Detailed Program:
Keynote: Prof. Robert Sutton, GSB, Stanford Univ.
– “The No-A**hole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace”
Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering and a Professor of Organizational Behavior (by courtesy) at Stanford. Sutton has been teaching classes on the psychology of business and management at Stanford since 1983. He is co-founder of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization, which he co-directed from 1996 to 2006. He is also co-founder of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (which everyone calls “the d school”).
Prof. Sutton studies innovation, leadership, the links between managerial knowledge and organization action, scaling excellence, and workplace dynamics. He has published over 100 articles and chapters on these topics in peer-reviewed journals and the popular press. Sutton’s books include
Weird Ideas That Work: 11 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation,
The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Firms Turn Knowledge into Action (with Jeffrey Pfeffer), and
Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (with Jeffrey Pfeffer),
The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, and
Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best and Survive the Worst
(the last two on both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.) His latest book, Scaling-Up Excellence: Getting to More without Settling for Less (with Huggy Rao), was published in 2014. It is a Wall Street Journal and Publisher’s Weekly bestseller and was selected as one of the best business books of the year by Amazon, the Financial Times, INC., The Globe and Mail, and Library Journal.

Rafael Betancourt, Synaptics, “Updating the Model”
Rafael Betancourt is currently Director, Analog Mixed-signal System and Verification at the System Silicon Division of Synaptics, Inc. where he is responsible for a global team that performs AMS verification of complex capacitive touch controllers, as well as integrated touch & LCD Display Controller ICs (TDDI). He also served as technical lead for various TDDI controller chips.
A people-oriented IC Design Manager/Architect with over 25 years of digital/analog CMOS IC Design experience, Rafael has completed over 30 tapeouts, and has been directly responsible for the design and release to production of over a billion units. Experienced in complete product lifecycle, from initial conception through design, verification, fabrication & testing, Rafael is driven by project success and the success of the team. Before Synaptics, Rafael has worked for Hughes Aircraft, Intel, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and has consulted extensively for industry in Silicon Valley.

“Your New Acquisition: Proper Care and Feeding”
– Jessica Verrilli, Google Ventures (prev. Twitter)
I am a builder, investor, and partner to entrepreneurs. I spent 8.5 years at Twitter helping grow the company from a small start-up of 34 people to a global platform and profitable business. As VP of Corporate Development & Strategy I spent the vast majority of that time working with entrepreneurs and through 30 acquisitions brought new products, technology, and businesses into the company.
I am a founding partner of #ANGELS, an angel investing collective, that aims to get more women on the cap tables of successful start-ups. We run an #ANGELS Access program to promote and support women in the industry. I am on the board of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy (GGNPC) and delighted to support their mission: Parks. For All. Forever. I’m a Stanford University graduate and live in San Francisco, although the Pacific Northwest will always feel like home.

“A Bridge Too Far? Managing Technology Overreach”
– Orin Laney, Atwood Research
Orin Laney is an independent consultant, researcher, author, speaker, and designer. He is a Senior member of the IEEE and has a California PE registration in Electrical Engineering as well as being a Certified Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineer. Orin received his MSEE from San Jose State University and an MBA in marketing and finance from Brigham Young University.
The talk will start by examining Boeing’s unfortunate experience with the schedule-and-budget-busting development of the 787, then move on to a personal case history. Some cogent advice will be drawn from these examples, including the need to insert certain unusual but critical steps to implement large leaps in technology, the correct use of experts, and some observations regarding betting the farm on reference designs and white papers.

“Recognizing and Addressing Software Disruption Trends on IT”
– Dr. Paul Trompeter, Managing Principal, Paul Trompeter LLC
Dr. Paul Trompeter has a broad range of experience in the computer industry at a variety of companies including Litton, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard (Tandem Computers), Network Appliance, SDT, WellPoint, Technicolor, GDI InfoTech, Paul Trompeter LLC, and Cognizant Technology Solutions. Prior to moving into the SQA/testing arena, he held positions as a development programmer and manager, a project manager, and a program manager. For the last twenty years, however, Paul has been directing enterprise-wide and global SQA and test efforts spanning many industries including life sciences eComm, retail, compliance, DevOps, entertainment,security, banking & financial, and healthcare. Paul holds doctoral degrees in math and organizational change. A frequent conference speaker, Paul has published numerous journal articles and has participated in pre-publication reviews for several books. Paul has also successfully conducted business in many counties across the globe including those in Asia, South America, North America, Australia, Africa, and Europe.
Paul will discuss why disruption exists, where it’s coming from, which organizations are affected, recognizing disruption’s analytics, speed and agility, and the business of technology.

“Wrike: speed and efficiency for co-located and distributed groups”
– Roberto Wantland, Sr. Strategic Customer Success Manager, Wrike
After graduating from San Francisco State University, Roberto began his professional career at Fisher Investments, then a few years at companies like RICOH and DemandForce. His mentors helped him find his own voice and lay the foundations for the principals that carry him through the business world to this day. Roberto discovered that helping clients understand and benefit gave him joy. He shifted focus to Customer Success and held successful roles at growing companies such as Square, ClearSlide, Showpad, and Houlihan Lokey. Today, at Wrike, his focus is on managing their largest, most notable clients and driving life-long business relationships.
Wrike is a work management and collaboration platform used by high-performance teams everywhere. Wrike makes day-to-day work easier, more transparent and efficient for thousands of companies. It has been translated into ten languages and is sold in 120 countries.

“Facebook Workplace: connecting and transforming your workplace”
– TBD, Facebook

“Zoho Projects: making business projects more productive & on time”
– Raj Sabhlok, President, Zoho Corp.
Raj Sabhlok is the president of Zoho Corp. Zoho, a division of Zoho Corp, is the operating system for business — a single platform with all the applications needed to run a business entirely from the cloud. More than 30 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho every day to run their businesses. Each business can choose to run the entire Zoho suite or just a single application. Raj is also active in the management of Zoho’s ManageEngine division. The ManageEngine division offers a broad portfolio of IT management software including network management, application management, security, desktop and mobile device management, and IT help desk.

“Microsoft Teams: Enterprise-class Communications”
– TBD, Microsoft

“It’s Not About Gender: Hierarchies are Dysfunctional by Design”
– Kimberly Wiefling, Wiefling Consulting
I’ve always had strong objections to hierarchical organizations. Hierarchies concentrate power in the hands of a few individuals, and power corrupts. In the business world Bob Sutton’s famous “asshole research” has indisputably shown that people with power change in 5 specific (and unflattering) ways. As a woman working in technical and engineering fields much of my career, I have had my share of negative experiences that seem to be a result of my gender. But, as a result of my experience with hierarchies and power, I strongly believe that equal representation in leadership positions will merely create equal opportunity harassment. While a provocative statement, I am prepared to back this up with research as well as my own decades of experience.
Kimberly Wiefling, president of Wiefling Consulting, enables teams to achieve what seems impossible, but is merely difficult. She regularly facilitates workshops on creativity, innovation, leadership, team effectiveness, and execution excellence globally. Kimberly has worked with people from over 50 different countries, in companies ranging from startups to the Global 1000. A physicist by education, she began her career with 10 years at HP in product development program management and engineering leadership. She then spent 3 years growing Silicon Valley startups, including a Xerox PARC spinoff where she was the VP of Program Management and Organizational Effectiveness.

“Customer and Market Insight as Fuel for Innovation and Disruption”
– Ellen Grace Henson, Marketing Mechanics
As technologists we often focus on developing and refining product features and functions. While technology is core to the value we offer customers, is it enough to drive innovation and market disruption? Bringing diverse perspectives towards expanding our view on the customer, understanding the full customer lifecycle, and taking a deeper or broader view of market dynamics can lead to high-value innovations and, sometimes, huge disruption of market status quo. This session will look at how integrating various perspectives on markets, customers and value has both driven established companies to innovate and re-invent themselves and positioned start-ups to disrupt mature markets, while the failure to integrate diverse perspectives has slowed down or even stopped product success.
Managing Director and Founder of Marketing Mechanics, Ellen Grace has been working in high-tech business strategy and product management since the mid-’90s and consulting for 15 years. A thought leader with experience across multiple markets and technologies, Ellen Grace brings a unique combination of analysis and creativity to business and product strategy, market and customer insight, product-delivery process design, and aligning cross-functional teams to deliver high levels of customer satisfaction and strong business results. She has contributed to the strategy, design and delivery of successful products for start-ups as well as Fortune 500 companies. A respected guest lecturer in the MBA program at Santa Clara University (SCU), Ellen Grace helped define and deliver the inaugural product management certification program, “Productizing Innovation”, for the Executive Development Center at SCU. Ellen is a graduate of MIT and President of Women In Consulting, a professional association centered in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“A New Model of Human Values for Motivating Innovation”
– Oliver Yu, Ph.D., CEO, STARS Group
Founder & CEO of the STARS Group, a premier technology and resource strategy consulting firm spun off from SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) in year 2000, is an internationally recognized expert on technology strategy and innovation management. He is also a Consulting Associate Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, and an Executive in Residence at the College of Business of San Jose State University. In 2017, he co-founded and serves as the Board Chairman of Global Alliance for Innovators and Entrepreneurs, which was awarded a US$5 million contract to develop and operate an international innovation center in China.
Dr. Yu holds a BSEE from National Taiwan University, an MSEE from Georgia Institute of Technology, and an MS in statistics and a PhD in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University. He is an AdCom member of the IEEE TEMS and chair of its Innovation & Entrepreneurship Committee, a Fellow of Portland International Center of Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), and a Co-Founder and Secretary of the International Society of Innovation Methods. He has published over 70 technical papers and authored and co-authored 7 books on technology strategy planning. He is currently writing a book on Innovation Management for the 21st Century to be published by Springer in early 2019.

“Just-in-Time 1-Day Training in Needed Skills”
— Sue Smith, Effective Training Associates
After several years teaching in the public school system, Sue Smith shifted her focus to adult education. Living in the heart of technical innovation in Silicon Valley, she recognized that there was a significant need for improving “people skills among technical professionals, engineers and managers.” Slowly and methodically she built a network of highly skilled trainers and high tech clients that has now grown into a leading global training company. Effective Training provides courses in several languages and Smith travels internationally to ensure the quality of their instructors and courses. Diversity Business has named Effective Training one of the Top Woman-Owned Businesses in California.

“Lifelong Technical Learning: Advanced Degrees”
— Dr. Alexandar Zecevic, Assoc. Dean, Santa Clara University
Dr. Aleksandar Zecevic is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Santa Clara University, and the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies. His technical research interests include graph theoretic decomposition algorithms, electric power systems, Boolean networks and the control of complex dynamic systems. He has published more than 40 papers in the leading journals in these fields, and some of his most important results are summarized in his book: Control of Complex Systems: Structural Constraints and Uncertainty (2010).

“Technical Training, Certificates for Working Engineers, Managers”
— Benjamin Ting, Program Chair, UC-Santa Cruz Extension

Breakout Session (3:00 PM)
“Experiencing the Impact of Hierarchy: 4 People, 3 Levels, 10 Minutes,” with Kimberly Wiefling
While many people are interested in “self-organizing systems”, you might be thinking “Hey, practically speaking we just can’t have a body without a head. We need executives to set the direction and managers to manage the work!” Yah, I thought that, too. This makes sense in theory, but an exercise that I’ve done hundreds of times over the past 10 years demonstrates quite the opposite. One beautifully simple experiment simulates the chain-of-command communication common in hierarchies. The exercise is done silently, using only Post-its for written communication to simulate working in virtual teams, a common occurrence these days, or even the primarily email-driven work environments typical in many organizations. Talking about exercise won’t make you strong! Come to this “learning lab” and feel the impact of hierarchy.