How Iridium Navigates Global Leadership Challenges

Manjula Sriram (00:10):
I'll start with a very fundamental philosophy of mine: without mistakes, there are no innovations. You have to allow for people to make mistakes for innovation to take place. If I was to go back and pull something from my purse or backpack of mistakes, there's several that I have made. The moment people stop making mistakes, innovation's not happening.

Tom Soderstrom:
Absolutely. And how do you show your vulnerability? For instance, I would start with my mistakes, and I have plenty to pick from. But that made it okay for other people to make mistakes.

Manjula Sriram:
Actually accepting you have made mistakes, showing the human side of you. We make mistakes every single day. You have to lean into the pain of that mistake.

Tom Soderstrom:
Then it creates this cultural of experimentation. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we built an open source rover and we taught it to speak and follow us using Alexa. I was presenting it to about 6,000 people. I said, “Good morning!” and the robot said, through Alexa's voice, "Good morning." Then I said, "Okay, turn left." Dead as a doorknob. "Turn right." Dead as a doorknob. I was devastated. One of the leaders came down in the auditorium and said, "Hey, great demo." I said, "What do you mean? It didn't work." He said, "It worked for about a second, and you dared to try. Dare mighty things." And I think that just shows the future leaders that it's okay, just experiment.

Tom Soderstrom:
One thing I learned the hard way at JPL was that we did a lot of experimentation and in the beginning, I didn't have cybersecurity involved. Once cybersecurity was involved, prototypes sailed through if they were successful and we didn't leak any data. How do you deal with that with doing something as big as space and satellites?

Manjula Sriram:
It's a very, very big question and an important one for us to answer. Space has become very popular now in the last 18 months. It was very obscure for the longest time, so you had security through obscurity. But it's changed now. It's become very critical. We must accept that we will have security vulnerabilities, but work as a group and identify the risks. It's a risk-based approach. Some security vulnerabilities may be okay because the risk of that occurrence is not as high.

Tom Soderstrom:
As far as leadership, I found that we had to form that personal bond because in the beginning, the Chief Security Officer and I butted heads. I would say, "Good morning, Wes. Remember, your job is to protect by enabling." And he would say, "Good morning, your job is to not bring crazy stuff in." And so we became frenemies, but it really made this friendly culture of collaboration.

Manjula Sriram:
We've been providing that type of feature for our organization and we continue to implement a lot of segregation of environments where our crown jewels reside and who can access it. We are very careful about all of that.

Tom Soderstrom:
Space is growing leaps and bounds. The new space economy, it's 5% cost for each of the components compared to what it cost 15 years ago. And private industry will be funding more than government very shortly. So there's a huge competition for that talent. How do you bring in the talent? How do you train them?

Manjula Sriram:
We have a program called the Orbit Program, fresh graduates from college who are interested in our space industry. They get six months experience in all the different departments. Some of them will go into our network operating center, or they'll work with the ground space stations, or they'll work with the product teams. And then at the end of these 18 months, they get to decide which group they find affinity towards, and we provide that leadership from there. We have a very strong internship program as well at Iridium. Last year, we had about 49 interns. We try to hire the top people. And space itself is so innovative, people can move from department to department. We have strong educational programs.

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Tom Soderstrom:
One of the things we did at JPL that was successful was to bring the interns in, they rejuvenated the organization, but we needed to have projects for them to come in and work on right away.

Manjula Sriram:
We have a program called Uplinks. It's working with the newer generation of the team who are less experienced. And it's an opportunity for us as senior members to learn how they want to be managed, how they want to be led, and it's an opportunity for them to learn from our experience. It's one-on-one time, we sit down and we pick up topics and we discuss. We pick up a book and we read together. That's one way we bring in diversity of thought. It's also the fact that diversity is an idea of many things, right?

Tom Soderstrom:
One of the things we're seeing talking to leaders across the world is there's all these new technologies coming, but you have an existing infrastructure with people who resist change. How do you bring new technology into your organization?

Manjula Sriram:
You have to think about new technology. Everyone is afraid of what it's going to do to their position, what they know today, what their job is. We as leaders have to understand that insecurity and give them the opportunity to upskill. That's the key piece: making sure we are giving them the opportunity to upskill. They may choose to go a different route, and you provide them the opportunity to do that. No decision is a bad decision in such a scenario. We want to upskill people, give them the opportunity for training, give them projects and encourage them.

Tom Soderstrom:
How do you get synergy, comradery, productivity out of these global teams?

Manjula Sriram:
I actually have a post-it on my laptop. It's “not out of sight, not out of mind.”

It's as simple as your body language, what it says about you if you sit with your arms crossed. You may just be cold, but on a video call they think, "She doesn't want to hear what I have to say." Little things have to be thought about. Your body language becomes very critical. I have a team in India, Iridium has teams in London, so we've got teams all over the globe. Trying to understand the common language, trying to understand the cultural differences, yet being respectful of those is very critical.

Tom Soderstrom:
Is there one piece of advice you could give to people if they have a global team? "You should absolutely do this, and don't do that"?

Manjula Sriram:
Don't assume. One of the key things that you should do is ask the question. If you're thinking about something, you should ask the question. A very simple example: we were trying to do a report and I wanted it in HTML format, and the other person was thinking they were going to give me a PDF format. It was a very simple question. I could have said, "I want an HTML format."

The other piece of advice is assume the question to be just the question. An example is, you come and tell me, "Hey, this is how I'm doing something." I could say, "Why did you do it this way?" You could assume that I'm questioning your judgment of trying to solve a problem, but I'm just asking you the question, "Why did you do it this way?" If we just put it to that question, I think a lot of the global differences go away.

Tom Soderstrom:
One of the things we discovered is to have a good generative AI experience, you need to have a good, practical data strategy. Where are you on that journey?

Manjula Sriram:
We are actually in the elementary stages of our data journey. There is so much data that we have, if you can put it in silos. I've got telemetry data that talks about what's happening with the satellites. I've got the billing data, which is telling me how my customer is using the information. I have other types of data that will tell me how to react if something's happening to my satellite. And today, to crunch those numbers, it takes us days, not hours. So to be able to centralize that data, that's the journey we are on today. To centralize the data. modernize it, and build AI models around it. I think we should focus more on AI and make sure that people know how to train the models and build the models.