“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower

The powerful words of one of America’s great leaders underpins the most difficult role of the CIO. Acquiring buy-in from key stakeholders is a challenge all leaders face. The ability to translate the transformative ideas we have dreamed up, into realizable opportunities, is what is progressing innovation forward.

Join Innovate@UCLA for an engaging thought leadership session featuring Lucy Avetisyan, Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer of UCLA, Michael Bacharach, Associate Vice President of Technology Solutions at Contact Centers at Humana, and Kevin Gray, Chief Information Officer of the City of Burbank.

The panel will explore ways CIO’s can attain buy-in for their projects and initiatives, by examining use cases such as City of Burbank’s SAFe transformation project, Fox’s cloud transformation program, and more.

Our moderator and panelists are:

Moderated by:

Kevin Gray

CIO, City of Burbank

Lucy Avetisyan

Associate Vice Chancellor & CIO, UCLA

Michael Bacharach

Associate VP Technology Solutions, Humana

Heather Caruso will engage you in a conversation on the future of leadership.  What changes are coming?  Will organizational designs be different/ more matrixed in the future?  What communication skills are needed to bridge different cultures or roles? How can leaders foster effective collaboration, especially for cross-functional and multicultural teams? What does it take to ensure that you provide your team with the right opportunities to grow, inspire and work together?

Biography

Heather Caruso joined UCLA Anderson in 2018 as assistant dean for equity, diversity and inclusion. A scholar and researcher of organizational behavior, she teaches in the Management and Organizations and Behavioral Decision Making areas.

Caruso’s passion for facilitating collaborative success runs deep in her life and work. “My formal interests in organizational and social psychology developed when I was an undergraduate at Stanford doing cross-cultural negotiation research with Jared Curhan and Lee Ross,” she says. These interests deepened during her years as an engineer and executive in a multinational Silicon Valley startup. “I was fascinated with the real-world experiences stemming from differences in cultural identity. Interpersonal problems could derail even the most talented individual performers, and effective collaboration skills could not only prevent such problems, but raise individual contributions to new heights.”

Layering rigorous academic training on top of practical experience, Caruso grounds her interests in the areas of: effective collaboration (especially for cross-functional and multicultural teams); skilled improvisation in leadership; management of identity, power and influence; and strategies for optimal choice, judgment and decision making. She focused on these topics in over a decade of teaching, research administration and scholarship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and has moved to UCLA Anderson to enrich and expand her work.

“Propelled by our outstanding research in these areas, we are connecting to pioneers and pathbreakers, building bridges between research and practice to best accelerate innovation in the digital age.”

Caruso stays connected to the everyday priorities and challenges of the workplace by consulting for private- and public-sector organization leaders across the globe, as well as by teaching classes in leadership, team dynamics and power and influence. In addition, Caruso partnered with Chicago’s Second City to co-found the Second Science Project, which offers skill-building leadership workshops at the intersection of robust behavioral research and professional improvisational practice.

Caruso is a strong proponent of lifelong learning for management excellence, and encourages students to make the most of their professors’ knowledge, not only while they are pursuing their degrees, but also throughout their careers. “As a preeminent public university, UCLA has a a distinctive opportunity to advance equity, diversity and inclusion,” she says. “It is an honor to help UCLA Anderson seize that opportunity by creating the kind of challenging and rewarding educational climate that can benefit leaders from every walk of life.”

In a hyper-accelerated digital transformation era across all industries, technology professionals can no longer operate in a silo and focus on solving the opportunities/ problems that have been handed over to them by their business partners. Technology being a key enabler of transformations today, they have to scale up on critical business skills to be an effective partner to functional leaders across the organization. This session will address following questions:

1. What are those critical business skills tech professionals will have to scale up on? 
2. At which level(s) within the organization these business skills are needed? 
3. What are the next steps and challenges do we foresee in getting our workforce trained in these business skills?

Our speaker is: