In this episode of Innovation and the Digital Enterprise, Patrick Emmons and Shelli Nelson welcome Sean McCormack, Chief Information Officer at First Student.
They discuss his career that spans military intelligence, startups, global enterprises, and now tech-focused leadership in student transportation. Sean shares his unexpected entry into technology through the development of early online language learning systems in the military which later led to diverse experiences across industries.
Today, at First Student, Sean has spearheaded digital transformation initiatives to modernize student transportation. He discusses the complexities of managing a large fleet, the challenges of tech integration, and highlights the use of AI in supporting recruiting and enhancing safety.
Sean unpacks his leadership philosophy, emphasizing the need to understand the day-to-day, improve communication, and build strong, delivery-focused teams. He shares valuable lessons on driving innovation, managing change, and leading with empathy and effectiveness.
- (00:00) Introduction
- (01:46) Sean McCormack’s Career Journey
- (03:49) Impactful Experiences and Lessons Learned
- (05:58) Innovating at Harley Davidson
- (09:26) Transforming First Student with Technology
- (16:11) Implementing AI at First Student
- (22:40) Leadership and Communication Insights
- (28:43) Advice for Future Technologists and Leaders
- (32:45) Conclusion and Final Thoughts
About Our Guest
Sean McCormack is the Chief Information Officer at First Student, the largest provider of student transportation services in North America. Previously, he’s held leadership positions at Grainger, Harley-Davidson and ManpowerGroup. He earned his BA at the University of Texas at Austin, and his Executive MBA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.Subscribe to Your Favorite Podcast
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Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Full Show Transcript
Patrick Emmons: Hello, fellow innovators. This is Patrick Emmons.
Shelli Nelson: And this is Shelli Nelson.
Patrick Emmons: Welcome to the Innovation and the Digital Enterprise Podcast, where we interview successful visionaries and leaders and give you insight into how they drive and support innovation within their organizations. Today, we're joined by someone whose career has spanned startups, global enterprises, and now leadership in one of the most mission-driven industries out there, Sean McCormack, chief innovation officer at First Student.
Sean started his career in military intelligence focusing on the Middle East, where he developed early language learning systems well before edtech was a buzzword. He went on to build six startups from online car sales to developer tools before stepping into major enterprise roles where he made a real name for himself. He's led transformation initiatives at MillerCoors, ManpowerGroup, Harley-Davidson, Grainger, and EQT, and picked up a few trophies along the way. CIO 100, IndustryWeek Best Plant, Microsoft MVP, and Forrester and Edison Innovation Awards, just to name a few. Now, at First Student, Sean is at the helm of a sweeping digital transformation. His team launched Halo, a transportation platform that connects everything from routing to maintenance, and FirstAlt, a digital business that's rethinking mobility for underserved students. He's a technologist and innovator, and you'll hear he's a great storyteller. Sean, I'm really glad to have you on the show today.
Sean McCormack: Yeah, thank you so much. Really, really excited to be here.
Shelli Nelson: Yeah, and Sean, again, welcome to the show. Thought maybe we'd start with a bit of context. So this career arc from military intelligence to innovation leader at First Student, what ties it all together for you?
Sean McCormack: Yeah, it was a very strange series of events. I actually went into the military and planning to stay military my entire career, had nothing to do with technology. As you mentioned, I was military intelligence, I spoke Arabic. My whole focus was that career field, and I ended up having a stint at the Air Force Academy where I was a Arabic language instructor. And while I was there, I had a colonel that I reported to, his name was Crazy Colonel Sutherland, that's what we all affectionately called him. And Crazy Colonel Sutherland at the time, I was in the Department of Foreign Languages, and he had this thought that you could actually teach people languages online. And at the time, that was not a common belief. The view was that you had to have students in the classroom, learning life, and it was actually really expensive for the military because if you think about Special Forces, soldiers, diplomats, foreign service, you name it, they were spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year sending people to schools.
I went to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. I was there for a year and a half. Beautiful assignment, but very expensive to learn a language. So the thought was, is there a way to teach people languages online? And he pulled together a kind of ragtag pool of people, all of us spoke multiple languages. I had several that I spoke and we pulled four different people and just thought it was easier to teach someone the program than it was to teach them a language. So ... all these linguists and then gave us a bunch of books and started figuring out how to teach people languages. And I think we were naive enough and crazy enough that we actually did it. And we built the first online language learning platform, ended up getting highlighted globally across a bunch of conferences. And then from there, ended up consulting with the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, a bunch of universities to commercial content. And that's how I ended up in technology, completely unplanned.
Patrick Emmons: Well, you've worked all over the world, touched on a number of different industries. Obviously, there's some threads there, but how has that global and cross-functional experience shaped your approach and what you're doing right now?
Sean McCormack: I think for me, probably the most impactful job I had was at a e-commerce startup. And I got brought in, it was an entrepreneur that had started up an e-commerce company literally from his garage and using a simple $200 software program that he bought online. And by the time I joined, he was at 20 million and he was hitting a growth curve where he didn't really know how to go beyond that without making some major technology changes. And for me, it was really impactful because it was the first time I got to look at a business as a whole and really figure out how do you take this entire system, everything from shipping and pricing and customer service, merchandising, and build a technology platform that services all that and is integrated? And that was very impactful for me because I had the opportunity to do that, ended up taking them to 40 million within two years.
That really changed my thought process on how technology can help a company and how do you even design systems. Because oftentimes, what you see in enterprises is very siloed capabilities. You'll have business units that go by their own little platforms for their specific needs, but it doesn't actually roll out for the enterprise. And then you often have certain functions that get hit with all these different systems, different purposes. One simple example is when I joined Grainger, we had people in the contact center. We were 2,000 contacts on our agents and they were using 17 different systems at once.
Patrick Emmons: Holy cow.
Sean McCormack: Yeah, just trying to get their job and that's because everybody gave them different systems for different needs. So that e-commerce job really changed my thought process. And I think ever since then, I've always tried to approach a business from understanding the business as a whole, how does the business actually operate, start to finish, what are all the key components, and then try to find a way to have technology help. And sometimes it doesn't help. Sometimes it's not the right answer and being willing to understand that.
Shelli Nelson: Wow. And then, Sean, at Harley-Davidson, you built out an innovation group and you ran a corporate shark tank, launched gaming partnerships. I guess, what did you learn about making innovation real inside of a large enterprise?
Sean McCormack: Yeah, that was a blast. That was one of the funnest jobs I had. It's pretty cool when you have a job that you're given a credit card and told to go party with your customers at Daytona Bike Week.
Patrick Emmons: Are they hiring?
Sean McCormack: Yeah, they're hiring. It was awesome. And I got to wear jeans and a t-shirt every day, and it was a really fun job. That was the first place that I really got to do innovation at scale, and there's a lot of different ways to do it. I had a lot of good learnings and a lot of painful learnings along the way. But we [inaudible 00:06:42] built a dedicated innovation team. So I had innovation managers and we had an innovation pipeline and innovation council, we worked with all the different VCs, we worked with tons of startups, and we basically would identify, we looked at it two ways, what's a business challenge and how do we find a solution for it from a technology perspective? And then likewise, what's a technology and is there a business need for it? So we looked at it from both sides.
And I think one of the biggest learnings that I had in that is you really have to be careful how you approach innovation because people want to be viewed as innovative, and if you come to the table and steal people's ideas or don't give them the right credit, you'll hit a lot of resistance. And that's what happened at the beginning, was we still have innovation function, and you get sales and marketing and manufacturing. Everybody's saying, "Well, hold on, we're innovative too. How come you get to do this and we don't?" And there was actually a lot of, I'd say, competition and not willingness to engage with us.
So because of that, I changed the entire model where we started working with all the business units. We started providing seed funding. And what we would do is we'd say, "Hey, help us identify an issue. We're going to jointly approach this. I'll provide the seed funding to go after your issue, and then if we're successful, then we're going to turn it into a full-blown project that you run and we'll provide the resources. And that way, you get the credit and the benefit that we're providing is the seed funding resources behind it." And that fundamentally changed the entire engagement model. And from that point forward, we had a lot more success. So I think that was one big learning.
Then two is just actually having a formalized process. A lot of times, people do innovation, but they don't really... What does that mean? And something as simple as the definition of innovation, I had a lot of challenges around that. So we said, "This is what innovation means. Here's our areas of focus. Here's the targets we're going after. Here's the metrics, here's the process we're going to follow. Here's the governance structure, here's the funding model, here's the resources that we're going to use." Having that makes a big difference. Whereas I think a lot of times people just pick a side project and go after it. [inaudible 00:08:47] don't understand why they can't get it across the finish line.
Patrick Emmons: Damn. Sean, I got to tell you, just that, I think you hit on probably the most important issue when it comes to innovation and why it doesn't work in most organizations is that greediness of credit, the innovation team gets all the credit, even though all they did was, in many cases, not always, but farmed the ideas from other people. But your recognition and taking action on that I think separates you from a lot of people. And that humility is just, it's inspiring, to be quite frank. It's amazing. So looking at, I'm going to assume you carried that innovation mindset into First Student. And so can you tell us a little bit about Halo and FirstAlt and what makes those platforms unique, how they came about, and just share more about what you're doing with First Student?
Sean McCormack: Sure, yeah. So First Student, I would imagine a lot of people don't know much about First Student. We're the largest provider of student transportation in North America. So you can think essentially yellow buses, even though we do a lot more. We're over 60,000 employees, over 46,000 vehicles. We're the third-largest fleet across any industry, and we do over a billion trips a year. We have about five and a half million passengers that we move every day. So that's more than all the US airlines combined. So very large scale transportation. And one of the things that I came to appreciate pretty quickly is it's a lot more complicated than I thought coming from Grainger where you're dealing with massive supply chain and all kinds of challenges and logistics. I thought this would be simple. And it turns out it's not. Yellow bus routing is one of the more challenging capability, and then you're dealing with all the interpersonal dynamics.
So if I have two kids that don't get along with each other, like if I get on a airplane and I see my neighbor and I don't like them, I can't get the plane to change their route because of that. But in a school setting, if you have interpersonal dynamics, you have to even deal with those issues and angry parents and all kinds of stuff. So it's been a really fun endeavor. But I got brought in to really help transform the company with technology. And the whole focus is how do we build better brand recognition? How do we create value for the company? How do we improve revenue? How do we improve efficiency? How do we reduce costs? Really just looking for opportunities, and it's been a fabulous ride.
And two things that we went after, one is FirstAlt, which you mentioned. FirstAlt is focused on underserved kids, especially special needs transportation. And we had a huge issue where oftentimes, we would have to send a large yellow bus for special needs transportation. And one, it's not super personalized, but two, that actually cause challenges for us because it's taken a CDL driver, which is a hard thing to get and send them on trips where we couldn't leverage the full bus, and that impacted our ability to serve everything else. So we have someone named Gregg Prettyman who the company hired, and he's really a specialist in the space, and I worked with him and our respective teams to build out FirstAlt, which is a digitally-based platform that allows us to manage the entire transportation process through a core platform. We have a driver app, we have an operational dashboard, we have an app for the districts, we have an app for parents where they can see where their kids are, and we manage all that.
And that allows you to do fairly sophisticated things because I may have two kids and one of them needs a booster and another one needs a wheelchair lift. So we have to track all the different vehicles, all the different configurations, the different kids' needs, and then make sure we provide them the best possible experience. So that's gone extremely well. We went from concept to market launch in nine months and basically built a startup within a large enterprise and the company, or not the company, but that function has grown like crazy and we've exceeded our targets every year, continue to just really have good success and expand across the US. So that was the first one. And then Halo, kind of going back to my e-commerce experience, First Student was already a leader in technology. They had already done a lot of really good innovation, but the challenge is it was a fairly disjointed experience, especially internally.
We had all these different systems that were built for a single purpose, and it was really challenging for locations and bus drivers and dispatchers to operate across all that. And the other challenge we had was being able to effectively explain our technology capabilities to the market because we had so many different products, we'd sit down with a customer and there was 10 different products that we're trying to explain to them all doing different things. So it was just confusing. And because of that, we built the Halo platform where we re-engineered the entire core capability and we solidified to a core set of products, a single technology stack, a shared database backend with analytics and all the things that you would need, integration with all the enterprise functions, a single look and feel, and then branded it Halo so that now we can talk about the capabilities and not the technology, and it becomes a much easier story for the customer to understand what we can do. And then we have this fully-integrated architecture that we can add ... like AI cameras and do a lot of other cool stuff.
So it's given us just a really good platform that's industry-leading, and like you mentioned, between FirstAlt and Halo, we've been fortunate to win a lot of awards. You don't normally see a yellow bus company win in Forrester or T-Mobile Awards or Fast Company for innovation. It's been a fun ride.
Shelli Nelson: That's incredible, Sean. And as you just mentioned, Halo won awards from Forrester, Fast Company. I guess what was the biggest challenge you faced in building it and how did you overcome it?
Sean McCormack: I think the biggest challenge was helping the different business units understand why this was better for the enterprise. Because oftentimes, people get very focused on their capability and their need, and a lot of times, technology change isn't about the technology, it's about the people. You have people that are very proud of the work that they've done, proud of the capabilities that they've built. And if you come in and say, "Hey, I'm changing it." To a certain extent, the feeling is, "Okay, well, what's wrong? What did I do wrong? This is all my work. And what happens to me as you start to change things?" So I think one was really just partner with the business units to understand why this was a good thing, why this was going to help them, the benefits that they'll get from it.
Two is just the technical challenges themselves. I mean, you're redoing all of the plumbing on a very large live system and how even simple things like how do you start to deploy the different components? How do you turn them on? And we have 40,000 drivers, how do you train all those drivers on the new functionality? So I think those really, the change management across everything was probably the biggest challenge. And just this, in two years, we built a massive enterprise platform and we removed over 20 different systems, consolidated everything, integrated, brand new UI, brand new functionality, switched from more of a waterfall approach to more of an agile approach. So across the board, just a lot of change for the company.
Patrick Emmons: Sean, this is a podcast on Innovation and the Digital Enterprise. So we've been going for about 20 minutes here and I haven't brought up AI, so either I bring it up or I'm going to get scolded. So from what I understand in our previous conversation, you've got AI running across First Student, is that correct?
Sean McCormack: Yeah, that's correct.
Patrick Emmons: Like safety cameras and some recruiting chatbots, things to that level?
Sean McCormack: Yeah, we have AI in production in several different areas. You mentioned AI cameras. We have those deployed to about 2,000 vehicles right now, completing a pilot on that. And we've seen massive success, but we've had a accident frequency rate go down by almost 30%.
Patrick Emmons: Holy cow. So what does that mean, accident frequency rate? What does that mean to parents?
Sean McCormack: Yes. Collisions, bumping into people, objects, things like that. And the cameras that we're employing do road facing. So they're able to detect objects and notify a driver, hey, you're following too close or someone's starting to walk across the street. It's able to detect if someone's going through yellow lights, if they're speeding too much. So really good intelligence to help coach the driver and not help them understand or distract... The intent is it looks at the driver and it looks at things like distracted behavior and then just helps coach them to be safer drivers. Here are things you can do. Don't follow so close. You didn't even realize it, but you're glancing at your phone or you were paying attention to ... on the streets and how do you just continue to drive safer. So that's been really powerful.
We deployed a bot called Olivia, and that's helping us in our recruiting process. We have over 13,000 people that we've interviewed using that, and it basically does a first pass, allowing us to very quickly talk to candidates about them. It automates all the scheduling for us, so we don't have recruiters trying to deal with all the scheduling anymore. And that allows us to very quickly get someone to the second stage where they can talk to a lab recruiter. And the benefit for us is it's really helped us accelerate our hiring pipeline and get people through the process faster, get higher quality candidates. We've got AI that we're using for more complicated things like contract data extraction. We have really complex contracts. All of them are fairly customized and unique, and it's been a really big challenge trying to find a way to actually get the data out of it.
For me, it's actually been a good litmus test for AI because we spent a year across multiple AI companies trying to find a way to get it to work and couldn't. And then we finally found a partner that has a very successful capability and we're extracting 150 attributes out of each contract now, and that gives us good insights. We've got things like Copilot deployed across the company. We have AI chatbots internally for our service desk, for our employee portal, for HR systems. So we have a lot of things that we're in production with, and then we actually have an AI pipeline where we have several different POCs and pilots that we're going after.
Patrick Emmons: Well, it sounds like you've gotten a few things accomplished. Took a couple check boxes there, nice work. So I wanted to ask you about agile, but I also think how do you get that much done, right? Because I think that's really what I think would be really helpful to understand because you're touching on a lot of different areas, you're getting a lot of things accomplished. I know you're not running around doing it all anymore, much to your own dismay.
Sean McCormack: No. I think it's a couple things. I think one, getting really clear on business needs because if you understand what the problem is, it's much easier to get people focused on the solution and really clear on what is the problem, how are we going to solve it? I think two is having very clear governance structures because when you're going after these things, there's a lot of players involved. You've got procurement and legal and HR and commercial and finance, all these different groups. So how do you set up a governance structure that builds good communication and helps facilitate speed versus facilitate friction. And have made mistakes throughout my career where I didn't do that. And the problem is we don't really have a good governance structure and good relationships in place. You run into tons of roadblocks. So really just trying to have a frictionless environment as much as possible to allow things to move fast.
Next is having a team. I have a fabulous team. I have people that I've worked with throughout my career that I've brought in. I have new people that I've hired, but we really try to focus on people that want to get things done. And one of my key leadership principles is delivery over activity. I see oftentimes, teams will focus on activity. I send an email, I had a meeting, we had discussion. I can have a team that does 100% activity and delivers nothing, and our focus is on delivery. Did you get the contract signed? Did you get the code deployed? Did you fix the issue? Did you close the ticket? So a big focus just across the entire team on delivery. And then I think just prioritization and having a process like agile that facilitates rapid pivots as business needs change as you come up with this use, having a day-to-day process that really allows you to move quickly.
Patrick Emmons: Wow, I love that. It sounds like anti-busy idiot of like, yeah, I'm super busy. Is it productive? Don't worry about that. Look at how much I'm getting done.
Sean McCormack: And you see it all the time and it's not malicious, it's just people get caught up in the day-to-day. And one of the things that drives me nuts is you'll have an open issue and you're like, "Well, where are we with the issue? Have we closed it?" "Well, I sent an email. Well, I left a voicemail." And it's like, "No, get everybody in a room tomorrow, have a meeting, and fix the issue, come up with a decision." And you can do that, you move so much faster. But oftentimes, it's easier when you're busy, it's easier just to send an email or it's easier to set up a meeting two weeks from now or it's easier to punt it to somebody else and kind of play hot potato.
Patrick Emmons: I'll tell you this, Sean, do not get in charge of a sales team. Don't do it. You won't like it. If you want to see people who are just activity-focused, they're like, "I sent them an email." Awesome. That's great news. What are we doing next?
Shelli Nelson: And Sean, you've kind of touched on this a little bit, but when you say CIOs need to speak business, not tech, what specifically, I guess, do you mean by that and how do you make sure your team is aligned in that way?
Sean McCormack: Yeah, I was really lucky when I was at ManpowerGroup, I worked for a lady named Amy Bernstein and she was the outside of IT and she was head of strategy and had a marketing... And I reported to her for a while and she was a amazing communicator. She actually ended up becoming the chief editor for the Harvard Business Review later on in her career. And I remember early on when I started working for her, she was like, "You got to completely change your communication approach. You're talking tech and you're putting everybody to sleep and nobody understands what you're talking about." And she really helped coach me on how do I lead with what does the business need? Nobody cares about bits and bytes and servers and CPUs and code deployments and hotfixes. None of that matters if you're in charge of the commercial team or the finance team or sales or marketing.
You have a business need and I need to be able to speak in your terms on how the technology that I'm providing addresses those business needs. It's your KPIs, it's your process, it's your outcomes. So she did just a fabulous job coaching me on that. And if you look at my presentation style, I present like a marketer or a sales person. I don't present like an IT person. And very rarely we actually see much technology in my presentations that's really focused on the business. Something that's for a lot of CIOs who probably haven't had that coaching like I was able to just don't realize that it's a big gap. And if they can address that, it makes a world of difference.
Patrick Emmons: I also think, Sean, you demonstrate that you're somebody who soaks up and you're self-aware. I think from all leaders, that's a critical first step of like, okay, so what are other people doing? There's a certain level of, I said it before, humility that's required that you're going to acknowledge the blank stares in a meeting when there's a lot of people in tech that they'll just keep going. Where it's like you should have seen that they've checked out about 20 minutes ago. And so I do think that self-awareness is something that's critical for leaders. One of the thoughts that I think when I talked to you always is that concept that the Seals have of there's no bad boats, just bad leaders. And so I do think there's a... I'm a big Jocko Willink guy too. I listen to his stuff all the time. It's a good reminder of it's not about you, jerk. And so I need that a lot. I need that constantly to remind myself, it's not about you, jerk. So that's good that he's there for us.
Sean McCormack: I love Simon Sinek. I don't know if you spent much time with him. He's amazing. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is when they switch to leadership, they don't understand their context changes. Normally, you got promoted because you were a functional expert. And people have a hard time switching from that functional expertise to the fact that now, my entire focus really needs to be on communication and people and change management and business outcomes. And that's a hard switch. And if you look at where I spend my personal time reading and watching stuff, it's books by Simon Sinek, it's books on body language. How do I just read someone and understand. It's books on negotiation, how do I effectively approach negotiation? Thanks on change management presentation, I'm always trying to improve how I present stuff. How do you condense it more? How do you do better visuals? So to me, those are the type of things that the more you shift into leadership, the more you have to focus on because that's what matters.
Patrick Emmons: And generally, those things make for a better life, right? Better relationships with other people, not just at work, but also with your family, with your neighbors. It's a different skillset that really, I think, enhances your ability to experience life in a more full way of like, hey, just even the communication styles you talked about. One of the first lessons we teach at my organization when you want to be a leader is active listening, where it's like the amount of times I've said that and people push back and they're like, I thought we're going to learn about leadership. And I said, "Tell me the attribute of your favorite boss. Well, you listened to me, so that might be important. That might be where we start." As opposed to the patent-esque yelling, screaming. Nobody liked that guy. He was effective, but it's not like anybody wanted go have beers with him afterwards.
Sean McCormack: I had one very important learning when I was at ManpowerGroup. I worked for two different people, two completely different leadership styles. Both of them were effective, both of them got things done, but one was a tyrant and one was a really good leader. And what I came to realize is ultimately, what matters is how you make your people feel because you can be effective by the way. I can yell at people and get things done, or I can try to care about them and still get things done. So really, how do I want people to go home on a day-to-day basis? Do I want them to feel like they work for a company that cares about them, they work for leader that cares about them, they work for a company that has a positive culture? Or do they want to go home, complain to their spouse and their kids and work in a toxic culture? Either way, you can get things done. But in the end, I think as a leader, you have to figure out how you want to impact people.
Patrick Emmons: I totally agree. My contention on that is with the more of the abusive, pushy, kind of hardcore tyrannical, I think you have a shorter timeframe.
Sean McCormack: Oh, yeah.
Patrick Emmons: Yeah, you're going to burn people out, they're going to quit on you. And so it's like, do you want to keep them for longer? The other concept that somebody taught me a while ago was if you make people smaller, you'll be surrounded by very small people. And if you make people feel like giants, you're going to be surrounded by giants.
Sean McCormack: Yeah, I love that.
Patrick Emmons: So I know that's a great bit of advice, but I also thought from you've built innovation into industries that aren't always known for it. I never noticed First Student buses until we met and now, I see them everywhere. So that awareness is pretty interesting of literally, last time we talked, I was driving 95th Street in Chicago, turn the corner, and there's a bus coming out of the junior high, First Student. So what advice would you give to our listeners and other technology leaders trying to drive meaningful change into these sometimes not technology, and even in technology environments? What are the things... I think we've touched on a bunch of stuff already, but what's that one thing? If you're going to talk to a leader today, somebody who's just about to start their job, what's the one thing you're going to hit them with?
Sean McCormack: I'd say the one thing would be go see. Literally go see the business. Learned this at Harley, we used to do something called walk a mile and you had to go work at a dealership. They came from Toyota lean manufacturing, so they had the whole concept. They just had to literally go see what was going on. And at First Student, the first thing I did when I joined, I went through location manager onboarding. One of the most critical roles for us as location manager, they're the ones that are running all the day-to-day operations. So I went through their onboard process and just like any other location manager joining the company to see what's that experience like, what tools are they giving them, what are their expectations? I went to multiple locations and just sat down and talked to people and looked at how things operated. You're going to catch so much more doing that versus sitting in corporate headquarters on Zoom meetings, talking to people. You'll just never get the same realizations.
And so I think out of anything you could do, it's just go see the business, go see the business where it actually happens, go to the plant, go to the distribution center, go to the store, talk to the people, and very quickly, you'll identify the business problems and then they'll tell you or you'll see it, and then all you have to do is find a way to fix it.
Patrick Emmons: That's awesome.
Shelli Nelson: And Sean, I just want to give a shout-out to your daughter. I know she just graduated with a CS degree. So curious what it's been like watching the next generation of technologists grow up?
Sean McCormack: It's actually been fascinating. My wife's an attorney. She originally went to school thinking that she wanted to be an attorney. And her entire life growing up, I tried to get her into coding and she's had zero interest, goes to school, takes her first CS class, falls in love with it, and decides she wants to become a software developer. So she ends up switching her degree. She graduated from University of Tennessee, Knoxville with a degree in computer science. I'm so proud of her, especially for someone that really didn't come from a STEM background to be able to push through that. She graduated with honors, so phenomenal job. What's been fascinating though is watching her progression, and at the same time, the progression of the industry. And four years ago, my advice to her was, "Get a computer science degree, become a software developer." Four years later, when she's graduating, I'm like, "Don't go into software development."
Because I think AI is going to change that industry so much. And my recommendation was get into more people facing roles that are still in the technology space because I think that's where the value is going to be moving forward. So now, she's in a business analyst role at a FinTech company and just starting her career, but it's going to be really cool to watch. And I'll tell you one thing I've been amazed with is her generation. I think there's a perception a lot of times in corporate circles that the younger generation just doesn't have the same work ethic. I've never seen that. If I look at her and all her friends, what I see are people that are extremely creative, they operate differently, they care a lot more about work-life balance than, I think, other generations. But they're so creative, they're so innovative, and they just want to make an impact. It's been cool to watch.
Shelli Nelson: That's awesome.
Patrick Emmons: That's awesome. Well, Sean, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your experience, your wisdom, your perspective. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I always get three or four really great nuggets. I wrote quite a few of them down, so I'm going to take credit for them until this gets published. I will not footnote you appropriately until I'm required to. But sincerely though, thank you so much for joining us today.
Sean McCormack: Yeah, it's great catching up. Thank you so much for having me.
Patrick Emmons: We also want to thank our listeners. We appreciate everyone joining us.
Shelli Nelson: And if you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, you can subscribe by visiting our website at dragonspears.com/podcast or find us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Patrick Emmons: This episode was sponsored by DragonSpears and produced by Dante32.
