Season 2 of Inspired Execution Shares the Incredible Stories of Today’s Most Impactful Leaders

The second season of Inspired Execution has returned with three episodes you won’t want to miss.

The podcast, hosted by DataStax Chairman and CEO Chet Kapoor, explores the origin stories of some of today’s most influential technology leaders to find out how they arrived in their current roles, what they’re doing to scale multi-billion-dollar businesses, and how they inspire their teams to reach their full potential.

The fourth episode of the second season — What You Don’t Know Helps You Grow: Lifelong Learning with PayPal EVP & CTO Sri Shivananda — drops today. To make sure you don’t miss any episodes of Inspired Execution, join our mailing list and get notifications for every new episode.

To give you a better idea of what you might have missed, here’s a brief recap of the last three episodes.

From Culture to Cooking: A Masterclass with Cisco’s Group CIO Jacqueline Guichelaar

“Hire people better than you all the time. The quicker you do that, the quicker they take on your role, the quicker you can move to the next one.” —Jacqui Guichelaar

When she was two, Jacqui Guichelaar moved from Uruguay to Australia, and her parents didn’t speak a word of English. The experience of growing up as an immigrant in a foreign country helped Jacqui prepare for an awesome career that has involved working for some of the biggest companies around the world, including Cisco, IBM, and Thomson Reuters. Tune in to hear why Jacqui believes diverse teams are amazing, why leaders shouldn’t just hire the people they know, what Cisco’s Customer Zero initiative is all about, how Cisco is moving to new business models in response to shifting customer demands, and why you should always try to hire people who are better than you.

Zoom In, Zoom Out: Solving Financial Challenges of the Future with Wells Fargo CIO Ravi Radhakrishnan

“Sometimes 80% of what you need to know is good enough to make an effective decision, and sometimes it's 90%. It's almost never 100%.” —Ravi Radhakrishnan

Ravi Radhakrishnan assumed he’d eventually wind up in Silicon Valley and work in technology. But after beginning his career in finance, he got hooked on financial services technology, and he hasn’t looked back since. In this episode, Ravi talks about what it was like managing a group of 1,500 engineers, the perils of being overly analytical, the projects Wells Fargo is working on with IBM and MIT in the Watson AI Lab, and how Ravi has balanced portfolio execution with speed throughout his career.

Building the Best Bank for a Better World with DBS Group CEO Piyush Gupta

“You've got to create an environment where it's okay to take some risks, it's okay to experiment. You do not have to be worried that you're going to lose your bonus or lose your job because something got screwed up.” —Piyush Gupta

Piyush Gupta has worked for some of the world’s leading banks for nearly 40 years. He began his career at Citi, holding 22 jobs in multiple countries over 27 years. In November 2009, Piyush took the reins at DBS, and he’s been taking the bank to new heights ever since. In this episode, Piyush talks about leading a legacy bank through a digital transformation, setting a goal of being named the best bank in the world (and achieving it), his mantra of culture by design and running a bank like a 20,000-person Silicon Valley startup, and why he decided to devote his free time to help cure childhood cancer.

Check out the next episode of Inspired Execution!

To learn more about what today’s leading executives are doing to inspire their teams and take their organizations to the next level, tune in for the next episode of Inspired Execution today.