Listen: Masters of Risk | Episode 12 - Women's Panel

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Presentation

Yashi Yadav

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Masters of Risk, a podcast by S&P Global Market Intelligence. I'm really excited to have you all here today as this is our first video podcast panel. So just to kind of kick it off, I'd love for everyone to go ahead and give me just a brief name and introduction, your background to help set the stage.

Katrina Dudley

Great. My name is Katrina Dudley. I am a Senior Vice President in Public Market Investments at Franklin Templeton. Until very recently, I was a Portfolio Manager within our Mutual Series division. And as of the beginning of this year, I transitioned into my new role.

Meredith Beddow

I'm Meredith Beddow. My background, I'm a product manager, and I've always been a product manager in different industries. But here, I've really transitioned to more of a go-to-market. So I'm working with our clients, and the product is RatingsDirect here at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Rachana Kothare

Hi, everyone. I'm Rachana Kothare. I'm with Amazon, and I work as a Principal Finance Manager with our Corporate Business Development team. I've been there almost coming up on 4 years now, so it's been quite the journey. And prior to that, I've worked in a multitude of industries, from construction to aerospace. So it's been fun.

Question and Answer

Yashi Yadav

That's great. So to kind of get -- let's jump right into it. Would you mind -- I know we all come from diverse backgrounds. We've pivoted into different job functions and different industries as we progress in our career. I'd love to know what the journey was for each of you and really what the rationale was behind when those pivots were made.

Rachana Kothare

So to start out, I mean I just mentioned I've gone through a multitude of industry. When I first started out of college,, it was more about the housing industry, and that was the time that I graduated in. And so it was an exciting moment to be part of it. I'd never ever thought of myself as being in the construction industry at any point, so great challenge to start out. Learned a lot trying to do a variety of things from operations to manufacturing to sales, and so very rapid learning curve in my very first role. That was exciting.

In terms of pivoting from there on, I was kind of looking for an opportunity related to technology and connectivity got my interest. And so that's how I ended up working in telecom for quite a while. So I moved from working in housing and construction completely unrelated, straight into the telecom industry. And I looked at everything from the very basic wire in the ground [ and relay ], all the way up to moving into like cellular work with a phone, which then led to my interest in aerospace ironically, which you would never have thought of as connected.

But if you think about how you reach people, the wire in the ground gets you so far, and then there's an audience that you can't reach with that wire. So as I was thinking through my customers' journeys and the problems they were trying to solve and where they needed to be connected, that process of how do you connect someone over the ocean became a problem. There's no cell tower, there's no wire.

And that really got my interest in space communications, it's like the next technology. And I started working for a startup called OneWeb, and that progressed over into working for Project Kuiper at Amazon, which is one of the most exciting projects within the company.

So my first 2 years really went into getting that, helping the team get off the ground with their business plan. And then based on what I'd learned there, I decided to expand out into the other frontiers that Amazon is looking at, which led me to the Corporate Business Development team. It's been a very rapid learning curve, if you will, each time I do one of these transitions, but I think to me that makes it exciting. So half the job is what do you know that you can bring to the table, and the other half is what do you learn next.

Meredith Beddow

That's great, I love that. So I started off actually in technology in a small startup software firm. Very much B2B, really mainframe infrastructure communications before. FTP was always out there, but we had a proprietary communication. So that was one of the products. The other product was a single sign-on. So really precursors to just typical stuff we do every day. We transfer files every day. We're on the Internet every day. We have security. So I learned a lot, to your point, and spent a lot of time also wearing many hats from helping our HR folks go create college recruitment programs.

We had a group of about 40 employees, so it was definitely a family. I stayed there for about 8 years. I was itching to grow. And at the time, I thought I'd like to look into finance, so looked around and got an opportunity at a credit rating agency as a product manager. So I worked for Fitch Ratings. This is before 2008. I started quite a bit before that. And so you need to talk about maybe there's a chance to talk about shifts in our industries and things of that nature, but that was certainly quite an experience to look through that.

And then I joined S&P about 8 years later, and I've been here ever since. And I had been from product management writing requirements, working with QA, UAT. And really what I found I liked about that, where I wanted to go more so was working with the clients, being able to get out of the scrum team, bring that insight in. And it really gives me a lot of energy. And so I think about my journey, I never really saw myself being here back when I started.

Katrina Dudley

So my journey, I started at an accounting firm. So I used to do valuation work for couples that were divorcing. We value their private interests, and I like doing that so I worked out where in the firm I could do that full time. And then I transferred from our Sydney office of an accounting firm into L.A. and then on to New York. And when I arrived in New York, I did my MBA part time. So I did that. And when I was doing that, I realized I love valuation but I want -- I always felt like when we turned up at the client, they really didn't want us there because we were valuing things like in the rearview mirror. We were doing things for the 10-K.

So I had a very unique business valuing noncompetes and I loved it, because we'd sit with these chief executives and senior leaders and work out if you were to damage the business, what would you do? And it was really tough for them to kind of think about doing that, but we get them to talk about where the vulnerabilities were. And that's now what I do full time. I mean when I became an analyst and then a portfolio manager is you're analyzing companies, you're assessing where their vulnerabilities are and then you're also looking at what they'll work in the future.

And I did that for 21 years. And then just recently, I've been a portfolio manager analyst for a long period of time. And I was looking for that new challenge. So an opportunity opened up to working at Public Market Investments team, just helping our investment person, investment teams become better.

Yashi Yadav

Interesting, Katrina. I'd love to follow up, Meredith, with you and then also, Rachana, get your insights and yours as well, Katrina, where when you made the pivot, Meredith, into moving into finance moving, into credit ratings agency and then coming to S&P, I'm sure the first word that comes to me at least that's top of mind is risk, right? And then we're talking about '08 and the transition. You're talking about being in the housing market. I mean bringing it back to present day, what are some risks that you all see in your respective industries or areas of focus? And how do you see them evolving? What are you thinking about when you wake up in the morning?

Meredith Beddow

Okay. I mean I can start. I mean one thing I want to say about risk in transitioning and making these big moves in our lives and our careers especially as women, I found it was really important for me to get comfortable with risk, and I'm sort of realizing this now. I actually read -- I sought counsel of some folks at the time. This is my first career change, and I spoke to some trusted folks. And I actually read a book, a small book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. It's a real nice little leaflet, but just these things to help me realize that I could do more. So I just want to say that.

And so as far as the industry is concerned, I mean, there's a variety of risks. I mean our product is a desktop server based, web based rather. So there's tons of data. The data has to be right. I mean there's a whole ecosystem within making sure the product is correct and delivering the information and the data. And of course, on the other side, we productize the credit risk, credit ratings, credit risk insights from S&P Global Ratings. And it's been fascinating how they manage and how they feel about risks and some of the top areas they're looking at. I guess just one thing I'd say, and I can't come up with this myself, I can't take credit for this rather, is that knowing what -- being able to see around corners, which is quite an interesting idea that it's not to be too comfortable with the risk you know, in general, is what I've observed.

Yashi Yadav

Okay. Katrina, would you like to go next?

Katrina Dudley

Yes. So as you know, we [ wrote ] about risk, in one area in terms of careers for women. And I think one of the areas we found is that women didn't take enough career risk. And a lot of women that we interviewed for our book kind of almost in reflection regretted not taking that career risk. And so when people looking at risk, a lot of people assume that women are risk averse. We talk about it that women are much more risk aware, but we don't want to let that awareness take away from making these jumps. And you've got people here who have made career pivots and career jumps, and they've all been successful. And so I think that, that's the first area of risk I just think as I look at people that I work with and people that I'm talking to.

In terms of the industry, I was thinking about it, the industry is changing but it's been changing ever since I joined finance. I look at what I did when I first joined an investment manager and what I had available to me as tools. I actually, even when I started my career, I started on a 286, which probably most people will not realize was like a disk that was floppy and hard. And that was like my first intro to computers. And now I mean, that's just obsolete technology, but things are always changing.

But the one risk I think we've all got to be aware of is just reputational risk. And that's where I think that the big risk is. We're entrusted with people's money, we're entrusted with people's savings, we're entrusted by so many people. And it takes a lot to build that trust over time, and it doesn't take much to destroy a reputation. So I always think about it in terms of would this hurt the reputation of the firm and would I be proud talking about it? So it's not quite the risk that you think about, but I think about all the tools that help us preserve that reputation. And that's really what we're looking for, we're looking to address risk.

Rachana Kothare

So I'm going to tack on to what you guys just said because I think you've covered some very key points, and maybe looking at it from a slightly different industry lens from where I sit. But essentially, the idea behind risk as far as career risk is concerned, I think you spoke to it. I think back to what one of the CEOs of Vodafone said when he was in a large meeting basically said, "Think about the cost of regret," and that's a very interesting way to look at everything. Maybe it's a bit, I don't know [ if this makes it to the edit ], but it might be a bit existential to say what would you think of the things that you didn't do and then regretted not doing them versus having tried them and maybe failed or succeeded, you don't know.

And so when I think of career risk, making those pivots are kind of looking at what am I interested in doing next and where do I see myself going with it and what's the cost of not doing that? And so that essentially drives some of my decision-making when I made really big switches out of industries and out of job functions and locations even. So I think that kind of underlines the big jumps in career risk-taking, if you will, to a point not being risk averse but just being aware of what you're doing next and why you want to do it.

The other factor that you mentioned is reputation, which I think is critical. So Amazon itself handles enormous amounts of data for everyone, whether it's in the cloud, whether it's your shopping habits. And so we're super, super aware being very careful of reputation. And we want our customers to be overjoyed when they use our services and products. We want to make sure that they're safe and it's free and they can go to sleep at night knowing their information is secure. So that's very critical in terms of having the lens of what you do, what you say and how it affects all of your customers that depend on you day-to-day.

And then maybe the last piece of that is looking around corners. So in my current job, I would say that's almost my job description. And it's a really hard thing to do honestly because when we think about the pace of change, it's accelerated, right? Things might have moved slowly at some point. They were still changing. What I want or what I observe at least is the rate of change has moved up exponentially. We went from, hey, I can use Excel to I can use supercomputers, to now I can use GenAI and it does a bunch of stuff for me.

So keeping abreast of all that and making sure you're looking around the right corners, not just every corner all the time is kind of a very critical piece of that job function and understanding the risk therefore to the company, to your customers, to the work that you do, I think, manifests itself in my day-to-day work and how I think about this.

Yashi Yadav

So it's interesting because we're talking about the rate of change and pace at which it's moving, and also you brought up GenAI, which is great.

Rachana Kothare

Hot topic.

Yashi Yadav

Because it is a hot topic. I mean S&P just had a senior leadership off-site that a lot of our senior executives were at, and that was something that they're thinking about, that's top of mind for them. I'm curious from that technology perspective, how impactful is technology in your day-to-day in the work that you're doing? And what are your honest thoughts and opinions around it? Are we all pro-tech and pro-change?

Do you think that maybe we need to slow down a little bit and reassess what's to come? But I'd love to get your thoughts on that.

Katrina Dudley

I don't think GenAI and artificial intelligence is particularly new. It's just new and front of mind. We've been doing this for so many years in different iterations. And so I just think technology's always going to advance. And if it's not, we've got bigger concerns in this world than and not having Copilot or anything, other GenAI tools. As we think about it, I think that there's kind of two avenues. The first avenue is using these tools to kind of automate existing processes, so something you're already doing and maybe doing it a little bit faster. And they are usually the first use cases for a lot of these tools, and that's what we're finding.

The second thing is when we're using it in a new and innovative way to help out our teams and help our business, and I think that's where we're still working. And I think that's where the opportunity is. I love that example of walking around the corner because we know that we've got to go around the corner, we're just not sure where that corner is going to take us.

But as a firm and as an individual, I think everyone should just be excited about the change because if you have that fear, you're never going to advance and you're going to be the person who is left behind. And I think there's so many opportunities and so many ways to educate yourself and get aware of what's happening, so that when those AI projects become available in any area of any firm, you can be the person who puts your hand up and volunteers to be the first person using the technology or helping develop the use case.

Meredith Beddow

If I could just -- you made me kind of think about something. So here at this company, I'm sure many firms have an AI, an internal sort of AI, obviously, czar or group. And actually in this very room, a couple weeks ago, there was sort of an unveiling and a really great demonstration of some of the capabilities internally here at S&P. And I did realize because of the committee kind of stood up those that were here in New York, is that there was one woman on the committee. And I wanted to say, and I'm sure there are many women who are involved with it, I think one of the unique things that we bring potentially to the table is we are risk aware, but I don't believe that we're fearful.

And I don't think this is a How to Train Your Dragon kind of moment with AI. I don't feel that at all. I feel that there is a lot of upside to, it but I do think diversity and just sort of a diverse group of insights to train these AIs. I mean to put that input in upfront, this is a critical time. We can expedite processes easily like you said with tools right now. But I mean it is very exciting. And I will just end on a note just to say I have been -- I'm one of many folks here just kind of general employees who are part of a pilot with the copilot and see how it could potentially work with some applications. And I need to just commit the time to really see how it could help myself and my teams.

Katrina Dudley

But I think you make such an interesting point because we talk about diversity and we talk about why we believe in diversity, and often people go back to the fairness and the equity. But here, there's a real business use case that if you train your data without diverse inputs, and we're talking diversity. I know we're talking women here, but there's diversity along so many different lenses: socioeconomic, educational, ethnic, just educational even. But all of those lenses need to go in and train this engine, otherwise, we're going to have an engine that has bias to it, and we want to avoid that.

Meredith Beddow

That speaks to one audience almost or tailored to one. Yes, that's a really good point.

Yashi Yadav

Yes. I mean I think I'd love to -- continuing on the topic of diversity, would you be able to share a specific anecdote or experience where you were the diverse voice in the room and what that impact looked like from a decision-making standpoint? And I think that in and of itself should ideally highlight why diversity is so important.

Katrina Dudley

I will say I've been a portfolio manager, I've got 21 years. So being the only person, and I think I've been pretty public about saying that when I started in this business, I thought it would be different at 20 years later, and I've been disappointed that we haven't made the progress. Because the case for diversity is just it's easy to make. It's easy from the fairness point of view, that everyone deserves the same opportunity. From a finance perspective, finance is a high-paying career. So you want women to have equal access to those high-paying careers as well.

And so from that perspective, I've been disappointed that we haven't had diversity in the room. As I look at it from our investment teams for example, where a lot of the data is and a lot of where I focused on historically, it's better decision-making. So if you have more diverse perspectives in a room, it leads to better decision-making. That does not mean the decision is aligned with one diverse perspective, it means that the decision considers the diverse perspective to lead to a better decision. And I think that, that's good for everyone because better investment decisions lead to better returns for shareholders, which is good for us.

Meredith Beddow

Can you go?

Rachana Kothare

Sure.

Meredith Beddow

You're not last. Good.

Rachana Kothare

Okay. So I think one thing that you just reminded me of, Katrina, is one of the infamous or famous leadership principles of Amazon, which is Disagree and Commit. And I think that's a really useful way to look at any decision that you make because you want to hear all the voices in the room. That doesn't mean you're attempting to build consensus by virtue of having those voices. But you can hear who has a different viewpoint and why and, therefore, becomes part of the consideration set when you make the decision at the end to a point you're trying to get to a better quality of decision-making, not necessarily extending the decision to accommodate every viewpoint necessarily.

So you're not looking for the lowest common denominator in every decision. You're looking for the best possible outcome that you can get. And having those diverse voices and when everyone has this common baseline of Disagree and Commit, it's really useful because you can get to different projects. So in the case that you're asking, there's lots of operational considerations. There's legal considerations, there's privacy risks, there's PR. Every project that Amazon touches has hundreds of stakeholders within that group.

And so having that thought to say everyone's voice can be heard, we'll go around the room, you're welcome to state your case, and we'll consider that at the end as part of the holistic decision, is really critical. And I think getting or giving everyone that comfort of saying, "It's okay to say what you believe, whether anyone else in this room agrees or not, you're perfectly within your right to state what you believe and why," I think helps that very good decision-making because then you've heard good, bad and ugly from everybody. And no one feels the fear to voice something that disagrees with anyone else in the room because they know they're here. They have a seat at the table for a reason, and their opinion matters to all the stakeholders in that room.

Meredith Beddow

Very important core principles. Having a voice, I have just one brief example. And again, I'm going to go back to this product management and requirement writing and really understanding the essence of a user. It's at the heart of Agile or of the scrum team. And to really build a successful product is, I think, I really had to come to these meetings, design reviews and requirement-gathering meetings with a very strong conviction that I had to represent what I heard. I've done numerous client interviews for a new product prototype we had, which we've now launched, which is doing very well.

But it's critical to get that input. And I almost felt backed up by all those interviews I had over the last 6 weeks because there is power. There's power in having just insights in listening. And being able to synthesize that at the table is key. And I have had moments where I was a bit reticent or shy or wasn't comfortable in saying some of these things. But when it comes down to building a product that's really important to delight the clients, that's -- there's no -- I'm not compromising that.

Katrina Dudley

I want to just share one as a personal example, but I think you could also bring the diverse perspectives of others sometimes into the room. I'm on the Board of a nonprofit. And a number of years ago, we were looking at a new project, and we were going to make it affordable housing. And one of our directors came in and advocated for it to be deeply affordable housing. And we went back and redid the design so we could make it deeply affordable. And we thought that, that was actually a better fit for the neighborhood.

And he was actually not part of the group that would benefit, but he represented the views of the people who really needed access to this housing. And now 7 years later, I happen to be out visiting it. And I just feel so proud about the fact that we're able to offer this, and we're able to offer at such much more of an affordable rate than potentially we started at because one person in the room was brave enough to stand up and bring that alternate perspective to the room, and we worked with them.

Yashi Yadav

So interesting. That's great just to hear that. That's something else that you're working on, Katrina. It's awesome. Speaking about projects, I know that you just started a new role at the firm, and I know that a lot of your role, Rachana, is also doing some project-based work. And Meredith, being a product manager, of course, I mean that's just project after project.

But when we think about that, how do you define success for these projects where there is no end goal necessarily, where it's just an ongoing process? Because sometimes, for me personally, I can speak to that being a challenge because if I don't have a definite yes or no answer, I just don't see the end.

Meredith Beddow

Yes. Can I just jump in on that real quick because I could build a -- I had some folks working for me, right, a team that's formed over the last couple of years and new to product management and so I had to. But had worked at other places in the firm, more transactional, data oriented. Just at the end of the day, you sort of knew what you did for the day type of role or at the end of a period. So I had to explain that product management, no day is the same and you're not -- there isn't exactly -- we don't exactly know when we're done. In fact, we're never going to be done.

But the success, in my opinion, the success is, well, there's some achievements and releases and going to market with certain things, but it's just having that positive client impact and feedback. At the end of the day, that's what we want to do. So I really have been a product manager my entire career. It is a very -- they don't teach this really in schools. It is a very -- I love it, but it is a little hard to define once it's done. Or success is something you start to feel, and it's the commitment to the product that you know you're doing the right thing. You want to go?

Katrina Dudley

I was about to say I grew up with P&L. But I mean, that's how -- I mean, the financial market every day for most of my career is kind of the arbiter of whether the name you bought worked or it didn't. And in my new role, we don't have that. There's no stock market that I can kind of open up and say, hey, that was successful or not. But I think that it's a little more of a gray market, a gray role. And I think as you get further into your career, you do get grayer and grayer in what things are.

But you also therefore need to have confidence in order to be able to say, at the end of the year, this is what I did and this is what I achieved without feeling that, that's a bad thing to do. And I think often, when you lack confidence or you're not quite so new, you may say to yourself, "What am I boasting?" But no, you're actually helping the person who advocates on your behalf. And that applies throughout your career. I just think as you get further along and as I've gone into this new role, I'm having to just keep a list of what I've done so I don't forget it.

And then we're looking at how do we transition? If we go in and work with a team and we stand up a new leader, how do we transition to that, for example? And that, to me, is a successful transition. And a successful transition isn't that you just kind of shut the door and finish. You kind of do it over time the same way. I have kids. You send them off to college and they still keep coming back.

Rachana Kothare

Yes. I think a gray area when it comes to work, I don't have children, so I can't speak to that experience, but from a work perspective at least, a lot of my work is entirely ambiguous. There isn't a P&L. There isn't a yardstick of what the stock market say, what was the ROI on this. And so the way I like to think about it comes a little bit back to what we were discussing earlier is, did I help the leadership team make a better decision? And did I help them make it faster?

So kind of looking at velocity and quality of decision-making is how I think of success metrics in my role. And I think part of that is because we're helping the team think through some of the most ambiguous problems within the company, the most ambiguous problems within the company because there isn't a path of, okay, we've done this before, let's go do the same thing again. You're thinking through a problem that the company has never encountered. It's brand new to the way it's structured. You may never encounter again, we don't know.

And sometimes, the decisions are to proceed. Sometimes you have to help them also say no to the wrong things, right?. So things that either don't fit what the company strategy is or don't fit the outcome that we want or potentially just distractions from what we need to get done during that quarter, during that year, are things you have to say no to. And so kind of when I look at success metrics, just getting to yes isn't a good success metric for me. It's did we get to a better decision? Did we get to it faster than we would, by the way? I really like that actually. That's a great job, I mean I love doing it, but it makes people uncomfortable when you're [ left to agree with ] ambiguity to it.

Yashi Yadav

Definitely. I mean I also think that just saying no isn't always the most comfortable decision to make even if it is the right one. And so I think building that skill set can have a lot of impact on your career longer term.

Meredith Beddow

I actually think and part of, I guess, communication, being really a good communicator is just saying getting to the no. And just say the no and not kind of fluff it up with lots of different words that you're almost sorry, but no, no. We just have to remember. We have to remember to be direct there but with reasons, right?

Katrina Dudley

We have to. I mean you think about it, in industries where you're underrepresented as women and they want committees that have got balance on them, women are always going to be asked more often than their male counterparts. So you need to be able to say no because otherwise, you're not going to be able to get to do the work that's going to get you the next promotion if you're doing all these other things. So I think there's a book called The No Club that I read, and I wish I read it earlier. But it's a really great perspective of just putting yourself in that lens of I can't say no to -- I can't say yes to everything, and to understand why you're joining that no club is okay.

Yashi Yadav

I think that's really valuable advice. I'd love to shift a little bit. I know we've been talking a lot about project-specific work or job-specific work. But I'd like to take it up a notch, speak a little bit more at the macro level. So Katrina, you mentioned that you now stand up leaders in your organization. Can you speak a little bit to the qualities that you're looking for when you're trying to stand up these leaders or ones that you all are going to embody yourself as leaders on your respective teams?

Katrina Dudley

So I haven't had a lot of experience, so I would say yours is probably a little generous because I'm new to role. But I think what do you look for in a leader is humility, is the ability to develop people in particular because that's important. They're entrusting you with their careers, and you need to be able to talk to them about that. You need to have a degree of technical expertise or know where you don't have the expertise and where you can go to get it. And then you have to have -- it's an ability to kind of see the forest from the trees because when you're early in your career, you tend to be focused, like I have my tree, I finish the tree and I go to the next.

When in any role, as you get more and more senior, you need to see many more different parts, be it you were talking about being able to see legal and product and everything else. And you need to be able to incorporate all that. And that's difficult. But I think that, that's a really good leadership skill. So there's various different things you need to develop. But I think once you've got the technical expertise, being able to see the forest from the trees and being that people person and then finally, having humility.

Meredith Beddow

I think a people person, as you said, is definitely key in my -- just in how you can relate and feel comfortable being a key part of a team under such a leader. I've been blessed to have some really great leaders at the helm, and other leaders with a completely different style from different industries sort of dropped in. But that probably could be by design to actually drop in sort of different perspectives. It's interesting, the journeys I've been on. As far as I'm really very pleased with the current group or the current leadership that we have, to your point, technical skills and also being able to focus on what's important, there's a lot of distraction.

There's a lot of distraction in our private lives, in our world. And within the corporate construct, lots of opportunities to learn. There's lots of opportunities to engage and become more connected with others. But really, at the end of the day, it's finishing your tree, that's such a good way to put it. It was so much easier back in the day, right, but helping your team and helping your leaders succeed, that made a lot of sense to me. So I can't disagree with any of it, just agree, really.

Rachana Kothare

Great. I would have to agree as well. I think that's a very critical set of skills that anyone would want or need as a leader. Not as much work experience perhaps as Katrina is like top of her career here. So I'm learning as I go from people that I admire or people that I respect or look up to and what qualities they embody. And I think humility is probably top of that list for a good reason. It generates a degree of self-awareness within the leaders. And I think that helps them then build their team, find blind spots, look for ways to nurture and grow whoever's working with them or for them.

And I think that's somewhat innate, somewhat learned. But if you don't do it, you kind of have very large blind spots in your own work. And you're unable to get the team to go with you at times that you really might need them to. So I think that's super critical. Maybe one I'd add to that is just, I think I mentioned resilience at one point. I think because we live in such a changing world, the ability to bounce back from trouble or bounce back from failures and not take them as a "punch and I fall down and never get back up" is really important because have folks who are sitting with their one tree, we're going with the tree analogy, going, "Oh no, I did something wrong with this tree, what happened?"

And so you want someone that has the ability above you, perhaps as your leader, to then say, "Here's how you would recover from it." Don't worry about the one tree. Here's where the forest is going. Let's keep going with it. So I think that helps when you're in your single tree world to start understanding that failure doesn't mean the end of the road. It's kind of your next learning point, and your leader's going to help you move up that tree.

Katrina Dudley

Yes. I think also there's just that opportunity throughout your career to develop leadership skills. And it may be that you're in a role that you don't have direct reports, but you can lead through influencing others or you could take on a nonprofit leadership role or a community leadership role. And I think that, that's the thing that I speak to a lot of people about, that all of your leadership experience doesn't need to come within the four walls of your organization. You can find it in other places. And then the organization gets the benefit of you having gone outside. And when you do it in the community, the community gets the benefit as well.

Yashi Yadav

It's incredible. So to close this out, I would love to know what each of you is most excited for in the second half of 2024, I should say. It's almost Memorial Day weekend. Didn't even realize where the time's gone.

Katrina Dudley

I don't know if I have one thing that I'm really excited about. I mean I love getting up in the morning and kind of going into the office and doing it. And despite the work being different or gray and things, I actually enjoy it. And so I'm not excited for something that's about to come because I feel like today is just as good and it's going to be great tomorrow. And going back to your point about remembering resilience, that's exactly right. I'm going to fall over. I know I am going to make mistakes.

I've really learned in the last couple of years to take feedback as a gift. Someone gave me that advice. That is the thing. And to be just in a place where you're learning and developing and it's exciting, I think that, that's what's exciting to me. I just don't think of it as being like a second-half goal. I just think about it as, that's what makes a great career or a great job is you just love kind of getting up and doing what you're doing.

Meredith Beddow

Your perspective has just helped me kind of the light bulb's gone on about what I'm excited about as you were speaking. I think it's connections like these or opportunities such as this and to kind of hear different points of view. It's really being able to take advantage of some of the programs and associations and sort of the support that's around over the next year, so just to make sure that I'm a better contributor. So I'd say, I will get -- I'm pretty excited about that opportunity.

Rachana Kothare

Awesome. I mean I can't beat Katrina on that one because I love having a very gray ambiguous job, and so every day looks completely different. And it's super exciting to do that. In terms of excitement outside of that, I mean, more thinking about my personal life. Well, I have a bunch of friends visiting from the U.K., so we're going on a very long road trip in Southwest U.S., which is really fun. So we'll be going to my first actual rodeo, and I'm looking forward to that. Then it will just be a statement. It will not be my first rodeo, [ I mean in Texas ].

Yashi Yadav

That's great. Yes. Well, thank you all for joining us today on our first video panel. It's been amazing to hear about all your different perspectives on your careers and technology and just being women in this wild world that we live in and are continuing to live in. So I really enjoyed this, and I hope to chat with you all again soon.