John R. Miles

Which is my way of getting you to explain why is questioning the data so important?

So important.

It's so important.

Yeah, and a great story of this from my time at Lowe's was when I took over

the IT operations group, I knew I was given a huge issue to solve.

We had just come off the largest hacking incident in retail history, and so I was being asked to lead the charge on overcoming that.

But I will never forget, I go to meet our head of HR, her name was Maureen, and I think we're gonna be talking about this and maybe what I need to do on the bus

to put in new talent.

And she ends up saying, we didn't talk about this during the interview process, but we recently did an employee engagement survey where we looked at every single organization for the first time in the company.

And in addition to everything else you have to solve, your group was ranked worse in employee engagement in the entire company.

And Lowe's at that time had 350,000 associates.

18,000 stores, 1,800 stores, this huge supply, and I have got the worst performing group.

So where I'm going with this is there are many ways that I could look at the data, but instead of looking at it as, oh, I've got the worst group, I started to look at it as what did this employee's data show?

And so the number one thing I found was that repeated in their comments was they had no idea

how their jobs and what they were spending their time doing, how that impacted the company strategy or a typical customer walking into a Lowe's store because they couldn't see the correlation between sitting in a security command center or operations command center or data center or call center to solving a customer's needs.

And so when I started to look at that data,

I started to look at it, well, I need to give them a line of sight between why they're coming into work and their impact on a customer having a better shopping experience.

So that, I just wanted to give for the audience, that is a clear way that you can look at it

That involves both your books because there's a creative angle to that.

And then there's a solution angle to that.