M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Yvonne Wassenaar, CEO, Puppet | Sandhill
Summary
With 17 years experience at Accenture, and top leadership roles at New Relic and VMware, Yvonne is sought after for her understanding in how to scale organizations/innovate with technologies while mitigating associated security/data risks. For example, a large financial services customer is doing just this by moving to DevOps and CI/CD approaches into their data centers to benefit from these practices and start the cultural and organization shifts required for next gen architectures and help keep their talent engaged and empowered. Building a diverse team and fostering a culture of inclusion is rich and yet hard – it requires a high level of maturity to be able to listen and incorporate different ideas and experiences. I can’t claim to have a silver bullet to this challenge but I have learned some things over the years in my journey to create and nurture more diverse teams and more inclusive environments where everybody is afforded the ability to deliver at their true potential. Another powerful change agent is the creation of vocabulary and culture where people can name actions or words that may be creating exclusionary environments and have role models who demonstrate how you call these things out in a non-threatening and open way so that collectively we can address the challenge areas.