SSON Podcast Series: Kelly Switt, Citi – "selling automation as a concept"
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Shared Services Podcast with Kelly Switt, Citi, on automation
"Leading Citi from monolithic business architecture to an well orchestrated micro service architecture"
Recorded at Intelligent Automation in Chicago, Kelly Switt joins us as a native Chicagoan who was always a bit of an activist. Her nickname, Mako Shark, is due to the fact that she’s always moving! Kelly ran the Six Sigma Lean group for Citi, looking at how to improve operations. She has done some automation work at Bank of America and HSBC and has spent the past 4 years selling automation as a concept, internally. The team began by focusing on data quality and analytics to gain management buy in. Finally, last year, with no stones left unturned, Kelly and the team dove in on true intelligent automation.
Listen to the podcast here – or read the transcript below.
[Transcript]
Seth Adler: From Citi, Kelly Switt joins us. First, some supporters to thank and thank you for listening. This episode is supported by SSON with over a 100,000 members. The shared services and outsourcing network is the largest and most established community of shared services and outsourcing professionals in the world. SSON is a one-stop shop for shared services professionals, offering industry leading events, reports, surveys, interviews, white papers, videos, editorial, infographics and more. Engage at ssonetwork.com. This episode is also supported by SSON Analytics, digestible, date driven insights for shared services and outsourcing. SSON Analytics is SSON's global data analytics center. It provides shared services professionals with the global date insights you need, through interactive maps, tools and charts. Get headline industry statistics sent straight to your inbox, it's that simple. Explore the first layer of industry data for free now. Start a conversation to find out more. Sign up at sson-analytics.com.
Recorded that intelligent automation in Chicago, Kelly Switt joins us as a native Chicagoan, who is always a bit of an activist. She's been told her nickname is mako shark due to the fact that she's always moving. Kelly was running the Six Sigma Lean group for Citi. Of course, consistently looking at how to improve operations. She had done some automation work both at Bank of America and HSBC. And she spent the last four years selling automation as a concept internally. The team began by focusing on data quality and analytics in order to drive more process improvement, that gave that team runway for management to have buy in and finally, last year with no stones left unturned, Kelly and the team dove on true intelligent automation.
Welcome to SSON on B2B IQ. I'm your host Seth Adler. Download episodes on ssonetwork.com or through our app in iTunes; within the iTunes podcast app in Google Play; or wherever you currently get your podcast.
Seth Adler: Kelly – you're from Chicago?
Kelly Switt: Right. Absolutely, yup. Born and raised, lived here my whole life.
Seth Adler: You're suburban now?
Kelly Switt: Yeah, I'm a suburbanite. So I live in the west suburbs now. But yes.
Seth Adler: Does this make you a Cubs or White Sox fan. I guess I should ask you.
Kelly Switt: You're either born with blue in your veins or black in your veins, and I have blue in my veins. I am a Cubs fan.
Seth Adler: You do? You are? You don't remember Leon Durham playing first base?
Kelly Switt: No, I probably do not remember that. My grandmother probably does.
Seth Adler: Well no. Some people younger than your grandmother remember. Ryne Sandberg, you know who that is?
Kelly Switt: Yeah. Everyone know who Ryne Sandberg is.
Seth Adler: Rhino I think is affectionately what they call him, right?
Kelly Switt: Yes. And Mark Grace and Sammy Sosa and all the rest of them.
Seth Adler: There you go. Baseball has been very good to Sammy Sosa is what he has told us in the past.
Kelly Switt: Yeah. But I would say time has not been very good to Sammy Sosa, if you see some recent pictures.
Seth Adler: Yeah. He's got an interesting look going on, which is a whole thing. Do you remember Michael though, playing for the Bull?
"If you think about just the way you automate in general is around data. And so, we brought in a number of like imaging systems, which imaging systems are really the way you take paper and describe it into metadata. So we were leveraging technologies like that back then. So it was kind of really the start of a lot of what people are doing today."
Kelly Switt: Of course, yeah.
Seth Adler: Okay so that's where we kind of come in to things. Right?
Kelly Switt: Yeah.
Seth Adler: And so, if young Kelly is watching Michael play basketball. What else is she doing? What were your interests as a youngster?
Kelly Switt: So when I was ... I mean I think I've also kind of in-born a little bit of an activist. Really humorous but yes, I was always really involved in things around the environment and what not. And I do a lot of singing and dancing, and cheerleading. You know the typical things that you tend to think girls do.
Seth Adler: All right. So the cheerleading that's fine, wonderful, fantastic. The singing and dancing. Was there an acting thing that was there or no?
Kelly Switt: Yeah. I mean I think everyone tries that in high school, right? Like there's your musical…
Seth Adler: Not everybody. I did but not everybody.
Kelly Switt: Yeah. Well, I did. I think everyone, at least where I went to school, everyone wanted to be in the musical theater. So yeah, I did a little bit of that as well.
Seth Adler: Got it. Was there a favorite part? Did you rise to have a lot of lines or were you more singing and dancing in the kind of background type duo?
Kelly Switt: I was always in the chorus.
Seth Adler: Got you!
Kelly Switt: I was never a lead.
Seth Adler: Let's just ... I'm just doing ... Always a bridesmaid going.
Kelly Switt: Yes, exactly. But that's okay. It's because I knew that was more of a hobby than a passion.
Seth Adler: Okay. But you said activist. What causes called you?
Kelly Switt: So I would say social justice is always a big one for me. So even now, I'm very involved out in the west suburbs, where I live, Aurora area with just the level of poverty and helping people find ways to move out of poverty and doing that through the schools. Everyone knows the more you're educated, the more you understand, the more likely you are to kind of succeed in life. So I think that's always kind of been something that I've had. That even as a kid was always doing work with Habitat for Humanity or you know, the environmental groups and what not. And that just kind of always carried with me even now.
Seth Adler: You're a doer. You're a communicator and you're a busy body.
Kelly Switt: I am, actually my team, I was told on Monday that their nickname for me is the mako shark because I'm always moving. And I don't know if you know this but sharks, if they stop moving, they actually sink.
Seth Adler: Yeah, they'll die I think is what I've heard.
Kelly Switt: Right. So that's you know, they're like, "That's you Kelly." Like, "You can't have any downtime."
Seth Adler: So this is a perfect person to go ahead and throw in to intelligent automation.
Kelly Switt: Right. Absolutely, yeah.
Seth Adler: Just quickly before we get there though. You said Aurora, which is of course where Wayne from Wayne's World is from.
Kelly Switt: Oh yeah. Wayne's World 25th anniversary this year. Yeah, they have like an air guitar like competition and everything this summer. So yeah.
Seth Adler: And you are the perfect age for that to happen to the Zeitgeist, right? Were you proud that he was a hometown son type of thing?
"So, every year I always do a big pitch with what we should be doing and every year it was kind of put on the back burner and I think we finally got to kind of like the break point last year where it was, "All right. We've done everything else. There's like there's no stone left unturned. If we're going to do anything else to transform our business, this is probably the next step we need to take."
Kelly Switt: Yes, absolutely, yeah. I mean well, I think anyone when you grow up ... For me, like growing up outside of Chicago. I think anytime you see a movie, there's any type of excitement around something that you know then you feel a lot of pride and excitement yourself.
Seth Adler: Absolutely. All right. So good that's party time. Excellent.
Kelly Switt: Yes.
Seth Adler: I think it's officially what that is.
Kelly Switt: Yes, exactly.
Seth Adler: So here's the mako shark right? And she works at Citi and she says to someone or someone says to her, "Okay there's this automation thing, we gotta be doing it." How did it all happen?
Kelly Switt: I said it to them.
Seth Adler: Oh you did?
Kelly Switt: Yes.
Seth Adler: What was your position at that time?
Kelly Switt: So I run the Six Sigma Lean group.
Seth Adler: Oh so you're one of them?
Kelly Switt: Yes, I'm one of them.
Seth Adler: All right. Do you have a belt?
Kelly Switt: Yes.
Seth Adler: Do you have a black belt? Or you-
Kelly Switt: No.
Seth Adler: You don't?
Kelly Switt: No, I don't have a black belt. I was just a green.
Seth Adler: You're just a green belt but again, you can communicate. You're a mako shark so it's fine. Kelly can handle this.
Kelly Switt: Well, I realize after you go through the first certification, I'm like, "So let me get this straight, you're just gonna teach me to use more spreadsheets? I don't know if it's worth my time or money to get another certification when at the end of the day, they care more about who I am than how well I can fill out a spreadsheet."
Seth Adler: I love it.
Kelly Switt: So I never went and did the black belt.
Seth Adler: I don't need that brand association is essentially what we're saying.
Kelly Switt: Pretty much.
Seth Adler: All right. So in continuous improvement, in Lean, in Six Sigma. What were you doing for the organization?
Kelly Switt: So with the organization, we're always looking at like operations. How to move our operations to like kind of the next gen for our business. And actually when I was hired at Citi five years ago, I thought I was hired to do some automation work because that's what I had done at Bank of America, that's what I had done at HSBC. And I recognize that when I joined Citi, our culture just wasn't quite ready. So I basically spent four years, just kind of chipping away at it and getting people to be more comfortable with, there is a way for systems to kind of do the things that we've kind of always manually done. And I think that just the buzz in the industry and in the media about just automation in general and this financial services being a vertical that could benefit from it, kind of drove the executives to finally say, "Okay. We're ready. We want to listen. We want to understand how would we do this."
Seth Adler: Okay. Let's go back to HSBC. It was before Bank of America?
Kelly Switt: Yeah.
Seth Adler: Okay. When you say automation, roughly what year was it and what was the actual thing you were doing in automation?
Kelly Switt: Yeah. So I left HSBC in 2006. So this was 2001-
Seth Adler: Over a decade ago.
Kelly Switt: Yeah. A long time ago. It feels like a long time ago.
Seth Adler: And it is.
Kelly Switt: Yeah. And what we are doing then was looking at end-to-end kind of the mortgage business. And taking the whole loan process, from the start of the customer filling out an application through fulfillment of the loan and taking that paperless. And so, when you think about taking a business paperless, back then, we were still using fax machines and stuff like that.
Seth Adler: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You dinosaur, Kelly.
Kelly Switt: I know right. It's crazy because we're still using fax machines in 2017.
Seth Adler: I feel like don't tell us that now but whatever.
Kelly Switt: Yeah but I mean the journey really was you know, you had 14,000 branches across the country and they were doing everything on paper. Faxing it in, someone has to capture the paper right? And then making manual decision for underwriting and we leverage a number of technologies back then in order to end-to-end, automate the process. And I think the most fun I had out of it was like literally ripping the fax machines out of the offices because it force people to change. But I think that's the reason why I've kind of known that this was just a matter of time because if we could do this over 10 years ago, there's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't all be doing it now.
Seth Adler: Totally understood as far as the technology is concerned. Not necessarily sharing the vendors but the category of vendor. What were you putting in to make this thing go as far as the technology?
Kelly Switt: We were using business process automation software then.
Seth Adler: Fine.
Kelly Switt: And I mean if you think about just the way you automate in general is around data. And so, we brought in a number of like imaging systems, which imaging systems are really the way you take paper and describe it into metadata. So we were leveraging technologies like that back then. So it was kind of really the start of a lot of what people are doing today.
Seth Adler: Got it. And ripping the fax machines out of the offices. Have you ever seen the movie, Office Space?
Kelly Switt: Oh yeah.
Seth Adler: Okay so similar to that?
Kelly Switt: I feel like a Bob. Like you know, "What do you think you do in an average day?"
Seth Adler: "What is it would you say that you do here?"
Kelly Switt: Exactly. "I'm a people person."
Seth Adler: Well, they also beat up a fax machine so I guess ...
Kelly Switt: Exactly. Yeah, I'm sure that's what you were trying to get out of this. Like taking the fax machine in the fields and beating that thing.
Seth Adler: Yes but I think the Bobs is a better point. Right?
Kelly Switt: Yeah.
Seth Adler: So now let's move to Bank of America. We did that at HSBC, what automation did we do and by the way, we're inside and outside so we hear the fabled Chicago Fire Department behind us, doing their job.
Kelly Switt: Yes, exactly. So when I went to Bank of America, we spent a lot of time or I spent a lot time working on mergers and acquisitions. Bank of America made it their business to buy other banks. And so, I was in the group that was always working on the merging of those two banks. And so, the work that most alliance to the intelligent automation was the build out of a lot of ... We did a lot of decision engines there in order to drive referral traffic. So you're a customer of the retail bank but you have a business so we want to refer you over to the commercial bank so that way we could try to, as a bank, make more money.
Seth Adler: Sure.
Kelly Switt: So doing work with complex of end processing engines or decision engines. But then around doing some of that type of work. We did double in some of the workflows as well and had some early stage big data solutions that were brought in. In order to help with some of the challenges with the mortgage crisis that took place you know, with our economy.
Seth Adler: Sure. Heard about it.
Kelly Switt: Yeah. So to me, the evolution of moving from HSBC and to Bank of America. It was just kind of like tearing up the next level of the technology. From what I did there to what I did at Bank of America.
Seth Adler: So then you move on to Citi.
Kelly Switt: Yeah.
Seth Adler: As soon as you get there, you realize, "Oh my mindset is ahead of where the corporate mindset is."
Kelly Switt: Correct. Yeah.
Seth Adler: So you realize, "Okay fine. All this is a culture play anyway. And then we add the technology." So I'm gonna go ahead and start on the culture right now. So when you did that what were the things? What were the kind of you know, almost principles that you engaged in with the workforce, with upper management to kind of get everybody ready for when you could kind of hit them with it type of thing.
Kelly Switt: Yeah. I'm not gonna say I was completely successful. There is definitely a lot of learnings, I would say, prior to us being able to start this journey. It's really hard at times when you see the potential that an organization has but they're not willing to accept that potential for you to kind of stay true to yourself and the work that you want to do but meet the needs that they're asking you to meet. So I would say that my team started to focus more on data quality and analytics in order to drive more process improvements, if you will. So less systemic solutions, more organizational change management and that gave us enough runway for them to have buy in because we deliver value for them. For them to just like slowly chip away at like, "Okay. Let's test the waters again and let's try this."
And so, every year I always do a big pitch with what we should be doing and every year it was kind of put on the back burner and I think we finally got to kind of like the break point last year where it was, "All right. We've done everything else. There's like there's no stone left unturned. If we're going to do anything else to transform our business, this is probably the next step we need to take."
Seth Adler: How much was that actually a blessing that they weren't ready and so you had to go ahead and clean up the data before you could start with this whole thing?
Kelly Switt: Well, I think there was a number of blessings. It was not just like the clean up of the data or having a better understanding of the environment but it was also having the time to kind of build my team. And to feel like I had people that worked for me that could actually do this. If they had really said yes when I walked in the door, it would have been me and one other person and we would have failed.
Seth Adler: Okay. Now, why do you say that you would failed? I am looking at the mako shark, I do not believe that, that's actually the case. What you're saying is maybe you would have failed at the scale that you're at now, simply because you don't have the resources?
Kelly Switt: Yeah. We would have failed at the scale that we have now. But at the same time, I think that when you think about the culture of an organization, Citi's culture, we are afraid of failure, right? So ... Or I shouldn't say all of us, right? But there are communities that are and when you're new and you're an outsider right? You don't have quite the latitude to have the level of failures as someone that's been around.
Seth Adler: "Who's this new one with all the new ideas over here?"
Kelly Switt: Exactly. That was pretty much it. Like, "She thinks she knows how to run our business. We'll show her."
Seth Adler: Right. Which is by the way any company of any size, anywhere on Earth.
Kelly Switt: Absolutely. I mean I do it, right? There's external people or external teams inside the Citi that will come in and be like, "We're gonna go and look at this because we know how to fix your business." I'm like, "All right. You do that. You let me know how that works out for you."
Seth Adler: Good luck bro.
Kelly Switt: Yeah. So I get it and I think at that time, I didn't really appreciate it because you know, it's why you hired me because I have these skills. So you assume like you kind of have this like, I don't know ... People are bought in to you because when you're hired, you think you're so smart, right? Like from day one, you just believe everything I say. And I think that, that was probably the real recognition I had here at Citi, it was everyone's different and people need time. And we can't expect everyone to be at the same place on the journey as you. And you need to stop and give them the time that they need to get there.
Seth Adler: Yeah. And so you did, which brought you to the starting line when then you were all at the same place, at the same time. They say, "Go." Then what did you do?
Kelly Switt: Yeah. I still don't think we have everyone there.
Seth Adler: I got you.
Kelly Switt: But we have enough people there that they say, "Go." And that was one of those where it was, "Oh wow, they finally said go. Okay, be careful what you asked for."
Seth Adler: Right. Sure.
Kelly Switt: So you know I think what I would say is that, you're gonna have to plan and we spent six months planning before we even started anything.
Seth Adler: Okay. And that's after they said go?
Kelly Switt: Yes.
Seth Adler: So you had spent now, years planning and then another six months planning. What was this new planning that you were planning?
Kelly Switt: This was truly like, they say yes like let's go ahead and try this. It was all the financial validation to like threw up our assumptions, setting up the team, working on the contracts with all of the vendors, determining like how are we gonna really go and execute this, right? And I would say even now, after we've had some time behind us, there's still things we probably could have planned then that we didn't know but now that we know, we're like, "Ah! Those are things we could have always planned more right?" But the challenge is communicating with executives that always kind of like in hindsight right? They have the gift of hindsight.
Seth Adler: Sure, which is 20/20.
Kelly Switt: "Well why didn't you do? Why didn't you plan for that?" It's like, "You're right. Now that I know what I know, I would have planned for that but I didn't know it then."
Seth Adler: There you go, these are good points boss. I'm with you.
Kelly Switt: Exactly. Thank you for the encouragement.
Seth Adler: Indeed. So you planned for six months before the proof of concept. And what was the proof of concept? What did you choose? How did it go? All of that.
Kelly Switt: So we don't call things proof of concept.
Seth Adler: Interesting.
Kelly Switt: Yeah.
Seth Adler: Okay what do you call them?
Kelly Switt: Proof of concept tends to mean, it's a test. We could decide we're not going to use it when we're done. And probably because I'm the-
Seth Adler: Many people do use that. Right?
Kelly Switt: I know.
Seth Adler: Fair enough. What do we say?
Kelly Switt: We're just doing it.
Seth Adler: Okay. The proof of concept is we started, right?
Kelly Switt: Yeah. We start and we're doing it.
Seth Adler: There we go. So what kind of processes did you pick for those initial kind of-
Kelly Switt: Yeah. So I think I have a very different philosophy than maybe some. So for me and the way that I think that our business needed to move forward is financial services is a customer facing business. We only exist to have customers.
Seth Adler: Right.
Kelly Switt: And so, we need to focus on where we have the most amount of value for our customers. And thin out all of our pain point that we have in those specific journeys. So like I had shared in this session right? If you have a credit card, the one thing that you're guaranteed if you're using that is you're always gonna have a payment. Right? Every month, you're gonna have to make a payment.
Seth Adler: Absolutely.
Kelly Switt: And so, Citibank with the credit cards has millions of payment every single month, which usually results in millions of phone calls, disconnects, questions because something didn't go right. So we focused on our payments process first to really look at that is a guarantee of any customer whose active with us is gonna have to pay. And how do we make sure that our process is as lean as possible and is giving customers the information they need when they need it in order to be informed. And feel like they can manage their financials on their own and not need us.
Seth Adler: To do things at an enterprise level, you have to have that scale and also, cojones.
Kelly Switt: Yeah.
Seth Adler: And so, how did you ... You didn't do a proof of concept because that's not the way we think. How did you know that you could go ahead and just do this? If that is gargantuan.
Kelly Switt: I think that maybe it's a little bit of me then, right? I think this is probably and it's not to say that I'm not flawless, right? I have flaws, I make mistakes but in any group or company that wants to put an automation practice in place, you need to have a leader who is fearless and is willing to put themselves out there. If you have someone who is not willing to take those risks, you may not be as successful as you would like to be. And so, I'm willing to put myself out there and I believe in the team I have and I spend a lot of time supporting them and giving them whatever they need to make them successful. And obviously this is not a one-woman show, I've got a really large organization behind me but it's really important that you put someone in place that understands the vision, how you're gonna get there and then can empower team to deliver it.
Seth Adler: If we're gonna go big or go home, which is what you did, what advice would you give to your colleagues if there are three key principles of my finger is up and it's about to press go on this big huge thing that we're really doing here. What would be that advice? What three key principles would they be? What would you tell people?
Kelly Switt: What I would say is, you need to define your design principles.
Seth Adler: Okay.
Kelly Switt: It's really easy to say, you want to do any of this automation but it's another thing to understand what your design principles from both a business as well as at a technical perspective. Having those design principles, sets the guardrails for the entire team. And knowing when they're kind of falling in line, if you will or they're outside. So setting design principles is really critical. Finding the right partners. If this is a new journey for you, you haven't done it before, don't pretend like you can do this on your own, right? There is no level of re-skilling for you to be able to do this on your own.
Seth Adler: Who did you choose? If we want to go there.
Kelly Switt: I'm not gonna tell you the truth.
Seth Adler: No, that's fine. I'll ask, you don't have to answer. That's how this goes. Sure but choose the partner that works for you, that...
Kelly Switt: Correct. And choosing the partner is more about your trust in them.
Seth Adler: Okay.
Kelly Switt: Because what does success look like for the people that work for you? And that includes the partners you may engage with and having trust in them. If you don't trust the people you're working with then...
Seth Adler: What are we doing here?
Kelly Switt: Exactly. So design principles, pick a great vendor that can help you, if you can afford to have one. And then, the next piece would be, do not underestimate the level of business analysis and thought process you need to put in to the work before you go.
Seth Adler: Got it. There's also all these other work that we're gonna be needing to do when we engage in this.
Kelly Switt: Yeah.
Seth Adler: And it's gonna be painstaking.
Kelly Switt: Yes. I mean when we started off, I told the team, "The first 12 weeks are gonna suck, okay? So if we're all prepared for it to suck then when we're done with it, you won't say, God, that really sucked, why didn't anyone tell me?"
Seth Adler: Right.
Kelly Switt: And what's amazing is that when you prepare them for the suck factor, right?
Seth Adler: You assure that's an industry term by the way.
Kelly Switt: It's an industry term. It is. When we're done with the first 12 weeks of the work, they're all like, "Actually, it wasn't that bad. It wasn't as bad as we thought it would be." Because-
Seth Adler: Because you prepared them for the worst essentially.
Kelly Switt: Exactly.
Seth Adler: That's fantastic.
Kelly Switt: And it's also like, when you prepare them for the worst, it's giving them the luxury to know that upfront, you're expecting some failures and so, no one's afraid to fail.
Seth Adler: Perfect. Listen, I know that this is gonna be a mess. Let's just do this.
Kelly Switt: Yeah. Let's just do it. And when it's a mess and the executives don't understand how we spend all this money and they got nothing for it, I will take the hit for it and you guys keep going. Learn from what we just did.
Seth Adler: I love it! I love that! All right. So what else have we added but really more appropriately I think for you is, where is your mind with cognitive, with machine learning, with that next step into AI?
Kelly Switt: Yeah. So I talk about this quite frequently.
Seth Adler: Good.
Kelly Switt: That's the shiny toy everyone likes especially sales people and marketers like to wave in front of the executives faces these days.
Seth Adler: Right.
Kelly Switt: And so, that is on our journey and on our path. It's probably something that we're really gonna start looking at in 2018.
Seth Adler: Fine.
Kelly Switt: But what I would say is, you wouldn't take a five year old at a kindergarten and throw him into college. So if you don't have good data, you don't understand what your business does, you're gonna be wasting a lot of time, and a lot of money trying to go straight into machine learning and cognitive AI or cognitive whatever the new soup du jour is that people want to sell.
Seth Adler: Right.
Kelly Switt: What it comes down to is really understanding what the core commodities of your business are. How they operate, the date that supports them, making sure that you have at least some cleansed data around that. And even if you start with some basic rules processing, it's on the continuum, right? Starting with rules processing, starting to get smarter, having better data, running your analytics will only prepare you to be able to move into that journey. So that's part of what we're doing is, we've got places where we know our good candidates for natural language processing or machine learning that were starting with rules because we're dumb right now. And I can't possibly teach a system to be smarter than me, if I'm dumb, right?
Seth Adler: Yeah.
Kelly Switt: And I don't know why we think it's like, at times it feels like that infomercial on the set and then forget, right? Or we just feel like, we're just gonna plug this machine into the outlet and suddenly it learns everything about what we do and makes decision for me. That's not the case, you have to teach it. And you can only teach someone something that you know.
Seth Adler: There you go.
Kelly Switt: Yup.
Seth Adler: I am officially in the Kelly Switt fan club. I am unabashedly, a fan. I don't know if I'm your number one fan, there's probably many others in the group.
Kelly Switt: There are. We call it ... It's actually a family at Citi. We call it the family.
Seth Adler: Okay.
Kelly Switt: It makes me laugh because I'm from Chicago so everyone thinks about the gangsters right?
Seth Adler: Al Capone. Exactly.
Kelly Switt: Exactly.
Seth Adler: Right. Yeah.
Kelly Switt: So but we do. And part of that culture of calling it a family is because family is, they're honest and open and are vulnerable with each other. But it also means that, they're telling the truth to each other.
Seth Adler: Yes they are.
Kelly Switt: So yeah. But you're more than welcome to join the family.
Seth Adler: I very much appreciate that. I, really, I take that seriously. So I have three final questions for you.
Kelly Switt: Okay.
Seth Adler: I'll tell you what they are and then I'll ask you to them in order. Along the way, we didn't talk a ton about your career but hit on the points that we needed to talk about. But along the way of the whole thing, what most surprise you at work? What most surprise you in life? And then on the soundtrack of your life, one track, one song that's gotta be on there. But first things first, along the way, what most surprise you at work?
Kelly Switt: So at work, what I would say is that, do not underestimate people. My degree was in Journalism yet, I'm doing technology work. So would I have ever thought that this is where I would end up? Absolutely not. I remember sitting in college with friends that had Computer Science degrees going, "Ugh. You're going in your coding that's so boring." But now here I am. It's like super fun and exciting and I have a ton of passion for what my team is doing. So I would say that's probably the biggest shocker to me is that, the journey that I've been on. I was always that person that always wanted to change everything. And I guess I should have assumed that it would naturally lead me into some type of more technical job but-
Seth Adler: Sure. Well that's hindsight, right?
Kelly Switt: Yeah. Hindsight exactly.
Seth Adler: 20/20. There you go.
Kelly Switt: I think my boss probably could have told me that.
Seth Adler: Yes of course. And everyone's boss could have told them anything and everything and there you go.
Kelly Switt: Absolutely.
Seth Adler: This is just how life goes, Kelly. What most surprise you in life?
Kelly Switt: Most surprise me in life?
Seth Adler: Yeah.
Kelly Switt: I would say what surprises me most in life is watching my kids and like seeing how quickly they pick up on things. And they have a lot-
Seth Adler: How old are they? How old are we talking about?
Kelly Switt: I have a three, five, and seven year old.
Seth Adler: So you've got three, you're outnumbered no matter what. And these are like starting to be humans.
Kelly Switt: Oh yeah. They're definitely humans. Yeah, they're definitely humans with really big personalities. I don't know where they get it.
Seth Adler: No, me neither. Can't understand it.
Kelly Switt: Yeah. So I think that they probably are the most surprising because I think that everyone has that conception of what life would be like when they have kids and then you have them and it's so much fun watching them turn into like, these little people. And seeing what they're interested in and trying to expose them to new things and so I would say that's probably been the biggest surprise in life. It's just how much I feel like I learn about who I am and how people view me by talking with my kids and watching them and seeing how they're growing up.
Seth Adler: So you're still learning everyday? Is that fair to say? Right?
Kelly Switt: Everyday.
Seth Adler: About yourself.
Kelly Switt: About myself, about my kids, how I like you know, when you watch the way my kids interact with me and like how I make them feel. I can't help but feel like this is how I want people that I work with to feel about me, right?
Seth Adler: Look at that. Li culture calls that the work-life weave.
Kelly Switt: Yes.
Seth Adler: You know, do both, be present in both.
Kelly Switt: Exactly.
Seth Adler: You know, bring examples from each to the other.
Kelly Switt: Yeah. And I would say that's probably one of my biggest struggles is that when you find a role that you're so passionate about, it's really hard at times to balance. Not because you want work to take over your life but when you love what you're doing so much, it's hard to separate when it's your personal life versus your professional life.
Seth Adler: Yeah. So that's where you gotta keep trying, right?
Kelly Switt: Yes. Exactly.
Seth Adler: There you go.
Kelly Switt: And the soundtrack.
Seth Adler: Oh yeah.
Kelly Switt: My soundtrack is Queen. It's actually my karaoke song.
Seth Adler: Is it Bohemian Rhapsody?
Kelly Switt: No, it's Don't stop me now.
Seth Adler: Is that, Don't stop me now. Oh I know that. And that actually makes a whole lot of sense of course. That's mako shark. This whole thing is ... We just put a bow on this whole thing.
Kelly Switt: That's what I do.
Seth Adler: Kelly Switt. What a pleasure.
Kelly Switt: Yeah. It was great meeting with you. Thank you for interviewing me.
Seth Adler: And there you have, Kelly Switt. When you prepare them for the worst, it's giving them the luxury to know that upfront you're experiencing some failures so no one is afraid to fail. Very appreciate Kelly Switt and her time very much appreciated and yours. Stay tuned.
