Matt Dearmon is the Director of Leadership and Professional Development at Informatica, an organization that empowers next-generation cloud data innovation. Matt has a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Texas at Austin and began his career as an educator before moving to coaching and e-learning. Eventually, he moved from leading small, learning-focused companies, including his own, to guiding leadership and professional development at the global enterprise level. Matt is a dedicated leader focusing on innovative excellence, an expert curriculum developer, and an experienced facilitator with a passion for applied learning.
A Few Quotes From This Episode
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
Matt Dearmon is the Director of Leadership and Professional Development at Informatica, an organization that empowers next-generation cloud data innovation. Matt has a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Texas at Austin and began his career as an educator before moving to coaching and e-learning. Eventually, he moved from leading small, learning-focused companies, including his own, to guiding leadership and professional development at the global enterprise level. Matt is a dedicated leader focusing on innovative excellence, an expert curriculum developer, and an experienced facilitator with a passion for applied learning.
A Few Quotes From This Episode
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate
Scott Allen 0:01
Okay, everyone, good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning wherever you are in the world. Today I have a special guest, I say special guest because he was introduced to me by one of my best longtime friends in the world. And my best longtime friend in the world, Denny said, Hey, Scott, I've listened to some nice episodes, you need to meet Matt. Listeners, we would love to introduce you to Matt Dearman. He is the director of leadership and professional development at Informatica, he has a Ph.D. And he's this it's this unique case study, we were just talking about this map before we got on the air. But it's this really wonderful combination that you bring to this dialogue, of having that academic credential the Ph.D., but you are spending your days in organizational life trying to operationalize and develop leaders trying to prepare individuals to be more successful when taking on some of these kinds of gnarly roles. So I very, very much appreciate you being here. I see some albums behind you, ladies and gentlemen, there are hundreds of albums behind him, I'm feeling very jealous.
Matt Dearmon 1:08
A lot of people don't realize that. Artists are still releasing a lot of new information, a lot of new art on vinyl. Yeah, a matter of fact, I feel I think last year vinyl sales outstripped any other physical medium. So vinyl is very much well and alive. And now I have the nowadays we buy a vinyl record. Most contemporary artists will include a coupon where you can download the digital file. So you kind of get the best of both worlds, you have that nice analog physical piece of material. And then you also have the digital file that you can keep on your hard drive forever.
Scott Allen 1:41
I was watching the Beatles documentary on Disney plus for the last few days. And that is a fascinating case study in group dynamics. There are going to be some wonderful articles written about that. And then, of course, you and I were talking about the Velvet Underground documentary. I think that's on apple plus. But yes, I mean, there was something about holding an album and opening up Dark Side of the Moon and you get a poster in the album with the record that was just so cool. And of course, it was kind of shrunk down with tapes and, and compact discs. But so Matt is a music fan. I think he is one of the people. And that's one area that Denny knew that we would have a wonderful connection. But he also knew that we would have this connection around leader development. And so Matt, would you talk a little bit about your role at Informatica. And let's talk a little bit about some of your adventures in recent years. I mean, you all have been digitizing, and really working to transition and transform the organization in a lot of different ways. So I'd love to hear about your adventures.
Matt Dearmon 2:45
Thanks, Scott. Currently, at Informatica, I serve as the director of leadership and professional development and in that role, my honor to work with both soft skills, professional skills, cross-functional skills across the organization, and that leadership side, which is the ultimate cross-functional skill, right? Yes, it's interesting, because having a hand in both of those sides of the work, both employee development and leadership development gives you a bit of that perspective in terms of where the needs are. And in some of your past podcasts, you talked about that connection between leaders and followers, having a hand in both of those worlds, allows me to kind of see what are the needs of the leaders and what are the followers need to be better followers. Right. And it to be lady leaders in their own right, you know, maybe not the leader, but being a leader, that then so that involves, you know, running some of our internal processes and systems, doing a lot of facilitation, a lot of content development, very much like the fact we're fortunate Informatica, that we've invested heavily in online resources. And we can speak about that at some length and how that ties into kind of the open ecosystem and how I've tried to kind of connect those worlds over the years, we still have a strong practice in-person facilitation, even in the Zoom era, and real-time feedback and coaching, always trying to drive more coaching the organization, always trying to drive that culture of lifelong learning. There's some criticism of that term, but it's far less contentious. In the corporate space, it's actually something highly desirable. You know, now, when you get into the academic sphere, it becomes a little bit more of a matter of subjectivity. And perhaps, you know, having an enforced subjectivity, that creates kind of a performative expectation. That's much less the case in the corporate world.
Scott Allen 4:25
You went into some of your philosophical background there, my friend. You really, like performative and oof, they got big, there for a second.
Matt Dearmon 4:35
Only because I can I can indulge in it here. I can't do that in my day job, I lose them quickly. That was my biggest adjustment to moving from being you know, kind of a semi-public space academic to a corporate academic, is I really had to tone my language down. Realizing you know, there's a lot of truth to that idea that Why use a 50 cent word when a nickel word will do. Not necessarily my natural space going back That idea of records, I've always kind of understood theory and practice as like two records on a turntable. Right? And how do you blend those? How do you sync the tempo? How do you get the tonality to match? Right? How do you get the right key? You know, all those different, you know, and so on one side, I might have this practical idea and another set of might have a theoretical idea. And, you know, the work of a theoretician, the work of a practitioner, equally, is to blend those two streams, so that you have a cohesive whole.
Scott Allen 5:30
I love it. With a Ph.D. from the University of Texas in curriculum and instruction. How do you draw on some of that kind of every day in your work? What lens did that provide you because again, I have great respect, you've got that theoretical background? But then now you're putting that theory into practice. And as even as just when it comes to language like you mentioned, you got to alter, you got to shift. When I think about some times in my conversations with academics, they may have a perspective that absent is kind of absent the variable of time when it comes to corporate life, because in corporate life, we don't have all the time in the world time is very limited, and how are we learning on the fly? How does this kind of move with the flow of corporate life versus having to be this thing that takes people offline for days or weeks at a time I know that that happens sometimes, but I love that blend that you bring the theory and the practice? How have you found where do they clash, what are some observations you've had.
Matt Dearmon 6:30
Unlike education, which I came to theoretically first, and then the field of practice. And I'll give you a little background there on how I came to leadership development. I started my career as a public school teacher taught for the first three years at the largest public high school in New Orleans, a school called Marion Abrams and senior high school doesn't exist anymore. It was unfortunately destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, which prompted my wife's move to Austin, Texas, where we currently live going in education, learning to be teacher, I was very fortunate that at the did my undergraduate my masters at LSU. And at the time they were in the curriculum department there at LSU. There's a professor, still active Bill Piner. He's really one of the geniuses of the field of curriculum studies. And one of the arguably one of the seminal features and founders of that field, and curriculum studies is the more theoretical field of education, he does, it's much, much more qualitative. And as a result, there's not a whole lot of funding that goes into it or not as much funding in some of our allied quantitative fields. Learning from Bill Piner getting this really heavy theoretical perspective on education, and then going into the practical side and beginning to practice as a teacher and kind of seeing the mismatch from the theory to the practice. Now I'm kind of seeing it from the practice to the theory, you know, like, I'm coming at this from a leadership perspective. Okay, I've got all this practical, you know, insight or anecdotal, insider evidence, how does that match up with the theory? Whereas before, it was, here's the theory, how do I make this fit into the world of practice? So I taught for a few years there in New Orleans. So Katrina, then moved to Austin taught here for a few years, got into instructional coaching and e-learning always had a second job in New Orleans. the second job, I bartended. Teachers don't make us don't make that much money. Sadly, one of the great tragedies of our culture is that teachers are so chronically undervalued and underpaid, perhaps a result of the feminization of the field. But I digress. So how always having to have a second job in New Orleans, it was bartending in Austin, it was a learning, you know, a different set of opportunities, different, you know, different, totally different urban economy. So that became my point of exit from the public sector in the private sector. I started doing e-learning on the side, then I moved into instructional coaching professionally started working with adults got certified as a cognitive coach, and learn how you know how powerful coaching can be to drive insight, reflection, behavioral change, and really lasting behavioral change. That was like a lightbulb went off. I just I always like older students from teaching high school, but then I got into, okay, adults are an even bigger challenge, right? People always ask you that, like, taught kids and adults which are worse and like, not worse, but which are harder. Adults. They don't have to listen, kids don't have to listen either. And good teachers know that they know they have earned their classes respect, but so a lot more influence a lot less authority when you're dealing with adults. So just to wrap that story up, started doing the learning stuff, ended up running a small e-learning company, in starting a startup did some online assessments for the safety and security industries. We created an online web proctoring tool, did some product management around that kind of got into the tech side. And throughout this, I'm kind of dabbling with leadership. My first year as a teacher in New Orleans. I became a department chair, not because of any great skill or talent on my part, but because literally, nobody else wanted the job. No one raises your hand. I don't blame them, right. I mean, it was a tough environment, then it's even tougher now. I was naive and had a head full of steam. I was like, Well, sure I can do this how you know, how hard could it be? Right off the ground. First-year teacher, I'm trying to run the largest English department in New Orleans. The first big learning there was the value of alignment. And I still use that as a lever when I'm coming into a new team or coming into a new leadership situation is, let's start with something some easy blocking and tackling. How can we all make sure we're rowing in the same direction, I began kind of learning some of these lessons naturally. Fast forward a few more years, I've been run doing the e-learning thing for a while, got a call out of the blue from a former associate, who was leading a business development team here at Informatica that he was like, Hey, I know you've got experience with leadership, you've got some sales experience in your background, we have this rapidly growing team want to come to join a billion-dollar software company and try something different, had never had that opportunity before. It never occurred to me, honestly, I didn't realize that jobs like the one I have now exist in corporate America, quite honestly, within a year HR kind of figured out what my skill set was. And they asked me to join their team. And I've been working my way up on that side of the house ever since.
Scott Allen 11:03
Matt, what's really interesting about this is I have a Ph.D. and curriculum. And I've led, and I'm moving into this space, where now I'm designing some of the leadership development initiatives in this organization. And this is the point I want to explore a little bit. Where does your head go? Where do you turn? Where do you turn to learn? What resources do you tap into, as a practitioner now trying to learn quickly, as a practitioner?
Matt Dearmon 11:30
I was very fortunate my boss then and my boss. Now, Michelle Young, she's our Vice President of talent management, leadership development. And she has decades of experience in the field and is a highly capable and highly accomplished practitioner with very high standards, especially early on, because I always kind of foisted upon her, she didn't really ask for me to join her team necessarily. So I had to earn her trust and earn her respect, knowing coming in that I didn't know the leadership space. Formally. That Well, yes, right, I was able to learn a lot from her early on. So leveraging those mentoring, as I started identifying other areas of need, that I could also help to fill from a content development perspective, from the perspective of creating programs and programming, and learning assets and learning approaches and coaching methodologies around specific issues and challenges. So I did start turning to some of the research, right, I'm lucky, you know, I think one of the things a lot of people are afraid of when they leave academia is you're gonna lose access to the research. Yeah. And that was, that was a big fear for me too. Not that I ever really got that heavy in academia, I was always working full time, the whole way through when I finished my defense, but my committee was like, so So what's next? You know, like, are we gonna try to get this published? I was like, No. Um, you know, there were somewhat disappointed, you know, because they want to keep you, you know, they want to keep the field alive. In terms of where I started going to learn. It was that academic background, like a lot of practitioners kind of rely a little bit on some of your aggregators of research, your MIT, Sloan's your HBRs. And I still think that's a good place to start, you know, especially for a practitioner in the field to get an understanding of having a framework or an approach or a school of thought that might go a little bit deeper, just to kind of start there with that more mass-market mass audience gloss, and then I'll find some strains that I can dig into. And I'll start going back to the research for that and digging a little bit deeper on it. So that's my current process. Mentoring, I would say early on a lot of mentoring. A lot of practical knowledge, lifelong learner, I'm always going to be learning this stuff.
Scott Allen 13:37
Well, what's really interesting, and what I want to explore a little bit is talk about maybe an experience you've had where you, maybe you found something in MIT Sloan or HBr, you drill down a little bit, and then you tried to operationalize it in the organization.
Matt Dearmon 13:53
My secret weapon is, is that research capability that I drew, draw directly from my experience in academia, you know, being able to say, you know, "that looks pretty good. I think we can do better." That doesn't mean we always do better scale, resources, being in human resources. We're not a revenue-generating part of the organization, we're well invested in to be sure, but you know, we have to operate a little leaner, the ROI on leadership development is often a little more hidden. And I think that those are some discussions you've had in the past. But how do you create those KPIs as OKRs? There are visible metrics around leadership development, in terms of finding something and bringing it back. I think a good example for us would be our leadership behaviors. And Informatica, we have a set of nine leadership behaviors, they're not quite competencies, because they're much more unique to our own culture and our own approach. That's one thing I think is really kind of cool about them. You know, each behavior has three expectations, and they can get a little bit naughty. What we've had to do because they are idiosyncratic because these aren't like low winter competencies off the shelf out of the book, no knock on low winter competencies, but these are much more unique to our leadership and how they see the world and how they the values that they think are important in their leaders?
Scott Allen 15:03
Well, they were developed by some of your leadership team or the leadership team in general. Correct? Great. Exactly.
Matt Dearmon 15:09
And when you know our leadership team, you can start to see little pieces of personality coming out from some of those, right, which, again, that contributes to our culture of leadership here, because they are homegrown, if you will, grab it from good stock and fertile soil. But there has been some work involved in fleshing these out in terms of, okay, what's the How to this? How do we do this? Well, we got the why we got the what, but we need a bit more around the house, because it's, it's unique to us, we have to kind of chart our own course through that. So in researching those leadership behaviors, I've had to kind of go in and pull out pieces from lots of different sources. And bring that back. What I found is that people, leaders really, really appreciate that level of depth when it's done carefully, not engaging in jargon really exploring like, here's, here's what this means, in the context of our business. Don't take my word on what strategy means? And what are the risks that you need to be mindful of, as you're, you're surveying the landscape for market competition. Here's what the research says, are the factors that these specific business units have to be mindful of. So it's giving that specificity to it? Yeah, it's making current and it's making it speak to our, to our organization. To me, that's the value of bringing, bringing a measure of academic research into the corporate space.
Scott Allen 16:25
And as I understand it, I mean, there's this initiative right now about leading through digital transformation, and really helping support your leaders navigate some of those shifts because that's going nowhere. That's a topic, these technologies, enabling disruption of many of these technologies are converging to create new business models, new differentiators, new strategic advantages, and helping the organization and preparing the organization you'd mentioned, retooling or upskilling. Earlier in the conversation, would you talk a little bit about topics like communication, change management, innovation, strategic execution, how you're thinking about some of those right now?
Matt Dearmon 17:07
Absolutely great segue because digital transformation is Informatica as business that is our stock in trade, we consider ourselves the champions of our customer's digital transformations, how can we help them disrupt their competition before they get disrupted? So our business model is somewhat predicated on the idea of data as a disrupter. Now, that's changing a little bit as data has become more the lingua franca of multiple industries, it's still an important differentiator. Now we differentiate at the level of our engagement with that data, how we're able to apply a platform approach and really rich metadata and metadata and tagging, to create automated processes and applying that that, you know, AI and ML to these very complex data process. Yeah, because we are focused on helping our customers become disruptors in their own fields, we have to be mindful of being just not being disrupted ourselves. One prime example of that is our recent reemergence on the New York Stock Exchange as a publicly-traded company, okay? When I first joined Informatica in 2016, the very beginning of 2016, it was right after we'd gone private. Now, Informatica was publicly traded for 17 years or so we've been around for almost 30. So I want to say from 1997 to 2015, we were publicly traded on the stock, we went private, for a couple of reasons. Number one, we realized we needed to change our business model, right, we had a great business and perpetual license and on-premise installations. But we realized that the future was in subscription, now consumption-based marketing, and much more of that cloud-first, cloud-native approach. So you know, over the last five years, we successfully did what we were trying to empower our customers to do, we changed our business model, entirely less of that on-prem perpetual license, more than land adopt expand, renew a subscription model, and now we're going into consumption-based pricing, and finding different ways to serve our customers. So we're constantly in that act. Innovation is part of our main value, we realized that if we are in the tech space, if we're not innovating, if we're not disrupting, yeah, we're not going to be around much longer. You know, it's like that old, that old, that old adage, if you're green, you're growing. If you're not, you're right. never true. We're in technology because you know, you sit on your laurels for even six months, you're prone to disruption. Yeah, so that's part of our business model is part of what we are what we see ourselves doing. And therefore we have to parallel that in how we see ourselves and how we lead our team. So it means we have to lead in a way that maximizes trust that maximizes bidirectional feedback that maximizes transparency, calling BS right when you see but like what I tell our leaders is that means that you have to be prepared for your teams to call BS on YouTube. Yes, right. How are we doing that? We're still working on it. But that sets the standard that we're all trying to work to operate to and allow your teams to
Scott Allen 20:01
in their organizational culture, it might be called calling BS. But then, you know, it could be radical candor or crucial conversations or, you know, again, once you go to the academic literature, you can find support for the importance. Oh, absolutely, yes.
Matt Dearmon 20:19
One of the reasons I call that one out is very memorable, right? That's one advantage of having these kinds of culturally reflective leadership behaviors, it speaks to how that reflects the culture and the personalities of our organization
Scott Allen 20:32
and the spirit. You know, I'm going to call BS on this.
Matt Dearmon 20:35
Absolutely, absolutely. And we don't say the full word, you know, yeah. Yeah, there's a euphemism in there. So when we talk about digital transformation and leading through that, that means that we have to model that right. And that's one of my central leadership beliefs personally, without doing in a way that I create puts pressure on your team, you know, you don't want to be that kind of PaceSetter. Yeah, but you have to be willing to kind of put yourself out there a little bit and take some chances and take some risks. And especially if you want your team to take chances, and your team to take risks. So you know, really, what are the operating principles that we think are going to be successful for us? What are the behaviors that support that? How do we drive that in our leaders and give them the resources to master those? Yep. And then how do we know the next level is how do we scale that throughout the organization? Because importantly, we don't say that these leadership behaviors are only for the managers of the company, these are expected to leaders at all levels of our company, whether you lead by influence or authority. So there's a bit of a common language there, we're that we're still trying to drive and this is, we've had these for about a year now. So we're still working through them. One of the things I love about leadership is I like to think of it as an asymptotal craft. Are you familiar with an asymptote?
Scott Allen 21:48
Say more...No, I'm not.
Matt Dearmon 21:51
So you know, an asymptote is a geometric figure where you know, a line is infinitely close to both the x and the y axis, but it never quite touches. Okay, right. So for infinity, it's always closer and closer to the X-axis on this side, and closer and closer to the Y-axis on this side. But it never quite touches its asymptotal...you're never going to get there.
Scott Allen 22:10
I did an episode with his name is Chip Souba. And he was the former dean at the Dartmouth School of Medicine. And he said, you know, this is a mountain without a top, we're never going to totally get there. Right. But we're in process, each one of us is in process. What I love about what you're saying is that, and this is how you make leader development a profit center. Because you figure this out, you figure out how do we prepare our leaders to disrupt before being disrupted? How do we prepare our leaders to lead that transformation and model that, and boy, there are organizations all over the world that are in need of that way of thinking, because to your point, there's a lot of shifting that's happening at a very, very rapid pace. And whether it's FinTech insure tech, health tech, ad tech, so much is happening. And, you know, I heard Scott Galloway from NYU say that calculus is an $8 billion dollar industry. Well, you know, what?
Matt Dearmon 23:19
And I can tell you that one of the biggest challenges that some young developers have when they're getting into machine learning is understanding those algorithms, right? If we're fortunate because we're able to apply resources to help with that upskilling. Right. We're a decent enough size company. And we have a progressive leadership that believes in making those types of investment and learning and development to where we are able to scaffold and build their skills. That's one way that we're currently beginning to measure some of this growth and this growth over time is by looking at skill set development. So we're heavily partnered with Coursera, widely known as one of the biggest MOOC platforms in the world, and MOOCs being massively open online courses, right. Largely for the benefit of our audience. They largely mimic the structure of a collegiate course, but in a distance-learning format. Coursera is doing a lot of work, where they're tagging their courses to the skills, setting up assessments and pre-assessments to do some placing. I love the example of Coursera because it is a bit of a bridge between that academic world and you know, the online l&d 4.0 world of your, your plural sites and your cloud gurus and, and these other types of vendors that are very purely a digital learning domain. Of course, there still has a foot in that other world and we like them because number one, they're known for data science they're known for cloud computing. They have a lot of depth and breadth, they have a lot of great leadership content. We just launched a Leadership Academy last week that uses a kind of a skill set first-based approach like what skills do you want to learn? Let's start there and then we're gonna make some recommendations based on what where you are right now. And as you keep learning over time, they're gonna be it serves up fresher recommend Based on their own AI, I think that there are some interesting ways that we might be able to see that type of curated and platform-driven learning to help meet some of the time-strapped and cash strapped needs of our modern leaders about leadership development teams.
Scott Allen 25:16
Exactly, exactly. I mean, how do we do this differently? more efficiently? I love the question of how do we make leader development a profit center? It's a really fun question to explore.
Matt Dearmon 25:29
It already is a profit center.
Scott Allen 25:31
proven profit center.
Matt Dearmon 25:32
profits. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It. But whether you realize it or not, if it's not a profit center for you, you're not going to be around that. You know, we don't hear about companies where it's the nonprofit center, because it doesn't make it that far.
Scott Allen 25:46
As we kind of wind down our time, one last question for you. What haven't you been able to figure out yet? Is there a question that you kind of keep coming back to, as a practitioner, working to make this life and breathe in your organization's scale in your organization? Is there something that you continually kind of come back to is something that we're not quite there yet, we're gonna get there. But we're not there yet. Does anything come to mind?
Matt Dearmon 26:12
Leadership is an open learning practice. The more I did my doctoral work at UT on open source education, and caught the use of Copyleft in learning and development, really, especially in the online space from that work. I recall, kind of that realization that we think about, we tend to think of open source in the digital context, right? The kernel of the software is available and adaptable by all users with documentation, etc, etc, we tend to think of it as a maybe a purely digital space, we lose sight of the fact that all learning was originally open. Right? Yes, Speech Communication, talking conversation. That's the ultimate open source. Yeah, right. And I say that because I think there's a lot of opportunity for leadership development in open source with an open-source approach, when I first kind of made that transition from this academic interest in open education and an understanding the levels of openness to different types of platforms, you know, I naively thought, oh, man, we'll be able to find some way to leverage these open resources, for the good of a lot of different organizations, including, you know, my own, what I found was, it's, it's too fiddly for a corporate audience registering for different platforms, and you may be auditing one, but maybe being a criminal is too much. Our average sales lead our average customer support leader, you know, our average r&d leader, they don't have the time to hunt and peck and find things anything's that are kind of, and they really don't have the time. Yeah, I need a package, they need a package. And so so so something, something I kind of think about the other day, and what we really need is an open-source LSP, or an open-source learning experience platform, right? Something that enables you to pull together these different open resources into a more coherent, navigable, and accessible learner experience. And I will say this, just because as somebody who wants to, leverage open-source learning assets, for the benefit of a corporate audience, I also want to flip that split that relationship and have more corporate leaders and corporate thought leaders contributing. And here's, here's the opportunity for your audience. And I know, we often talk about where do we where I've heard you ask the question to your other guests. Where can we find your stuff online? Yeah, you're not gonna find a lot of my stuff online. Because I'm a corporate academic, my IP is owned by my organization, and I'm compensated for that. So I'm not complaining. One of my pet projects ever since I finished that work has been contributing to open-source learning projects. I've got one right now this languishing that I was I thought I might put a little plugin with your audience. It's the organizational leadership entry on Wikiversity. I've just kind of got a wireframe up there right now. But if you're at all interested, it's pretty easy to become a contributor on Wikiversity, which is in the Wikimedia stable along with Wikipedia. Yep. So it's, in my original academic research, identified Wikiversity is maybe the most open of the platforms because it has a very low barrier of entry. It's a lot of text and a lot of images. It's not as interactive and I think that kind of dings it may be a little bit for modern audiences but or contemporary audiences, it is the most open you know, anybody can get in there anybody can create stuff there's no there's not a lot of, of neoliberal baggage if you will, you know, associated with like, as you might find with some of these other when you may be familiar with the concept of open washing, it looks open but then once you pull back the covers, you realize Oh, there they are, they are monitoring my data. Turns out I'm not the customer I'm the product great you know, it's getting past that a little bit. It's finding ways to activate more leaders, whether they're in Informatica whether they're in your audience, to bring more of that to obviously I'm talking to, you know, live your audience or educators so they're doing this already frauding that that's good. Open that reach of open learning practices,
Scott Allen 30:03
right? And in democratizing the information. I think I read a statistic the other day, Matt, that generally, a third of the world has not yet been online. So think is Elon, who's just down the road from you now, apparently. But as Elon starts, you know, continuing to put these satellites up into low orbit, and starts connecting the world. I mean, democratizing that learning and that education is invaluable. It's invaluable.
Matt Dearmon 30:31
It can all be relatively open because we can share it. And we, you know, even even if, like, like, do me doing this today, this is an open practice because I'm not expected remuneration for it. I've always been influenced by the sociologist mouse who wrote the book, the gift, and then Saltman wrote a did a great piece on that called the gift, the gift of education. And he kind of takes this idea of mouses, which was this idea of, of the gift of almost like a type of Potlatch, right? Like this is the currency of enlightened individuals is gifting the social function of gifting over time. Yeah, and I think that if we help more educators, more corporate leaders, more politicians understand that function of gifting, it might help open the doors a little bit for some of that open, open, expansive, open exchange,
Scott Allen 31:20
Opening the doors, I like it.
Matt Dearmon 31:23
The doors of perception.
Scott Allen 31:24
Speaking of, okay, you have a lot of albums behind you. Oftentimes, I ask people about what they're reading and streaming, what are two things, listeners should listen to maybe pull up on Spotify or iTunes, something you've been listening to lately that's caught your ear that you think people would be interested in knowing about or there's some artists that come to mind for you, sir?
Matt Dearmon 31:47
John Batists' We Are. Having some roots in New Orleans. I'm actually from Mississippi, my wife doesn't let me claim New Orleans. So you know, I'm going out from an hour away. But but but having some roots in that, in that in that region, I'm always fond of, you got a big, big soft spot mark for New Orleans musicians and the positivity of his message, the musicianship throughout, you know, and then in the variety of that musicianship is really inspiring. Keeping that New Orleans vein, Dawn Richard's, most recent album, Second Line is a revelation and how it kind of takes a contemporary, you know, spin on some of those tried and true New Orleans traditions.
Scott Allen 32:27
That's great. Anything else? One more?
Matt Dearmon 32:29
One record that I have kind of spinning is this idea of Assemblage Theory right from Manuel DeLanda. And you know, which she takes from Deleuze and Guattari. But this idea that rather than seeing things as being, you know, in connected in terms of interiority, how are they connected in terms of exteriority and through flows and through symbiotic relationships, but not necessarily being organically connected in the same way as like an organism or something would be right. What's been interesting to me lately is kind of having that playing on one turntable. And having something like it Reid Hoffman's The Alliance on another, right? The idea that rather than saying that we're, we're family, or we're all free agents, you know, being more pragmatic about our relationship with with with our employees and realizing there's an alliance, and we owe them something, and they owe us something in return. And, and it has that kind of symbiotic focus to it, but it still honors the interiority of the individuals. So I think there's something I'm seeing some connection therebetween, you know, that this is, you know, how individuals are relating to the organization, in the pandemic, and post-pandemic era. And this idea of assemblage theory from speculative realism. That's, that's one thing. I'm kind of thinking through a little bit on a high level.
Scott Allen 33:46
Matt, I love it, you could go to 50,000 feet, and then you can be down at, you know, ground level. It's awesome. So Matt, thank you so much for being with me today. Love the conversation. I look forward to future conversations. And thanks for your good work, sir. Have a great weekend. Thanks,
Matt Dearmon 34:06
God, thank you for the work you and the rest of the international leadership Association are doing to drive you to know, a deeper understanding of the relevance the importance and impact the critical importance of this work, not just you know, in our public institutions, but really in every in any group, any social group that we have, we need to have more focus on leadership. So thanks for helping drive that.
Scott Allen 34:26
You bet. You bet. Okay, sir be well!
Matt Dearmon 35:44
Have a cgood day!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai