S9 E9: CIOs Must Be Able To Foresee Potential Trends To Guide and Assist Decision Making and Strategy

Today, I have a very special guest. It’s Jason Kasch, CIO at Structural Group. Structural Group is a big business – 3,000 employees. One of their big, big moonshots – their big growth patterns, is they want to be a multi-billion dollar company.

I’ve known Jason from my very first RedZone Podcast episode. He was on the first episode many moons ago. Here, we get into some really powerful topics like - self-driving cars and business disruption, what does that mean to a company like Jason’s; we talk about invention convention and problem solving for a 3,000 person company; the modern IT leader skills are not what you think, and we talk about the role of the CIO moving forward and which skills he believes are necessary for you to cultivate… and they’re not what you think!

We also look at what is the mindset to the multi-generational workforce. I haven’t covered this topic with anyone recently. This is the first time in history CIOs must support multiple generations – from people super young to people super old. Sometimes the young people are leading the older people. So, how do you do that as a CIO? How does that impact you and your teams? 

I also ask, “What is your CIO Superpower?”. If you’ve ever thought about what makes you great. We’re  always focused on what makes you weak and what we want to make strong. Well, what if we double- or triple-down on our strengths? Jason and I discuss that.

CIO Superpowers! One of the things I always talk about and what you’re great at. Jason firmly believes that he’s a technical guy. He started out technical and he’s got amazing business skills now, but he believes you shouldn’t lose those technical skills if you come from that world.

We talk about SD-WAN. For those of you who want to understand SD-WAN and how you can use that at scale and some of the benefits Jason has gotten from that, then listen into this episode a little further.

So now we have a conversation about Structural’s small, vision, mission cards. It was really interesting as I was sitting down with Jason. We talked about these little tiny vision cards that the founder and majority owner of Structural distributes among the teams, and how it really guides how they make decisions – how they run meetings, and how you scale culture. You know, that’s always a challenge. How you scale culture – this is a great learning point.

Finally, what is your 3-year ambition? Jason and I talked about the ambition of his organization for growth and the role and the mindset that’s needed as a CIO to support his business as it scales into a billion dollar organization. I often say, and Jason supports that – who do you need to become as the business grows bigger and as you take on more challenges?   

So with that, you’re going to love this interview and my conversation with Jason Kasch.

When you think of the construction industry, you probably don’t think of innovation. Well, sit back and listen to my conversation with Jason Kasch, CIO of STRUCTURAL Group. Jason discusses, very specifically, how the Structural Group team employs a technique they call an ‘Invention Convention’ to explore the art of what is possible.

Jason asks some interesting questions that lead off a great discussion. I know you will find these questions very thought provoking for glimpses of your enterprise in the relatively near future.

• How technical should a Next-Gen CIO Be?
• Modern IT leader skills – are not what you think
• How is the role of the CIO of 10-years ago, versus the role 10-years moving forward?
• CIO Superpowers: What skills should a CIO cultivate moving forward?
• Creating a mindset to support a multi-generational workforce |
• How a CIO of a 3,000 person company thinks and will give you an example of how to deploy a technology that will assist you in building a cloud enabled company.
• Leadership Principles of a $700M Company contained within a simple card that helps with problem solving, meetings, teamwork, excellence, vision and mission.