This week my guest is Professor Stephen Hicks, a Canadian-American philosopher.

I have invited Professor Hicks on the show to walk me through important cultural themes that are happening today and why they matter for you and your business. Aside from that, with my daughter going off to university/college next year, I wanted to understand what is being bred in the Universities on a cultural level.

During the interview, Professor Hicks and I take a deep dive into history to trace the rise of post-modernism, and discuss the issue of offense as a weapon in the current social environment. We also talk about business ethics, hiring young talent and structuring your group dynamics as a leader in order to maximize individual thinking in current environment.

I hope you will find this interview fascinating and educational as much as I did. With that, enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with Professor Stephen Hicks!

Major Take-Aways From This Episode:

1. Learn about the University shift from tradition of classical liberal education with focus on individual and his uniqueness to a post-modern outlook with focus on groups that are fundamental to a person’s identity than their individuality.
2. If you are an entrepreneur/ business leader who has scaled up your business, you are also the chief culture officer and are able to work with people of all different personality types.
3. Walk through the major epochs and find out what brought us to a post-modern era.
4. When you are hiring young people out of college that have dramatically different backgrounds, how do you socially manage them working closely with each other?
5. Post-modernism views involve philosophical argumentation that individuals are either secondary, or ultimately not real.
6. As a leader, how do you structure your group dynamics to maximize the individual thinking?
7. Why Professor Hicks’ take on ethics in business is a “minority position”?
8. What is equality of outcomes perspective and why is that an issue?
9. What are the ways to embrace the new generation that is constantly being offended coming into the workforce and integrate them into society?
10. Why should you should expect to be offended on a regular basis and develop a thick skin?
11. Why you should be aware that the broader culture is everything?

About Professor Stephen Hicks

Stephen R. C. Hicks is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA, where he also directs the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He has published four books and his writings have been translated into fourteen languages: Portuguese, Spanish, German, Korean, Persian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Swedish, Hindi, Russian, Ukrainian, Cantonese, French, and Arabic.

He has published in academic journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Teaching Philosophy, and Review of Metaphysics, as well as other publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Cato Unbound, and The Baltimore Sun.

In 2010, he won his university’s Excellence in Teaching Award. He has been Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., a Visiting Fellow at the Social Philosophy & Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, Senior Fellow at The Objectivist Center in New York, and in 2018 he will be Visiting Professor at the University of Kasimir the Great, Poland.

He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Guelph, Canada, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington.

Read full transcript here.

How to get in touch with Professor Stephen Hicks

• LinkedIn
• Website Contact Form

Key Resources:

• More information about Dr. Hicks’s courses, publications, and blog can be found at his website: www.StephenHicks.org.
• Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship Profile

Books:

• • Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004; Expanded Edition, 2011).
  • Nietzsche and the Nazis (Ockham’s Razor, 2010).
  • The Art of Reasoning: Readings for Logical Analysis (co-edited with David Kelley, W. W. Norton & Co., 1994, second edition 1998).

Credits:
* Outro music provided by Ben’s Sound

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This week my guest is Sunny Gupta, CEO of Apptio. I looked into Apptio software used by a previous podcast guest Bob Fecteau, CIO of SAIC. I had to check it out because I got to see what Bob was dealing with and why Apptio added such a tremendous value for his business.

During our interview, Sunny shares the story of Apptio's genesis and I think every CIO can learn from it. It is fascinating how Sunny was able to take a problem of one CIO and reconstitute it into a solution set that ultimately addresses all today's CIOs and their challenges.

I thought, many of you are constantly solving problems for other departments within your business, but what about yourselves? How are you, the CIO, solving your own enterprise resource planning?

You will find this interview useful if you want to learn how to build transparency, trust and confidence and have a seat at the table. Sunny and I also talk about defense and offense, comprehensive IT, vendor, cloud spending. I believe that this type of approach to bringing IT together would only work today. Many of you, CIOs, are at that point where you are looking to up level your skills as leaders, as Sunny put it, CIOs are technologists wanting to be business people without going to business school.

Listen to this interview to get practical advice on how to gain visibility into your IT cost management and find out how Apptio is collaborating with IT leaders today to achieve that.

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Major Take-Aways From This Episode:

1. Story of Apptio
   • System of Record for IT that came out of the need to manage business, analytics and decision-making for CIOs.
   • Listening to the customers and morphing, changing execution plan based on hearing from CIOs, gave Apptio its start and growth.
   • Apptio as an “ERP for CIO” helps IT Leaders become more business-oriented.
2. Technology Business Management System as a Market
   • Apptio’s standardization function is explained.
   • Apptio as a framework of language and transparency.
   • Technology Business Management Council is a non-profit organization created by Apptio and dedicated to industry standards and an operating model for CIOs.
   • What role does Apptio play with the speed of change? How Apptio helps CIOs innovate and dive into transformation projects?
3. How is Apptio helping CIOs win with their business? Practical advice for CIOs on how to get started.
   • Apptio solution helps to get granular transparency into CIO services and products spending and uses it to create an offense dialogue with the business.
   • Automating your existing budget, planning, financial management discipline.
   • Categorizing the vendor's spending fine optimizations.
   • Getting control of your Cloud spending.

Read full transcript here.

How to get in touch with Sunny Gupta

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Key Resources:

• Apptio Website
• Apptio's Cost Transparency web page
• Technology Business Management Council website

This episode is sponsored by the CIO Scoreboard, a powerful tool that helps you communicate the status of your IT Security program visually in just a few minutes.

Credits:
* Outro music provided by Ben’s Sound

Other Ways To Listen to the Podcast
iTunes | Libsyn | Soundcloud | RSS | LinkedIn

Leave a Review
If you enjoyed this episode, then please consider leaving an iTunes review here

Click here for instructions on how to leave an iTunes review if you’re doing this for the first time.

About Bill Murphy
Bill Murphy is a world renowned Innovation and Transformation (Offense and Defense) Expert dedicated to your success as an IT business leader. Follow Bill on LinkedIn and Twitter.