maybe it’s a six week digital marketing course. And they’re in a call center right now, whatever that might be, if they can add their skills to their profile, add their work experience to their profile, create videos and other sort of branding, if you will, within their profile, then that allows them to proactively advertise themselves out to the people who might be looking for them, which is a very, very different experience than saying to yourself, I want to figure out how to get to the next step in my career. So I probably need some training. I don’t know if that training is actually going to make me qualified for the next job because I can’t tell what other people did. Because I don’t have the ability to access the platform. And even if I do it, I don’t have the ability to tell the world that I’ve done it. I really only can just go on to a job board and apply to a bunch of jobs and see if something comes back to me. I think we can change that with this platform.

Vince Menzione  09:43

I love what you have to say here. It sounds to me as though it’s an empowerment platform, and then taking advantage of the network effect right. We’ve all seen this with LinkedIn right before we posted our resume we we now can go in and applaud other people on what they’re doing with their career, how they’re skilling up. And this is a group of individuals, again, that I believe you’re empowering through this platform.

Jennifer Byrne  10:05

I hope. So, Vince, that’s what we’re trying to do. We are a startup. So we start small. And we have big aspirations. There’s a lot of technology to be built, there are a lot of partnerships that we need to create. It’s a pretty crowded ecosystem. And some of this is a little bit disruptive. But it takes a slightly different mindset around what HR tech or workforce management tech ought to be doing. We argue that most of that technology is really optimized for employers. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But until you optimize it for a worker experience, is not really going to solve these bigger problems. So we’ve got some big bold aspirations. And I hope that we get there. It’s what we’re working hard on every day.

Vince Menzione  10:48

We’re going to dive back into this topic in a minute, but I wanted to pause and discuss how you got here. So I know we both worked in Microsoft, and we were in SR organizations, I think we might have been in one or two meetings. I think it might have been like a mid year review or something where you’re in public sector, and I was on the US public sector leadership team, I wanted want to learn a little bit, I want our listeners to learn a little bit about the journey. For Jennifer, tell us more about how you got here, to this point in your career.

Jennifer Byrne  11:16

I started at Microsoft in 2014. And I was originally hired as the chief security officer for the worldwide public sector group. And that Job was a field facing evangelist role, mostly. And the topic that I tackled at the time it because Microsoft had good security capabilities, but hadn’t quite figured out how to market that. I know there have been in the longer history of Microsoft, many attempts to talk about cybersecurity, I think the company does extremely well now, but what they doing now, I think started in that 2014 era. And the concern at that time, is if you can think back to what Azure adoption looked like, eight years ago, it was trying to convince governments that it was safe for them in their private constituents to put their data into a public cloud, owned by a US company. So it was a it was a policy conversation or regulatory conversation. And of course, ultimately a cybersecurity conversation, comparing the risk of public cloud to the risk of putting your data in your data center. And that lasted for a couple of years. And I got the opportunity to understand what really, really, really big programs global programs look like. And you just can’t know that until you work for a company like Microsoft are the size and scope and complexity of Microsoft. So we ran a program, we called it the national assurance program. And it was essentially a blueprint or a template that we use with governments around the world, to help them understand how to change policy regulations, PR sort of perceptions around the use of public cloud. And it was pretty successful, we drove a lot of office 365 adoption drove a lot of Azure adoption and really changed mindset. So that job, not the work. But the strategic, what I learned around strategy and programs effectively led me to my next job, which was to go be the CTO for that same group. At that point, it moved from public sector to a global industry team. And I’d worked for the CTO and then got that role. And I was very nervous because Microsoft has a huge platform and portfolio. And up until that point in my career, I only spent time in cybersecurity. So I knew that one space really well, but not everything more broadly. And but what if what allowed me to get that job was the fact that I did have a lot of strategic experience. And I ultimately found that to be a CTO in a company like Microsoft, if you’re a field facing is really to master your understanding of the intersection between technology and business and create strategy around that. And of course, that’s what we were trying to do, right? We’re trying to figure out how to help people understand what a digital transformation project might look like that job through an industry lens. So how do you get retail to digitally transform? How do you get manufacturing to digitally transform? What are the all the components of that? So I spent stayed in that job for a couple of years. And then I did the same thing in the US subsidiary, which was fascinating, as well. I ran the MTCs and had a couple innovation programs. And and this is becoming a long story. So I’ll just wrap it up by saying the end of my job in the US. I was trying to figure out how to encourage adoption of Azure. We knew that the biggest downward pressure on the business at the time wasn’t that customers didn’t want to use Azure it was because they didn’t have enough employees who knew how to use it. So we had all those digital scaling programs. But what happens when you pull that thread is you realize you can’t teach people Azure until they understand cloud concepts. And you can’t teach cloud concepts until you make sure that people have a really nice sort of set of fundamentals around technology in general. And so the problem became much more bigger, it really became a how do we enhance the growth of digital skills in general. And then when you get to the communities, the community level, you realize that this is really a stem problem, it starts in early childhood, it’s it doesn’t, it’s a problem that’s more difficult to solve for certain groups of people. And this digital divide that is growing, it’s a unintended consequence of the all the technology, we’ve been in the business of delivering a market, that divide follows socio economic lines. And so getting people who are on the wrong side of that divide, to be able to acquire the skills that ultimately allow them to find meaningful work and livable wages, seemed like a problem we’re solving. So when I left Microsoft, I started to spend my time in future of work. And that’s what ultimately led me to this company.

Vince Menzione  16:08

That’s why I’m so passionate about what you’re doing, as well as we’re having a conversation about our mutual friend, David Pryor, and the work of voices for innovation, which is all about doing good in the tech sector and the role of STEM. And the role of upskilling is so important. Like we talked about jobs and career and growth and these having these fundamental skills or having him taught early in schools, just so important to the next generation.

Jennifer Byrne  16:35

I couldn’t agree more.

Vince Menzione  16:36

So let’s dive in a little bit more here on work. We both have been talking about this time like no other. We’re coming out of it. I hope for good this time. But this also leads into this conversation, like we’re never going to go back and how that’s impacting the future of work. I’ve had conversations we’ve had Bria Starmer of the CEO of lions and tigers on the podcast, talking about how her organization is helping to shape or change the future of work. What’s your opinion, what is arrived? And what are you doing now with regards to the future of work,

Jennifer Byrne  17:06

b2c, if we think the future of work is this idea that we’ve got to make sure people are ready for future people at an individual level, but our economies are ready, I think there’s a lot of really good work that’s happening at the macro level, it’s nascent, but there are a lot of very interesting companies that are out there. Certainly, this is a public private partnership conversation around how we get ourselves ready for a future where most of the jobs that will exist in 10 years don’t exist today, where almost every job will require a significant number of new digital capabilities not required today. So future of work is really about adapting to a massive amount of change. And at the macro level, a lot of really good stuff is happening. And I followed that for a year and tons of respect for what a lot of companies should do. And I think, ultimately, big change has to happen at a systemic level. And that will happen in the timeframe that is appropriate to big change, in other words, over the next decade, or two or three. But there’s this acute problem of now that exists at the individual level. So while we’re thinking about big AI models and rewriting taxonomies for education and skills, and changing public perceptions, and changing law and regulation, and trying to transform our education institution, while all that work is happening, could we try to solve it at the small level right now? So can I just get a couple of people access to the work that they want to do visa vie a platform where they use a mobile app, and the mobile app by virtue of the profile that they enter into their into the system will deliver to them the jobs that they are qualified for, or that they want to have? So I think that that was really where I decided I could have the most impact is to solve the problem in small ways, but solve it right now and create a little bit of bottoms up that hopefully will spread over time.

Vince Menzione  19:14

Can you comment on the week, this term overused at this point, the Greg resignation that we’re seeing? I mean, is it true? Is it false? And what do you believe with regards to it?

Jennifer Byrne  19:25

Yeah. Well, the great resignation, I think they there’s a new term, which more accurately describes the problem from an employer perspective. They call it the great reshuffle. It’s so but the problem itself, yes. Is it real? For sure it is a demographic issue or a population issue, more than anything else, because we have a greater number of workers who are exiting the workforce and are entering the workforce. So if you if you want to understand the problem at its most fundamental level, it really while it has many symptoms, it really is as simple as that. At that we have a lot of baby boomers who are leaving the workforce, they left in an accelerated fashion during the pandemic. So I don’t think any economist anticipated could anticipate the number of exits in the timeframe that they happen, they were thinking it would be a longer timeframe. And there aren’t as many people entering the workforce as we thought, contrary to the beliefs of some people, younger workers are entering the economy in the US with a fairly high level of education, relatively speaking. So you have a lot of people who are leaving jobs that might be likely skilled jobs, not requiring a lot of education or training or certification, those jobs are being left open, the people who are entering the workforce are more skilled than have more skills than what those jobs require. So that’s it, that’s kind of the the most fundamental level what’s happening, and I think they’ve called it the great resignation. I think the great reshuffle is actually a better term, because oftentimes, when you hear this conversation, you are really hearing it from the perspective, if you’re kind of on the LinkedIn or listen to the news, you’re hearing what’s happening to tech jobs, or higher paying jobs. Because there’s a lot of there’s a lot more demand and supply at that level. And so people are able to kind of move around and ask for higher salaries, you’ve got remote work issues, and they’re all those other kinds of symptoms post pandemic that are defining the nature of work at the upper end of the wage scale. When I think about the great resignation, though, if you think about where where are people resigning from jobs, and there’s really literally no one left to fill them, it’s actually on the lower end of the wage scale. And that’s because of this population issue that we have.

Vince Menzione  21:44

So your platform can help solve for that

Jennifer Byrne  21:46

our platform connects people to those kinds of jobs. And so let me just make this really real for you. I have a daughter, who is in her 20s, and for many years worked in restaurants, and she works in great restaurants in Chicago, and she was never able to get her restaurant schedule more than a couple of days in advance. Never ever do it. Now, her manager had a really hard time creating a schedule schedules are hard to create, you got a bunch of part time workers, everybody’s got crazy availability, you have maybe a party of 20, that comes in there’s an event, there’s some reason why you’ve got to have more staff in the coming week than you did last week. And so scheduling is legitimately a difficult thing to do, also, from an employee perspective, really, really hard to live a life when you don’t know when you’re working more than a week in advance. And I think there are 28 million workers in the US who don’t have their schedule more than two weeks in advance. So this is a huge problem. When you start to see this accelerated exit out of the workforce that we saw during the pandemic, you take a already difficult problem, you need to make it much much harder, because now you just have less workers overall. So the platform, at its most basic level seeks to create a solution there where we can on the employer side, make scheduling and shift broadcasting much easier to do. So it automates that dynamic scheduling capability. From the mobile app perspective, my daughter could put her in her profile and say I only want to work these shifts. These are my qualifications. And I only like this, these kinds of restaurants. And I can only work in a two mile radius because I want to walk to work. And I won’t accept less than $25 An hour and that the platform will only give her jobs that she wants. So yes, the platform does solve for that problem with the platform aspires to do is when she says but I also have a degree in Fine Arts. And I’ve shown my work in this gallery. And I’ve done these things and I’m taking this training course, can I look at jobs, can you match me with the jobs, not just that I’m qualified for today, but that I am seeking to be qualified for tomorrow. And that’s the level of empowerment that essentially loves her drove her career through the app.

Vince Menzione  23:58

Well said, so you go from the tech giant to a startup, like what does success look like for you now?

Jennifer Byrne  24:06

Survival. I mean, startups are hard with the luxury of corporate America, although you I mean, I don’t think I ever worked harder than I worked when I was at Microsoft, and probably was never more overwhelmed. Because that company is so big and so complex. It is you have the luxury of working for a big company that you don’t have when you’re in startup startups are there. It’s a very existential kind of thing. But you’ve got to make sure that you’re building something that is valuable enough that people are willing to buy it. You got to think about funding, you have a small team of people, you’ve likely don’t have all the skills that you need in order to accomplish whatever it is you’re trying to do. So just making it day to day and staying true to the mission is the challenge oftentimes.

Vince Menzione  24:46

So we talk about partners here at ultimate guide the partnering, tell us how partners are playing a role in your growth, reach and expansion.

Jennifer Byrne  24:56

I don’t know how you could be a tech company of any size Is and not prioritized partnerships simply because it’s already anything you do, you’re entering in a digital ecosystem. And that is true for us as well. If we are trying to insert our digital staffing platform into a staffing agency or an employer, we immediately have to integrate, and work with all of the existing technology already in place. So that’s just the reality, I don’t know how you can be successful without a very clear focus and priority around the partners that you need to have in order to provide value for us that started with Microsoft. So I can maybe that’s obvious that I like the company and want to work with the company, we’re in the Microsoft for startups program. So we’ve gotten a lot of support we build on Azure, and we consider building as much technology as we can on Microsoft platforms. Because there are so many partners in that ecosystem that allows us to work across the ecosystem in order to integrate with all the companies that we know are already in place with our customers,

Vince Menzione  26:03

it seems that Microsoft to you, you touched partners quite a bit in your roles at Microsoft, it seems to be an innate DNA in the organization around partnering. Do you agree

Jennifer Byrne  26:12

that for sure, Microsoft is the any job I ever had at Microsoft, although I never worked in the partner group, I always worked with partners, you don’t go to market without them. You can’t go to market without them.

Vince Menzione  26:22

What’s the and I’ll use the term personal mission, or just cause for Jennifer,

Jennifer Byrne  26:28

what is that? I think the broad answer for everyone is that finding that out is trying to understand what unique thing you can bring to the world, and matching that up with whatever the world needs from you. And for me, I had an unlikely path to the jobs I ultimately had at Microsoft. I started with a degree in psychology from a decent but not great school, a first career and nonprofit management. But a very practical moved into tech and a windy path and a decent amount of opportunity, but also adversity along the way. And I think that’s a story that is worth telling. Because a lot of people are going to have to navigate their own windy paths to build the career that they want when the job that you are going to have in 10 years doesn’t exist today, what is the path to get there? Who knows. So I’ve got a story I can tell. I know what it was like to be a woman in tech in the 90s and early 2000s. Up through today, there’s some perspective I have to offer. And I’ve gotten really good at figuring out how to acquire skills without mastering them and use those in order to grow my career. So that’s what I have. And my mission, I think, is to really just be me, and and do my best to bring that perspective into the work that I do. And I think that’s why I ended up and future of work and this notion of wanting to empower people to make a success of their own journeys.

Vince Menzione  27:58

So is that the piece of advice you would give to our listeners? And what about for other women looking to get to this spot in their career?

Jennifer Byrne  28:05

Yeah, I think the pivot for me was an I don’t remember how I came to it. But was this idea that you have about as much power over your career as you want to take, and only you can advocate for yourself, really, and all those decisions that lead to the next best job, you’re really although we have mentors, and we have networks, and that’s very, very helpful. When you’re in an interview, or you’re networking, it’s up to you to bring forth all of your skills, all of your perspective, all of your experience. And if you’re not going to advocate for yourself, then in those small but important moments, nobody else will. And so I think I learned that I had to learn that because nothing I did could never say, Look, I have an MBA from Harvard. I couldn’t say that. But I could say, I built a program for ISV partners when I was at McAfee and I did these things. And this was my success. And this is what I learned. And I managed a team of difficult people, right? Whatever it was that I did, I was able to frame my experiences in a way that seemed valuable to other people. And so the big lesson is that I learned to advocate for myself, I learned to be proud of what I was doing and to really think about the value of my experiences in terms of what companies needed. And I think that’s how I was able to overcome not having maybe the pedigree that you would think I would have needed.

Vince Menzione  29:31

Is advocacy, one of your superpowers,

Jennifer Byrne  29:34

I think so I think I have a natural, a default to advocacy, but it’s something that I like doing for others. And it’s something I’ve seen in my own life that advocating for myself, which is by the way of balance of humility and honesty and self efficacy and self awareness all those things. You can I guess you could over advocate for yourself pretty easily too. But yeah, advocacy, both for myself and for others is a really important thing for me.

Vince Menzione  29:58

I love that. So Let’s have some fun. And I’d love to shift gears now. And this is a favorite question of mine. So you are hosting a dinner party. And I feel like we’re coming out at this time like no other. So masks are off. You’re in the Phoenix area. I’m in Florida, and you can invite anyone from the present or the past to this amazing dinner party. Who would you invite Jennifer? And why?

Jennifer Byrne  30:24

I struggle with this question. I really do.

Vince Menzione  30:27

That’s why I asked.

Jennifer Byrne  30:29

This is a hard one. I thought about this a lot. And here’s why this is such a hard question. I am always a fan of the untold story. And I think it’s because of the the way I grew up in the world, even having not had a lot of the big name Ivy League education, I didn’t follow the path a lot of people would think you’d have to follow to get to a CTO position. I kind of liked the underdog. I like the untold story. I like the UI just like the idea that there is so much good work that’s happening in the world that at any given time, meaningful, innovative, disruptive work that’s happening by people who will never hear of, and that’s what really powers the world. So I like the untold story, which is hard, because now I think well, okay, all the famous people I can think of already know their story. So do I want to hear it again, I don’t know, if I were, if it were a small dinner party, like a family dinner party, I would probably invite a relative, I think I’d invite my grandfather who I never met on my father’s side, he was a Japanese man and moved to the Philippines in the late 1920s and started a new life and married a Filipino woman and had a bunch of children. And then World War Two came along. And at the end of the war, all the Japanese people read repatriated back to Japan, which was not something that he wanted to have happen for himself, took his whole family back and sorted life over again. And if I think about that kind of windy path, it really is an explorer thing. You sort of sit off from the shore with a few maybe a map and a compass. And it’s you’re kind of sitting out on a great adventure, hopefully with enough skills to survive and thrive. And that’s a deep human thing. And so if I think about building a career journey, I think it feels the same way. It feels daunting. And I think a lot about my grandfather and what that would have been like for him to sort of set sail for an unknown land and navigate all that he had to navigate through his life. I never met him.

Vince Menzione  32:23

So is there one question that stands out, you would ask him,

Jennifer Byrne  32:26

I think I would have wanted to know how he gathered the courage to

Vince Menzione  32:31

go. Nice. As the grandchild of immigrants myself, I think that’s a very fascinating conversation. Yeah. Thank you. I love that. I love that. Jennifer, you have been an amazing guest. And I want to thank you for your generous time today. Are there any parting suggestions for our listeners, both partners, leaders, and aspiring leaders that want to get to that next spot in their career?

Jennifer Byrne  32:57

I think just have the courage to go forward operate in the context of your personal mission in everything that you do. Advocate for yourself, then have the courage to go forward.

Vince Menzione  33:07

Thank you so much, Jennifer, for joining Ultimate Guide to partnering today.

Jennifer Byrne  33:10

Thanks for having me.

Vince Menzione  33:12

As with each of my episodes, I appreciate your support. Please subscribe on your favorite platform, like comment, tell your friends about Ultimate Guide to partnering and where they can find us and I’d love your feedback. Please like the podcast and provide comments or reach out to me at Vince Menzione on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also like and follow Ultimate Guide to partnering on our Facebook page, or drop me a line at Vin Sam at ultimate dash partnerships.com This episode of the podcast is sponsored by partner tap the partner ecosystem platform most trusted by enterprise, drive more revenue with your partners and learn more at partner tap.com.

Announcer  33:57

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partnering. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to Partnering.

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