Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. This season of Smart Talks with IBM is all about new creators, the developers, data scientists, CTOs, and other visionaries creatively applying technology in business to drive change. They use their knowledge and creativity to develop better ways of working, no matter
the industry. Join hosts from your favorite Pushkin Industries podcasts as they use their expertise to deepen these conversations, and of course, Malcolm Gladwell will guide you through the season as your host and provide his thoughts and analysis along the way. Look out for new episodes of Smart Talks with IBM on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and learn more at IBM dot com slash smart talks.
Hello, Hello, Welcome to Smart Talks with IBM, a podcast from Pushkin Industries, iHeartRadio and IBM. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This season, we're talking to the new creators, the developers, data scientists, CTOs and other visionaries who are creatively applying technology in business to drive change. Channeling their knowledge and expertise, they're developing more creative and effective solutions no matter the industry.
Our guest today is doctor Derek Warren, Associate Dean and Director of Graduate Programs at the Southern University College of Business. After a thirty two year career at IBM, Derek chose to become a professor, and as a professor in the business school of a historically black university, it's his job to make sure Southern University students acquire the skills they need to remain competitive in the modern job market. For Derek,
that's where cybersecurity comes in. But nearly half a million unfilled jobs in the US alone, the industries demand for professionals with technical experts is staggerant. In an effort to bridge the gap, in twenty twenty two, IBM announced a collaboration with twenty HBCUs to establish a Cybersecurity the Leadership Center at each of them. Through this partnership, hbcu' students have gained access to IBM training, software and credentials at no cost to them, with the aim of building the
vibrant and diverse workforce cybersecurity urgently needs. In today's episode, you'll hear how Derek is using IBM's skills build a suite of courses focusing on business and tech to arm his students with the knowledge necessary to stand out to employers, and his approach to inspiring creativity and himself and his students. Derek spoke with doctor Lory Santos, host of the Pushkin
podcast The Happiness Lab. Laurie is a professor of psychology at Yale University and an expert on human cognition and mental well being. Okay, let's get to the interview.
Derek, tell us a little bit about your role at Southern University System.
I am the Associate dean and director of Graduate Programs for the Southern University College of Business. I'm also an associate Professor of management as well as the single point of contact our SPOCK as we like to call it, for our relationship with IBM Global University Programs.
And so, then walk me through your role at IBM, Like, how does that connect to your role at SUS today.
Well, I am a thirty two year IBM alumnus. I
started with IBM right out of college. I graduated from Southern University in computer science and after getting those job ovels with IBM, I started in Tampa, Florida there and had a very vibrant, exciting and fulfilling career with IBM and after returning to so Than after retiring, got a call from a colleague at IBM Vice President said, you need to speak to someone in IBM Global University Programs because we have these spectacular programs and HBCUs don't seem
to be taking advantage of them enough. So I said, hey, I'm happy to listen. We did that first conversation, I said, these would be fantastic for Southern University, primarily I'm At that time, I was director of Alumni for Southern University, and my thinking was these programs could help not only level the playing field, but further differentiate us and our students by providing access to these in demand technologies that
were offered through IBM Global University Programs. So the technologies focused around artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, cybersecurity, data science, design thinking, the Internet of Things, and quantum computing. Providing that access was something that I definitely wanted Southern University faculty, staff, and students to be involved in.
So today's episode is all about the need for diversity in cybersecurity. So talk about the role that diversity should be playing in cybersecurity today.
Diversity in and itself offers the opportunity to introduce and to include broader perspectives, different trains of thought. And when you think about cybersecurity and the dangers of it and the number of bad actors that are at play there, you need as much diverse thinking to help solve these problems as possible. And cybersecurity is one of the hottest
feels available. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs. I believe the forecast is somewhere around between three and five hundred thousand current cybersecurity job openings, and that is anticipated to grow certainly by the year twenty twenty five. So we're going to need a workforce that is inclusive, that has the opportunity for very thoughts so that we can avoid blind spots and pitfalls, that allows all of us
to work together to solve these problems. And the other thing about cybersecurity is that it is adaptive, so it is changing every day. As soon as we get a fix for one particular exposure area, the hackers figure out a way to introduce a new one around it. So it's going to take us constantly working together, the good actors working together to help combat the forces of evil.
That are out there in the world today, and I think this is where education can be so pivotal to make sure that we have that diverse workforce who has the right training. And so you've said before, the education is the great equalizer in a world that is not always fair. A little bit more what you mean by that statement.
Oh wow, I live by that statement. I do feel that education can help one overcome poverty. Education can help expose individuals to new opportunities. As part of our college specifically, we have a goal of poverty elimination, and I firmly believe that using education will help individuals who may not have been afforded access to economic benefits growing up. Learning new items, new areas, especially in these hot demand areas, can certainly help one secure jobs. Education has also been
proven to help with discipline discipline problems. It's been proven to help to mitigate crime. It's been proved even to help individuals think differently about and to appreciate the world that we live in. And that's why I believe education clearly is something that can help cure many of the eels that currently exist in the world today.
I agree with you completely about this philosophy, but I'm curious how that philosophy applies to your work with IBM and Southern University System.
Well, the IBM initiative clearly introduces just a whole array of technology assets to our university community. So I'm a firm believer. Another mantra that I have is that there is no business without technology and no technology without business. So as such, these assets and the training that is provided helps, especially here in the College of Business, which is where I sit. I am firmly of the believe that all of our business majors need technology as a foundation.
So my business majors learn about artificial intelligence. They are learning about chat, GPT and the other GPTs that are out there even as we speak. They need to understand cloud computing because everything that we do today touches the cloud in some way. They need to understand the role cybersecurity plays and why having a strong zero trust posture is important regardless of what industry that they're working in.
Understanding data science and how to get insights out of data so that you can make better decisions and you can solve bigger problems is extremely important. Design thinking, which touches on creative problem solving, critical thinking specifically from a customer perspective is very important if you're going to help and my view, create a better customer experience for the
clients that you serve out there. And again, everything we do, including our podcast today, is touching the Internet of things. And I won't even get into quantum computing. That's not I'm not expert in that space, but I will tell you a lot's happening there as well. So introducing our university family to these in demand technologies, to me, is a priority and it's part of my purpose being here.
I mean, it's clear you're bringing the work that you did with IBM, you know, into your role as a professor and kind of training the students. But I'm curious how your work with IBM shaped your initial desire to go into academia in the first place.
Well, that's an interesting question, Laurd. My parents were educators, so learning has always been at the forefront of my life when it comes down to it. I still remember my dad, who was a football coach in a small town in North Louisiana, Colled Bastrip, Louisiana, would take me to games or would have me sit in this class. Same with my mom. Primarily taught at the elementary school level and still does a lot of work in our
hometown in North Louisiana. They really, truth be told help shape my desire to always continually learn and the importance of education. In fact, I tell people to this day that I didn't realize I had a choice of going to college or not going to college. I always thought, you know, it was part of that progression that I didn't realize until after I graduated from college that really I could have chosen not to go to college. I'm glad that I did not make that choice, but I
never realized I had a choice in the battle. So that and then jumping into IBM. From the first day that I joined IBM in Tampa, Florida, with the IBM Information Network, at that time, we were immersed in education. We were always being encouraged to learn. Learning equals growth, Learning equals promotional opportunities. Learning equals just in a sense, happiness.
So I get joy when I'm learning, and that's helped with my desire to share what I've gained from my experiences with IBM with my students, with my peers and colleagues, with my bosses here at Southern University and other HBCUs as well.
And so while we through an example of how this partnership really comes to life in the.
Classroom, Well, I'll give you a pretty recent example. We recently sponsored here on the campus a symposium and we called that symposium cyber TIP. So see why I be TIP, and the TIP stands for Talent Initiative Program. And we used our partnership with IBM to introduce cybersecurity concepts to virtually every college on campus and every discipline, and we brought together students. We advertised it, brought students together and challenged them to come up with different cybersecurity topics in
a variety of areas. So we had ad majors, we had nursing majors, we had engineers, our civil engineers, mechanical engineers, we had finance accounting. All disciplines basically were challenged to come up with a cybersecurity related topic that they could relate to, and we awarded the top ten presentations. So there were fifty presentations. The top ten received additional recognition and believe it or not, Laurie I was blown away.
A student that I mentored with a freshman female received the top price, and she gives the cybersecurity and supply chain and she was a business major, so you would almost think cybersecurity, that's going to be somebody in sciences and engineering and so on and on. But a freshman student did a topic on cybersecurity and supply chain her minor and supply chain management, and she actually was awarded
the top presentation, So I was extremely excited. Another one that got high ratings was cybersecurity in the fashion industry. And then you had cybersecurity with regard to plant sciences and agriculture. And then to see the creativity with the students and how they researched the topics and their skill in presenting their skill and responding to questions, their skill in saying, hey, here's the problem, here are some recommended solutions. Just to see that growth made me extremely happy.
I love hearing about the breath with which they're using cybersecurity in the classroom. That you can apply it in egg or in fashion, in all these domains. It also means that students who leave who maybe not going into cybersecurity themselves, understand the problems that come up in whatever industry they're in exactly. But you've also been using IBM
Skills Build for coursework and certification. Can you tell us a little more about what skills build is and how you've leveraged all these resources.
We use skills builds specifically to augment our existing courses. For example, I taught a business analytics course this past semester. That business Analytics course uses IBM Skills Build Data Science course as its course content. I use all of the modules. There are eight to nine modules that touch on landscape, data science, case studies, the future trends, touches on all of those things that I use. It as both an eight week course and a sixteen week course depending on
the modality that is delivered. When they exit that course, they not only exit with three credit hours. If they exit the course successfully completing the course content, I should say they not only exit with three credit hours in data science data analytics, they also receive a stackable credential and data analytics which they can of course take with them. They can share it on LinkedIn, they can share it on Facebook or Twitter. Basically use it to showcase the
skills that they've required in that space. And the same occurs with cybersecurity, with cloud and with the other Skills Build offerings. Skills Build also touches in other areas such as mindfulness. Skills Bill has courses on entrepreneurship, which is extremely important to our College of Business, as we try to push and promote an entrepreneurial mindset, as we try to push and promote financial literacy, as we work to encourage digital literacy, and we actually use skills Build as
part of many of our community initiatives. So our surrounding community and the world, we've introduced skills Build to them also, And now that I think about it, Laurie, we've actually we did a trip to Ghana last June. We'll be going back this June. The most popular session of the trip was when I introduce our Ghanian colleagues to skills Bill. Because it is international, I introduced them to Skills Bill.
They allowed me to teach one of the classes. This is an extremely large university, it's ka nus Kwama and from a University of Science and Technology. I introduced it to a class and within a week, within a week, we had over three hundred students that had taken the Design Thinking Course, which is a two hour self paced course of fourteen lessons. Over three hundred students had taken the course. By the time I returned to the US a couple of weeks later, over eight hundred students had
taken the course. So the impact of Skills Build and the exposure to these technologies and these stack credentials, to me has not just a US impact, but it has a global impact.
I love how excited Derek Getz when he talks about teaching. He's a genuine passion for exposing others to new knowledge they otherwise wouldn't encounter. And it's remarkable that he's using IBM Skills Build to do that work internationally, be it the cybersecurity of fashion in Louisiana or design thinking in Ghana. As Derek will explain to Laurie in a moment, that exposure, those first time experiences can spark a newfound creativity in
a person. Let's listen on as Derek gets into the creative aspect of his work as an educator.
So this season of Smart Talks with IBM is focused on the new creators, these visionaries who are creatively applying technology and business to drive change. Do you see your work as creative?
Oh, without a doubt, without and I'm not trying. I'm not bragging when I say that I will about a sound like I'm bragging, But I really do believe that this has allowed me to level up, to say the least. So I think I am a creator of innovative and enhanced educational experiences for our students, for my peer faculty, for our deans and provos, even our university president, chancellor and the other chancellors on our other four campuses.
And so when you speak to your students, how does diversity help cultivate creativity within this field of cybersecurity in particular.
Well, it cultivates creativity clearly because it helps us understand each other. I believe one of my greatest experiences, and this occurred when I was with IBM. iBIM afforded me the opportunity of living abroad for over seven years. I lived in Tokyo for over a year. I lived in
Shanghai for two plus years. I lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for a little of a year helping a large multinational corporation prepare for the World Cup, and then I returned to the US and did additional two years working with various clients of IBMS and then went back to Shinjin China, and so that exposure to different cultures, to diverse cultures, to individuals. Because some people think of diversity as black and white, it's not. Diversity includes thinking ways
of thinking. Diversity is much more than just skin color and human beings. Diversity is in learning, it's in education. It's like you said just now, it's in cyber security because right now, the things that we are being hit with from a cyber standpoint, I was just reading that chat GBT got hit with a cyber attack. It it was hacked that they had to be taken down for
a minute. So it's going to really involve us continuously being creative in order to pro actively address problems over the day as well as reactively address those that we can't anticipate that are certainly going to happen as we move forward. As educators, we've.
Been talking so much about how you've used creativity in the classroom, but you know, as a colleague professor myself, I know that one of the perks of being in academia is that your students go off and they do all these amazing things in the real world. And so I'm curious if you've ever interacted with students after graduation? Have they taken this principle of creativity and applied it in their own work life? And if so, can you share some stories?
Oh, without a doubt, Without a doubt. And a couple of my students that I'm extremely proud of. This student was out of our loss and one of our loss students who took the in fact, they took cybersecurity and I believe they took the data science courses after taking those courses. He developed and has developed and it's now in its second year a journal of IP law and technology.
She created a journal. She created it as a student, was the first editor of course of the journal, and now that journal is going into his second or third year. To hear her say that our courses and this partnership with IBM inspired her to create that journal as a
law student is probably one of my private accomplishments. The other accomplishment I'd like to mention is I get emails from students regularly that say, hey, I completed the IBM Skills Build course and cyber are and Data Science r INAI added it to my LinkedIn profile, and hey, I'm getting calls from a variety of companies, Google and Microsoft and Adobe and Meta, all these different companies. Now, because as you know, companies are using AI to kind of
peruse through LinkedIn for keywords. But because they've taken these and completed these digital credentials, these stack of credentials, they're getting job opportunities and one in particularly because of the digital credential that they added, they were able to get promotional opportunities. So I've had several that have ridden me, you know, to thank me and say, listen, thanks for bringing this to us because I just received a new promotion,
I've gotten a new job. So hearing that from our graduates and seeing that they're using what they're gaining through this partnership for their growth and success has been extremely fulfilling for me.
That's great. And so you've said before that if you're not uncomfortable, you're not learning. How do you apply this philosophy to your own life and how do you encourage others, especially your students, to go outside their comfort zone.
Well, that quote actually was derived from a quote that I heard Jenny Rimedi, who was IBM's first female CEO, who I admired greatly. She said, growth and comfort cannot coexist, and when you think about it, it can't. I mean, you got to get uncomfortable, you know. I tell my students all the time, you're going to suffer pain. You can suffer the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. And I certainly would prefer to go through discipline then
then regretting something that I did. So I really well, I'll give you a story when I was first offered the assignment in Tokyo and my family and I were in Tokyo. We arrived in Tokyo. Of course, Tokyo is one of the largest, if not the largest city metropolitan area in the world, with thirty plus million people. We
got there, it was intimidating, extremely intimidating. Well, during that week, while we were god of huddled in our apartment, I remember hearing a presentation around the question when was the last time you did something for the first time? So I took that question and I created a challenge with my family. It was a family challenge, and that family challenge was listen, every week, we're going to have first time experiences. We're here in Tokyo. It's a brand new place.
We're going to have first time experiences and then we're going to do report outs of playbacks at the end of the week, doing family meetings. So my daughter and I were the two that really took on the challenge. She's pretty competitive now, she's a PR EXECU in New York to this decade. But she and I, she was fifth grade at the time, but she and I took the challenge and so we used it to meet new people.
We used it to explore and go different places. We used it just to have new X experiences, and it peaked our curiosity. It encouraged our competitive spirits, but most importantly, we just grew. We learned so much to that challenge. Through that, I climbed Mount Fuji in Tokyo, I walked two hours on the Great Wall of China. I was having so many first time experiences. I started losing count because they were occurring just on the hour, especially when
I lived abroad. And when I think about it now, that's how I encourage my students to to get creative and stay creative by just seeking out those first time experiences, by using their curiosity to grow and to learn, and most importantly, to have fun.
And so it's clear even from the short conversation that you have found your purpose in kind of you know, teaching everybody these amazing skills. And I know that one of your mantras is find your purpose, but I'm curious how you encourage your own students to find their purpose.
Well, one exercise that I have students go through is I ask them a question. And normally they're puzzled by this question, and that question, Laurie is what's your genius? So when they say I don't know what I want to do, I don't know what I want to major, and I don't know what I want to do in life, say well, tell me this, what's your genius? And then say genius? What do you mean genius? You mean my IQ? Did?
I say? No, what's your genius? And your genius is the intersection of what you love and what you're good at. So I asked them, tell me what you love. Tell me some things that you love. And they may say, oh, I love video games, or I love watching television, I love traveling, I love math. Then I asked them, I
say what what are you good at? And then they step back and say, well, I'm good at helping people, at communicating, I'm good at this I said, and I say, well, your genius is the intersection of that, because you may love basketball but might not be good at it, so I wouldn't encourage you to. I would basically say, that's probably not your genius. But if you can find that intersection of what you love and what you're good at, that can lead you to your purpose. And that's what
led me to mind. I enjoy being with people. I enjoy helping people learn. I enjoy the environment of colleges, high schools, and beyond. I enjoy seeing the sparkle in the student's eyes when they have an Aha moment of when they've been able to accomplish a credential or learn something. It's nothing like it and it really excites me a lot.
Derek, this was a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for all the amazing work that you're doing, you know at HBCUs and beyond.
My pleasure and I'm a big fan, Laurie of your podcast. Now I'm a subscriber.
Well, now we're gonna have to get you on to talk about purpose on the Happiness Labs as stay tuned, all right.
Derek left us just now with a piece of wisdom. I'd like to reflect on that genius is the intersection of what you love and what you're good at. For students and young people still finding themselves, sometimes it takes a little help to discover where their talents and passions lie. By introducing his students to cybersecurity, Derek is trying to show that a person's genius intersection might exist somewhere they've never been before, which is why Derek's philosophy about first
experiences is so relevant. It's only when we branch out into the unfamiliar that we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves. That kind of self discovery leads to the diversity of thought, culture, and perspective that workplaces are hungry for, be it in cybersecurity or beyond. What's important is that we challenge ourselves to continue exploring the unknown and find that genius that is unique to each of us. Smart Talks with IBM is produced by Matt Romano, David jaw Nische, Venkat and
Royston Reserve with Jacob Goldstein. We're edited by Lydia gen Kott. Our engineers are Jason Gambrel, Sarah Bruguier, and Ben Holiday theme song by Gramascow special thanks to Carl mcgliori, Andy Kelly, Kathy Callahan, and the eight Bar and IBM teams, as well as the Pushkin marketing team. Smart Talks with IBM is a production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Malcolm Glabwell. This is a paid advertisement from IBM.